Off Season by Anne Rivers Siddons

Anne Rivers Siddons Talks About the Writing Life
Off Season, her new novel set in Downeast Maine, hit bookshelves in August, 2008
Standing in the doorway of her cottage on Maine's Penobscot Bay, New York Times best-selling novelist Anne Rivers Siddons, welcomes you with a sweet, almost girlishly high melodic voice that lets you know that she is from the south. She graciously asks you to call her "Anne." And although she has made millions on her seventeen best-sellers, which include Up Island, Low Country, Colony, and Sweetwater Creek, you get the idea that she's not the least bit pretentious.
The view into her living room is that of a rustic retreat. Nothing elegant or fussy-just pine floors, pine beams across the ceiling, an abstract painting of boats on one wall. Cozy, comfortable furniture. Above the windows, a humorous banner displays a colorful photocopy of Prince of Tides author and close ally, Pat Conroy, kissing her husband, Heyward, on the cheek at his 80th birthday party.The headline proclaims "Conroy finally proposes!" Obviously, it's an inside joke between friends.

Siddons became fast friends with Conroy when they both were struggling writers in Atlanta during the '60s. She grew up the daughter of a prestigious Atlanta lawyer and lived the life of a "southern belle" debutante until discovering the writing life. "If you're caught up in a debutant whirl from birth, you've got a tough trail to take."

She has been fortunate, she says, that she has taken other trails such as the one that led to her beloved Maine coast. "I became a Mainer the day I first stepped off the plane in Bangor over forty years ago. " She loves the sun and wind on her face and the feeling that there is no problem she cannot solve in this setting.

The well-known novelist continues to find peace on Maine's Downeast coast every summer when she and husband arrive after Memorial Day. The place they call home is part of a summer colony to which her husband's family belonged long before the couple married in 1966 in Atlanta.
It was this coastal setting that may well may have inspired Siddons's 1992 bestseller, Colony, her first-and until now-only novel set in Maine.

Her second book with a Maine milieu, Off Season, is scheduled to hit bookstore in mid-August. This long awaited arrival follows a string of best-sellers set in mostly Southern climes.
But no matter the locale, Siddons always populates her pages with strong women, be they Steel Magnolias of the south or Maine Yankee survivors.

The strong woman in Off Season is Lilly, a widow who journeys back to her Maine coastal roots after the death of her beloved husband, Cam. What Lilly discovers upon her return changes her whole way of looking at life.

"All my books are about women taking journeys they might not want to take," says Siddons.
Do these women echo parts of herself? Of course, she says. "How else would I know how they would react in any given situation?" But she is quick to add: "I always make my characters a good bit better than I am."

Much like her writer friend, Pat Conroy, she's not afraid to shine a light into the darkness of personality, perhaps because she once battled and overcame a depression that left her unable to write for three years.

"I take tragedy and I run with it. The darkness is just an aspect of the self. It's in all of us. But I try not to crawl in there too strong. My books are really about growth and change in spite of infinite pain and suffering. They are about women who are a misfit but in the end, find their fit.
"It's about finding wholeness. I know so few whole families anymore, and how can we have whole families if we don't have whole women?"