Queen of tearjerker books is big hit with teen girls
Lurlene McDaniel admits she’s the queen of the “teen-aged tearjerker,” the book bound to cause a catch in the throat, especially the throat of a 12- to 15-year-old girl. Children die in her books, whether from cancer or car wreck.
Her publisher, Bantam, classifies her books as “inspirational.”
“Yes, I’m the crying-and-dying lady,” says the Chattanooga, Tenn., author of 60 books over the past 20 years, noting her biggest resistance often is from parents, who ask their children, “Why do you want to read those sad books?”
Based on her fan mail, McDaniel knows a typical reply from a child will be: “Because it makes me feel good in the end.”
She says her paperbacks aren’t morbid. They’re about real life and serve as a vehicle: “What they give a child is a chance to grieve and mourn something in their own life,” she says during a phone interview from her home. “They can cry. It may not be cool to cry because your dog died … it works out certain angsts.”
But, she adds, the books always go beyond the grieving process to let young readers feel hope in the face of trauma.
Hers is a narrow niche she didn’t know existed until she turned an advertising and public relations career into book writing, almost by accident.
She was living in Florida when her then 3-year-old son, Sean, was diagnosed with juvenile diabetes. Putting family first, she freelanced while staying home with Sean and her other young son, Erik.
At a special event for diabetics, she struck up a conversation with someone whose father was involved in publishing children’s books.
She tried her hand at those (“Kickeroo – The Soccer Playing Kangaroo”), but quickly discovered that picture books weren’t for her.
She wrote a book called “I Will Never Dance Again” about a young girl diagnosed with diabetes, the first of her life-changing-illness novels, and has been writing them ever since.
“The books are not about the disease; the disease is just the arena,” she explains. “There are always characters you like or will get involved with.”
After her 23-year marriage ended, McDaniel moved to Chattanooga (a hilly city she loves) in the late 1980s because one of her sons was in college there and, “Hey, I’m a writer. I can live and write anywhere I want.”
Both sons are now grown and married, and she has two grandchildren.
“One of the hardest things for a writer my age is staying in touch with kids,” she says, “but that’s another positive thing about this type of novel. The human emotions that attend sickness, death and dying are pretty much the same as they’ve always been. I’ve read some old turn-of-the-century and Civil War diaries. Except for the phrasing of the notations and comments, the feelings are the same. Fiction is about feelings … empathy.”
A recent book, “Telling Christina Goodbye,” involves several teens whose lives are changed one night when they’re involved in a wreck and one of them dies.
Another book, “How Do I Love Thee,” introduces a girl hospitalized on a regular basis because of a weak heart.
McDaniel has even written about the Amish in northern Indiana, about pediatric AIDS, faith (she says she’s careful not to preach or deal with God and angels in a contrived way), and she just finished an untitled book she calls her most difficult.
That’s because it’s set in the past (1974) and told in the first person, methods she rarely employs: “It’s a story of a mother dying of breast cancer. I’ve been writing this a long, long time. It’s difficult because, one, I’ve been a victim of breast cancer and, two, I lost my mother to breast cancer. But I can have maximum impact. I hope mothers and daughters will sit down and read this book together.”
(Contact Rich Davis of The Evansville Courier in Indiana at http://www.evansville.net.)