Cathy Holton: Being a Novelist and a Book Club Member

Author Cathy Holton knows all about book clubs --- she has been a member of one for 20 years. Today she shares with us what she enjoys about being in a reading group, how she came up with the idea for her novel Beach Trip, and what she anticipates her reading group might say about the story when they discuss it. Cathy is also the author of Revenge of the Kudzu Debutantes and The Secret Lives of the Kudzu Debutantes.


I've been in the same book club for twenty years. We've grown old together, or perhaps I should say we've ripened into lovely mature women together. We've raised children, lost or gained husbands, started new careers, overcome illness, tragedy and the occasional run of bad luck. But through it all, we've kept reading. Reading and dissecting and talking about what we've read and, thereby, learning.

Because that's the lovely thing about book clubs. We bring our own life experiences to our interpretation of characters and themes, and those interpretations are as varied as the members themselves. Women are fascinated by relationships; we love to peek behind the facades, to catch glimpses of why a character behaves as she does, to understand what motivates her to make the decisions she makes. The more complex and layered the story, the more lively the book club discussions tend to be.

When I first got the idea for Beach Trip, I was out to dinner with some friends. We're a small group and we meet once a month to drink martinis and talk about our significant others. Our children. Our jobs. Socio-economic trends in Europe. (Just kidding.) One of the women was getting ready to go on an annual beach trip with her college roommates. We were exclaiming jealously that we wished we were going, when she looked up and said rather pensively, "It's kind of an odd group. We wouldn't even be friends if we hadn't met in college."

It seemed like a strange thing to say, but later, thinking about it, I knew exactly what she meant. I feel the same way about my book club. We are a diverse group and, in the early years, were quite combative with one another. But over the course of twenty years of meeting to discuss literature, of sharing our lives and our experiences, this ritual has somehow transcended our differences and made us a cohesive group. A diverse group, yes, and yet friends in spite of our diversity.

I knew when I began Beach Trip that it would be the story of four remarkable, but very different, young women whose lives over the twenty three years following graduation would follow very disparate paths. I was curious to know whether the intensity of four years of shared experiences would be enough to sustain a twenty three-year friendship. And I was curious, too, to see how the lives they had led, the choices they had made, had changed them.

I knew the novel would have an element of dark humor, and I knew there would be a surprising revelation at the end, something that threatened the tenuous bond the women had shared over twenty seven years, and yet helped to explain that bond, too. And I imagined that the four women, so different, would illicit different responses in different readers. This is something I knew my book club would appreciate.

I anticipate a lively discussion of Beach Trip in The Ladies of the Night Book Club.

---Cathy Holton