The Girlfriends' Cyber Circuit

List Previous Next Random

About the Book:

Claire Doolittle is not a happy camper. The married mother of five seems to have lost her way in life. Swept off her feet years earlier by Mr. Right, she’s dismayed that husband Jack has turned into Mr. Always Right, and the only sweeping happening in her life involves a broom and a dustpan. Jack’s officious, perfunctory way has left fun, spontaneity and laughter at the doorstep, and Claire is beginning to wonder if she’s actually married to a modern-day version of Ward Cleaver, the stuff-shirted father figure from Leave it to Beaver sitcom fame.

Cue a former fiancé, who re-enters her life when she desperately needs to figure out who she was, who she is, and who she wants to be. And if she wants to salvage her sagging marriage, or fall back on her old fiancé, who’s wooing her with promises of what could have been. Throw in a predatory hottie from Jack’s office who’s set her sights on Claire’s ho-hum husband, and you’ve got the recipe for a mid-life crisis of epic proportions.

The Cover:

About the Author:

Jenny Gardiner’s work has been found in Ladies Home Journal, the Washington Post and on NPR’s Day to Day. She likes to say she honed her fiction writing skills while working as a publicist for a US Senator. Other jobs have included: an orthodontic assistant (learning quite readily that she was not cut out for a career in polyester), a waitress (probably her highest-paying job), a TV reporter, a pre-obituary writer, and a photographer (claim to fame: being hired to shoot Prince Charles–with a camera, silly!). She lives in Virginia with her husband, three kids, two dogs, one cat and a gregarious parrot. In her free time she studies Italian, dreams of traveling to exotic locales, and feels very guilty for rarely attempting to clean the house.

 Jenny’s Answers to the RosettWrites Q & A:

Dream vacation destination? I LOVE Africa and would dearly love to get back there.

You’ve just won the lottery. What’s the first thing you do/buy?

Pay off my bills and fix my rotting front porch! Then a vacation with my family!

Favorite mystery/thriller movie? I'm a totally wimp and don't like to be scared. I do like movies with espionage, however. Just not blood/guts/gore and things that make you go ewwww...

Favorite junk food? Peanut M&Ms

What’s one food you absolutely can’t stand? anything with cilantro in it!

Paper or plastic? Definitely paper. Esp. the good shopping bags with the handles you can re-use all the time...

What’s one talent you wish you had? I wish I was a really good piano player (and also really want to learn to play the violin)

M&Ms or Godiva? Sorry, M&Ms, gotta go with European chocolate...

Favorite time of Day? Love pre-dawn to go to the gym, but love the color of light at the end of the day

Tell us a little about your book. Did an event or idea inspire the book?

I have always been a keen observer of relationships. Springs from being a product of a broken--make that shattered--marriage. Always fixated on that "what if?" factor--what if things had turned out differently, and how could they have turned out differently? I was always acutely aware of that fine line between love and hate. And I started to notice how conflict arises as couples approach middle-age. Women tend to experience a renaissance as their kids get older and they have time on their hands. They reinvent themselves by default. Men, on the other had, are quite entrenched in their careers, etc. By then marriages tend to be on auto-pilot. It's  a situation ripe for conflict. The title came to me and then I just had to write a book around it.

What’s your writing style? Outline or no outline?

No outline. Everything about my life is seat of the pants. I'm not a good planner LOL

What do you wish you’d known about either the craft of writing or the business of publishing when you first started writing?

Oh, I don't know. Everything has come to me in such an organic way, I think it's best that way. If my eyes had been quite as wide open, perhaps I'd have given up easier? So it's fine that I was clueless and made stupid newbie mistakes.

What’s up next for you? What are you working on now?

Just finished a novel tentatively called MARY KATE GOES OVER THE FALLS, about a sort of naive woman trapped in an abusive marriage who goes to pick up her husband's dry cleaning and instead picks up a handsome hitchhiker, the lure of whom reminds her of the lip of Niagara Falls, said to tempt people to jump in. They embark on a road trip of self-discover, en route to Niagara Falls, where she's planning to take the plunge as the first act of defiance in her life.

Thanks so much for having me, Sara!

You bet, Jenny. Thanks for dropping by!