I had the pleasure of speaking to Lynda Cohen Loigman, whose latest book, The Love Elixir of Augusta Stern is going on my rolling top 10 books. Check out my Instagram page Elena Meets the Author and this website for my rolling top 10 favorite reads.
Hello Lynda, this is not the first time I’ve interviewed you. I interviewed you back in January of 2023 about The Matchmaker’s Gift, another great book of yours.
I tend to listen to books on walks and/or read in bed at night. With The Love Elixir of Augusta Stern I couldn’t wait to go on a walk or get in bed. This book is a clever feel-good romance with its colourful characters, strong sense of place, imaginative plot line, and dual timeline.
Alternating between a pharmacy in 1920s, Brooklyn, and a drama-filled retirement home in Florida in 1987. It’s a story about second chances, how whether we’re 16 or 76 inside, we’re still the same person, and how it’s always possible to recapture that magical feeling of our youth. The story is full of old-world charm, suspense, history, and it’s very funny.
Aunt Esther and Irving Rivkin had me chuckling throughout. There are some bootlegging gangsters thrown in with Mitzi and Zip Diamond in their furs and fancy cars. The book starts with 79-year-old Augusta Stern, who works for a hospital in New York City. She loves to work and has been lying about her age for decades until on the eve of her 80th birthday, her boss tells her in so many words that it’s time for Augusta to move on. Augusta hates the idea of retirement but has no choice. So, on the suggestion of her beloved niece, Augusta moves to her retirement community in Florida. No sooner has she arrived than who should she bump into, but the man who broke her heart 60 years ago.
Below are some edited highlights from our chat. You can listen to the full conversation here on Elena Meets the Author or wherever you listen to podcasts.
Elena: So, Lynda let’s start with what inspired you to write this wonderful book. Your author’s note is fabulous and anyone reading The Love Elixir might want to skip to the back of the book and read that first.
Lynda: The inspiration really came from two different places. The initial idea for a story about an aging pharmacist came from what I had learned about my husband’s great-grandmother. She was a pharmacist. She graduated from Fordham Pharmacy College in 1921, which was a very unusual thing. There were very few women in her class.
But I didn’t really have a story. I keep story ideas in my head. I have this imaginary basket of ideas I keep in my head. And then I wrote The Matchmaker’s Gift and that was the first book where I added a little bit of magical realism to my writing. It was definitely a more joyful story than my first two books and more heartwarming.
After I wrote that book, a lot of readers wrote to me or told me in person how much they loved it, how it brought them all this joy. Before writing that book. I had never really thought about that. I thought about what I wanted my stories to say. I thought about the messages that I wanted to convey in my stories, but I never really thought about the emotional impact on the reader.
I always want to make people cry for better or for worse. If a reader’s crying, that’s good, it means they’re connecting. But I never thought about getting people through tough times, making people feel happy. And I wanted to write another story like that.
But I still really had no story. In the summer of 2021 my dad, who was 84, had a bad fall. He lived in Florida on his own. He was in rehab; he was in the hospital. It’s a very familiar story to anybody who’s my age. I’m in my mid-fifties. I was down in Florida that whole summer, and he needed an aid. He couldn’t do anything really on his own anymore.
By the end of the summer, my brother and I decided we had to move him to assisted living, and he was very reluctant at first because he was thinking about the nursing homes of his grandparents’ time. But when we went to look at these places, he got more excited because my dad was a really social person, and he liked being with people. And so, I moved him there. Every time I would visit him; I would sit with him in the lobby.
It was like a middle school cafeteria. Everyone was gathering there and there was a lot of chitter chatter and flirting and gossiping and all kinds of stuff. My dad was looking for companionship up until the day he died. He had dated a lot of women throughout the 15 years that he had after my mom died. And some of the relationships were really nice and some were not. Some of the women were nice and some were not.
I had this moment of panic the first day that I moved him into the assisted living place: What if one of the women who he had dated previously, where it had ended badly, what if she lived there?
Wouldn’t that be very awkward and very bad? And that was sort of where the beginnings of the story came from. Augusta lives in a very active retirement community, not assisted living, but same idea, right? You know, you’re in this small community looking back at someone from your past, who’s staring you in the face, who you don’t want to be with.
The voices of Irving and Augusta came to me sitting there that summer, spending time with my dad, sitting with him and all those residents.
Elena: Tell us more about the decision to set your story in a 1920’s pharmacy?
I wasn’t really sure about the year to tell you the truth. Picking the year is always one of the trickiest parts. It was that way for The Matchmaker’s Gift also.
I wasn’t wedded to the twenties until I learned about the effect of prohibition and the connection between prohibition and pharmacies. Pharmacies were one of the few places where it was legally allowed to sell alcohol. You could get a prescription for one pint of whiskey every 10 days for medicinal purposes. I found this article about how to be a bootlegger, and it talked about how gangsters at that time would create fake pharmacies on paper to be able to get the good whiskey and sell it.
And then they would flood a pharmacy with fake prescriptions or just steal the shipment from the alley. They would kind of do anything. I love a gangster story. The idea that I could have a little side gangster story got me really excited.
So, I decided the twenties would be perfect. And then there was one other thing, which I knew from the beginning. It isn’t a spoiler because it happens in the first few pages of the book. Augusta’s mother dies when she’s very young. I wanted her to die from something that medicine would be able to cure, but not at that time. Diabetes was the perfect answer because insulin wasn’t available until the early twenties. Before that, diabetes was really a death sentence. People starved themselves to death and their bodies couldn’t go on. And so, this idea that Solomon Stern, Augusta’s father, is a man who’s focused on medicine and science, and the idea that he would have every possible medicine at his disposal except the one thing that might save his wife, was a fascinating, heartbreaking idea to me, and it shaped his character.
When writing a story. I want something dramatic like that. It was the perfect thing to happen to Solomon Stern, to create a man who we’re instantly interested in and feel empathy for.
Elena: Your story made me think of my grandmother Ruth Garland Bowes who was one of the first women to graduate from Stanford Medical School in the early 1920’s. While at Stanford she worked on a groundbreaking study on diabetes, partly to help two of her brothers who were stricken with the illness. She was able to significantly improve and extend their lives. She died a long time ago, but I remember her telling my sisters and I stories about her time at Stanford and as a physician.
Wow, that’s so fascinating.
Elena: I know. I was thinking the twenties is a very ripe period.
There are so many things that are different, but you know, people are the same. You know, there’s a character who gets pregnant out of wedlock. Some readers think that you can’t have an unmarried woman getting pregnant. Like that didn’t happen in the twenties, but it happened all the time. Human nature is human nature. People made mistakes back then the same way they do now.
Elena: Can you talk about the role the pharmacy played in the community?
I read a lot of memoirs by pharmacists, and I talked to as many pharmacists as I could talk to about the old pharmacies. People didn’t go to doctors first. If you had a rash, a stomach problem, whatever it was, you went to your pharmacist first. And they would make their own, specific creams based on what you told them.
They were like your priest, your confessor, your rabbi and your therapist, all rolled up into one. Solomon Stern was definitely that for people. So, he really talks about how important it is to keep people’s confidence. It’s one of the things that he stresses to Augusta that you don’t talk about the customers.
Elena: Thank God Augusta could eavesdrop.
Yes. Pharmacists tended to live above the shop. One of the things I found fascinating was the night bell. In an emergency, customers could come and ring the bell, and it would ring up in the apartment.
There were a lot of stories in the memoirs about how annoyed pharmacists would get when someone would ring in the middle of the night for something that was not an emergency, like needing a stamp.
And there were a lot of interesting anecdotes about how important it was to know your customer, because people would ask for things with the intent to misuse them. So, if Mr. Smith comes in and he’s asking for arsenic for his wife’s complexion, but Mrs. Smith’s complexion is white. (They used arsenic to whiten skin). And Mr. Smith has been seen around town with some floozy. The pharmacist should know not to be giving the arsenic to Mr. Smith.
Elena: Aunt Esther said that if she were a man, she would’ve been called an apothecary or a pharmacist. But instead, because she was a woman, she was called a witch. Tell us about her.
Aunt Esther is a fascinating character. She comes into their home because their mother is gone. The house is falling apart, the dust on the mantle is an inch thick and they’re having terrible meals.
Aunt Esther is from Russia, the old country. But she’s a newer immigrant. She’s been in this country for many years, going from relative to relative wherever she’s needed, a little like Mary Poppins. She comes to their household to help take care of everybody because their mother has died.
She ends up teaching Augusta so much about healing. And so, her role is to go up against Augusta’s father. They don’t get along that well, and it makes Augusta think differently about her career. She’s always wanted to be a pharmacist, but now she sees that maybe the way her father does things isn’t the only way to do things, and maybe Aunt Esther can do things more effectively.
I leave it up to the reader to decide if Aunt Esther is a witch or if she is just really empathetic and knowledgeable about what she does.
Elena: One of the things that you said at the beginning of this Q&A is that it hadn’t occurred to you that you could bring joy to your readers. You really did that with this book.
Thanks. I just feel like we need books like that now. I don’t want to teach anybody anything. I want to teach myself things. It’s interesting to do the research, but I just really want to tell a good story.
There are books that can be beautifully written, they can be literary, whatever. But I want a good story. I want a story that you can sink into. And it doesn’t need to be so complicated. The more I write, the more I want to simplify my stories. Readers can relate to it when it’s not so intensely complicated. And this is a simple story. This woman moves to Florida, and she runs into the man who broke her heart 60 years earlier. That is the story. The more I write, the more I realize how important it is to know your story before you start writing.
Elena: And Aunt Esther explains the power of words to Augusta. Can you talk about that?
So, Aunt Esther has this mortar and pestle that she brings with her from the old country. And there are words written on the inside of it. She says those words every time she mixes up a powder to heal somebody. At some point, Augusta, asks her why she always says these words and why they’re important. And Esther says something like wicked words have caused wars and, kind words have caused peace. Words have broken hearts. Why shouldn’t they have the power to heal?
I think when we speak something out loud, it makes it real. There’s something about the spoken word that is a really powerful thing.
Elena: What thoughts would you like readers to take away from after they finish The Love Elixir?
I think it’s very important to never give up on life. It’s this idea that it is never too late, but not necessarily for romance.
One of the things that’s really special to me about this book is Augusta and Esther are two women who’ve chosen a very different path. Neither one of them has gotten married and neither one of them has had children. I think it’s important to have characters who don’t follow a traditional path.
Augusta didn’t have this romance when she was young. But that doesn’t mean that her life was tragic. She has had this amazing career that meant so much to her.
When she gets to Florida, she opens herself up. She makes new friends. She finds romance and that’s important to this story, but it’s not the most important thing. She’s also practicing her craft in the way she’s always wanted to.
Elena: Well, thank you so much Lynda. That was really interesting.
April, 2025
