Sandy Gingras's Blog
May 5, 2022
why I wrote Paradise Girls
I wrote Paradise Girls because I admire people with bounce--people felled by loss who manage to get themselves back up and walk and trot and even skip again. I think healing is heroic. Not those people who turn themselves into rocks to cope with pain, but those who feel their way through things, whose vulnerability is their strength. I guess I feel this soft spot for the strugglers because I’ve had depression most of my life. I write, in part, because I keep learning from my own characters how to do it--how to live.
Maybe I shouldn’t admit that I love my characters, but I do. There’s Mary--the home magazine writer who loses her home and who gets flattened by love but who keeps on going in her clumsy, stubborn way. And Daniel, the broken-hearted fisherman whose son died, who is tempted to lose himself at sea, but who, instead, keeps chugging onward. And Tripod, the war-torn, three-legged dog who manages to bring everyone together with his hippity-hoppity resilience. I love their crooked paths and how they intersect. How they walk each other home. I hope my readers love the characters in Paradise Girls too. And the story. And I hope too, in some small way, it helps them live.
Maybe I shouldn’t admit that I love my characters, but I do. There’s Mary--the home magazine writer who loses her home and who gets flattened by love but who keeps on going in her clumsy, stubborn way. And Daniel, the broken-hearted fisherman whose son died, who is tempted to lose himself at sea, but who, instead, keeps chugging onward. And Tripod, the war-torn, three-legged dog who manages to bring everyone together with his hippity-hoppity resilience. I love their crooked paths and how they intersect. How they walk each other home. I hope my readers love the characters in Paradise Girls too. And the story. And I hope too, in some small way, it helps them live.
