Not only did I feel like I was on a vacation at this sumptuous inn, but the complex characters plus distinct back stories pulled me in. I liked watching their dramas unfold, building to a page turning emotional climax.

A little background: Renée and Jean-Paul De La Rue face the daunting decision to close their beloved inn Vis Ta Vie for good. Meanwhile their 8 guests are facing their own struggles. Three couples are in crisis: Hollywood celebs, Leo and Penny, are spending their silver anniversary together while on the cusp of divorce.

Lucy, a practical minded therapist, and Henry, an astronomer with his head in the stars, are on the rocks. And former lawyer, now stay at home mother, Sienna, and dynamic sports agent, Adam, look perfect, but looks can be deceiving.  Add finally, self-absorbed single mother Cassidy and her sulky 15-year-old daughter, Rosalie are barely speaking.

Below are some edited highlights from my conversation with Rochelle. You can listen to the full episode here on my podcast Elena Meets the Author available wherever you listen to podcasts.

Elena: Rochelle, before we get into your book, can you tell us how you went from being a secret writer into a somewhat prolific one with eight books out there.

Rochelle: Well, first, thank you, Elena, for having me. It’s a pleasure to be here. I was laughing when you were listing all the characters, because I’m like, Oh my God, how did I write all these characters and keep up with it?

I was always a writer, a secretive journal writer back in the day. I was also a huge reader. I used to steal my mother’s Sidney Sheldon, Danielle Steele. I was reading those books when I was  about 10 years old.  I like to say that they raised me in a way. They were my salvation. They were healing for me. My parents were divorced at the time, so there were some lonely times.

And I felt such refuge in books. At the same time, I was the journal writer, and I never had the courage or the self-confidence to put any type of writing out in the world.

My career path went an entirely different way. I was in the music business in South Beach in Miami and the company was bought and moved to New York City. I had just had twin boys. I’d always worked since the age of 14 and I felt I was at this career crossroads.  I always felt that I had a story to tell.  I literally sat down, wrote 110, 000 words of What We Leave Behind and that was the start of a career. It was a lark that turned into something bigger than I had expected.

Elena: Wow. Did you have that story percolating for a while?

Rochelle: There’s a lot of fiction and non-fiction in my first novel. A lot of it is my own self-discovery and the way I dealt with my parents’ divorce, the way I dealt with the men in my life and what I learned from years of work on myself.  I had a message that I really wanted to share with the world, and I felt like I could help other young women navigate through loss, insecurity and abandonment.

And I just basically fictionalized all these deep feelings into a story, and I made it entertaining

Elena: Of these eight books you’ve written, is there a common theme or thread to all of them?

Rochelle: There’s always some type of loss and resiliency, some emotional depth. There’s always a grey area. I like to explore the grey area.  I’m not a very black and white person. I see things in the shades of grey. I like to portray stories where we can see all sides and be able to show a little bit more compassion for the people around us.

Elena: I read that the working title of this book was The Inn, and you described it as The Big Chill meets Nine Perfect Strangers. Can you elaborate on that?

Rochelle: It’s so funny because as the iterations of this book have developed, now I like to say my elevator pitch is, One Week in Summer, Eight Lives Forever Changed. Think White Lotus Meets Virgin River.

Elena: How did you choose to set the novel in North Carolina?

Rochelle: I live in South Florida, and we spent our summers in the mountains of North Carolina, starting at the age of four, when my single mom was head of Girls Hill, a sleepaway camp in Hendersonville, North Carolina.

And I lived for these summers in the mountains, the smell, the scenery. I’m a nature girl at heart. So fast forward, I got married, we had kids, we would take our kids to the mountains of North Carolina. We have a place that we go to in the summers in Beach Mountain.

And nearby there’s this inn called the Inn at Little Pond Farm. And the inn in my novel is based entirely on the inn at Little Pond Farm.

They had a communal table, which only seated ten people, and you could end up talking to complete strangers while the gourmet chef would cook a five-course meal for you.

What’s so incredible are the seeds that are planted at this table when you’re with strangers. I was fascinated by the interactions between the strangers and what you could learn, what you could find out about people, the people who didn’t like each other. I decided that I needed to write a story about the dynamics of this table. I felt like the table was just such a great starting point for a story.

Elena: One of your character’s loves astronomy? Is that something you’re interested in?

Rochelle: Not at all.  I did some research on that. Carl Sagan says we all come from stars and from stardust. I felt like the table was a metaphor for the sun.

And the characters were the stars orbiting the sun. They gravitated around this piece, and it connected them or it exploded around them. I viewed the whole star piece as just a metaphor for these relationships.

Elena: I’m wondering if there were certain characters that appeared to you from the very beginning.

Rochelle: This idea has been percolating for a while. So, when I sat down to finally write it, I knew these were my characters. I knew I wanted to do a mother daughter dynamic. I knew I wanted couples who were best friends from college, reliving their youth at the inn.  I knew I wanted some celebrity to shake things up. And I knew I wanted to have the Renee and Paul, the owners.

I stapled six giant poster boards together and cut out pictures of celebrities from People Magazine. I’m very visual and I need to just see somebody to describe a face, the curvature of their chin. I had index cards for each day and each character had their arc and their goal for a specific scene. I had to see it visually.

Elena: Were these characters modelled after movie stars? Did you have a picture of a movie star for Leo?

Rochelle: The characters that I pulled out of People magazine three or four years ago are different than who I would have envisioned today. Leo was Rob Lowe. And I had Blake Lively as Sienna, but now seeing all her troubles, I think people might not be thrilled to see Blake Lively.

Elena:, Did you have a particular fondness for any of the characters?

Rochelle: People ask who’s your favourite character. Which is your favourite book? That’s like asking who’s your favourite child. But I loved writing Rosalie. There’s something about writing young girls. Something really pivotal must have happened to me at the age of 15.  I’m stuck in this youthful 15-year-old girl’s body and voice.

I also loved writing, Penny and Leo.

Elena:? Is there a particular scene that you really loved writing?

Rochelle: I loved the unpeeling of the onion at the table. I loved the last scene of the book. I loved Sienna and Lucy in the wine cellar. The scenes that are the most emotionally charged, I loved so much.

Elena: At one point in the story, Penny, who has been married for 25 years to the Hollywood celebrity Leo, gives some advice to a younger couple who are having marital problems. She says, if there’s one thing you should focus on, it’s not whether you love this person, because the answer is yes. The real question is, can you live without this person? And if you can’t live without them, then do everything in your power to fix it. I thought that was a very wise piece of advice.

Rochelle: Sometimes I wonder where (these nuggets) came from. It’s been a while since I wrote that book. You know, you get so deep into your characters, and I felt that that was something that Penny would have said, given her history with Leo.

Elena: Yeah,

Rochelle: Like you really get into character.

Elena: Might you ever write a sequel? I thought there were certain characters we’re invested in and we’re not sure what’s going to happen to them.

Rochelle: Never say never. None of my books are part of a series, they’re all standalones. This one definitely lends itself to that more.  I turned in my ninth book two Fridays ago. All I can say is it’s an epic love story

Elena: Oh, wow. You write a book in a year?

Rochelle: I’ve been writing a book a year, but I’m going to slow down.

Elena: You clearly have tons of ideas. Do you write them down as they come to you?

Rochelle: Yes. I have a file folder called book ideas. And I actually have synopses for books ten and eleven.

Elena: Amazing.  I know that you recommend books for the local NBC affiliate and for some magazines. What books are you recommending?

Rochelle: Nicola Kraus has a new book coming out The Best We Could Hope For.  And I’m excited about Jackie Friedland’s Counting Backwards That’s on my night table There’s obviously, the Queen, Annabelle Monaghan, I can’t wait until her new book It’s a Love Story comes out. I read it and it’s of course amazing.

Elena: She’s great. I’m interviewing her in May. I think that’s it for my questions. Thank you, and good luck with all your writing.

Rochelle: Thank you, Elena. I appreciate it. It was a pleasure talking to you.

February, 2025

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 I spoke with Anastasia Rubis, who goes by Stacy, the author of Oriana, a wonderful moving novel about the trailblazing Italian journalist, Oriana Fallaci. Oriana was an international superstar, arguably the best journalist in the world in the 1960s and 70s. She was a woman in a man’s world, which makes her accomplishments that much more impressive.

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traces  the fascinating detail-rich lives of five ardent, creative women who became friends and artistic supporters and who bonded over wanting to lead a creative life, a life beyond just wife and mother.   In 1960 Harvard’s sister college Radcliffe announced the launch of an exciting new programme – the Institute for Independent Study.

The study was aimed at a marginalised class of Americans: mothers” reads Doherty’s introduction. A Newsday headline said: “Radcliffe Launching Plan to Get Brainy Women out of the Kitchen.

Twenty-four gifted women were selected from across the US to participate in this “messy experiment” conceived by Radcliffe President, Polly Bunting, who believed that American women lived in ‘a climate of unexpectation’.

Doherty follows the lives of poets Anne Sexton and Maxine Kumin, painter Barbara Swan, sculptor Marianna Pineda and writer Tillie Olsen. Doherty delves the deepest describing the intense friendship between Sexton

and Cumin, both of whom won Pulitzer Prizes after their time at the Institute.

The Institute offered frustrated, bored, talented housewives, those with a doctorate or “the equivalent’, something that was inconceivable at the time – a generous stipend, office space and membership to a professional, like-minded female community.  The women who attended the Institute didn’t think of themselves as feminists – the word barely existed – but they flourished creatively at the Institute and wanted that life to continue.

Doherty’s well-researched book is full of color about the personal and professional lives of The Equivalents, what this group of five friends called themselves, since apart from Kumin, none had a Masters degree. Sexton hadn’t even gone to college.

Doherty’s book struck a personal chord with me, as I am sure it has for many women who remember the early 60’s.  My mother was born in 1933, got married at 23 and by 1962, she had three children under the age of five. She was 28. My mother was both privileged and glamorous. And smart. She belonged to that generation where attending college was unimportant – she never graduated from UC Berkeley and her college notebooks were filled with doodles of dresses and ballgowns – her goal was to marry well, have babies and be the perfect wife.  There was never a thought that she would work.

Here’s my interview with Doherty:

Your book puts a stamp on history showing that the mid-20^th century – long considered a barren time for feminism – was not.  The Institute fostered “feminism without the word.”

A few years later, Betty Friedan debunked the suburban myth in her iconoclastic book, The Feminine Mystique. Friedan looked at the ads of her time and “thought there was something wrong with me because I didn’t have an orgasm waxing the kitchen floor.” Can you expand on this?

One of the women I interviewed, the historian Lily Macrakis, called the conversations and consciousness-raising that took place at the Institute “feminism without the word.” I think it’s a great phrase for the incipient political consciousness that was incubating in that space. Often, political movements are growing and developing in private spaces before they burst into public life.

Part of my goal in The Equivalents is to show how feminist thought and activism developed before Friedan published her galvanizing book, The Feminine Mystique, in 1963. The Institute fellows didn’t necessarily see themselves as feminists or think that they were doing something “political” by joining this project. That said, as Macrakis noted, they began to grow more conscious of society’s limitations as they talked together at the Institute. As she remembers it, they were so delighted with the Institute and everything it offered that they started to wonder why there were so few programs that offered this kind of support to women, and why there couldn’t be more resources for women in America: “why don’t we push more,” was her thought at the time.

Reading The Equivalents made me feel quite envious for the comradery, the female companionship and collaboration that the Radcliffe Institute fostered – In this interview – part of the Radcliffe Institute’s series of Virtual Summer Book Talks – you touch on how a sense of community helped these women’s productivity. 

Can you comment on that and how we can recreate this “lost utopia” in the time of covid-19 and beyond?

This is a great question and it’s been on my mind a lot these last few months. I keep hearing from female friends who are really struggling with quarantine. Some of them have young children and are finding it hard to do their jobs and watch their kids at the same time. Or they’re feeling lonely and cut off from their friends while being totally overwhelmed by their family. The pandemic has had a disparate effect on women, as well as on people of color and the working class (all intersecting categories). In some ways, it seems like we’ve returned to the 1950s model of the home: women are housebound and responsible for taking care of everyone.

It’s really hard to create and sustain community under these conditions! We have technology of course, but that can be hard to use when many of us are also fatigued from working digitally. And there are mutual aid networks in many neighborhoods that remind people they are not alone.

If I were empowered to do something right now to address these conditions of isolation and domestic overload, I would institute a childcare allowance, something that other nations have under non-pandemic conditions. Material resources really help—this is why the Institute provided its fellows with stipends. I would also fund schools such that they would have the resources to open safely and to be creative with their teaching. I think these two things—well-funded schools and financial assistance for families—would benefit everyone, and they would free up women and allow them to reconnect.

Literary heavyweights Sylvia Path, John Holmes, Alice Walker and Betty Friedan all make appearances in your well-researched book. Can you describe the friendship between Plath and Sexton?

Sexton and Plath met in Robert Lowell’s Boston University workshop in 1959. Plath was fresh off a year teaching at Smith and was eager to capitalize on her early poetic successes. Sexton was gaining confidence in her craft, in part because Lowell, who was one of the most famous poets working at the time, seemed to favor her. Lowell sort of pushed Sexton and Plath together in the hopes they would “rub off on each other,” he later said.

In her journals, Plath recorded her admiration for Sexton’s work and imagined how well a Sexton-type poem would fit in her own manuscript. She was also a bit envious of Sexton, who was glamorous, and older, and who commanded the attention of men like the poet and editor George Starbuck, who accompanied Plath and Sexton on their evenings out. The trio would go drink martinis at the Ritz; Sexton and Plath would compare suicide attempts. Later, it would be Sexton who turned envious, after Plath committed suicide and became posthumously famous for the collection Ariel. Sexton felt that Plath had stolen the spot reserved for “suicidal poetess”, and she wrote a mediocre elegy for Plath that said more about her own death wish and poetic ambitions than it did for the dead poet.

You can read the rest of my interview here in 26, a diverse group of people who believe in the power of words, not just in business, but in life. And, of course, read the book! It’s terrific.

September, 2020

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Funny,  because if you came to my house, a lot of the books on the shelves are written by women.  Especially now, as I have been de-cluttering. I am moving house and spring cleaning big-time.

The Life Changing Magic of Tidying  by Marie Kondo is my declutter bible. With each item I own, particularly books since I seem to collect them like dog hairs, I ask myself

Does this item spark joy? If not, chuck it.  The books below did not pass Kondo’s test.

These books did …

Several of the survivors are written by women  that I connect with, that I might want to reread one day, that comforted me at a point in my life, old friends. (Yes, I admit Eat Pray Love survived the test – but not all three copies).

Based in the San Francisco Bay Area,  Anne Lamott’s autographical take on life always strikes a chord with me, and not just because I too grew up in the Bay Area. Whether it’s Bird by Bird, Instructions on Writing and Life or what’s currently on my bed table,  Small Victories, Lamott’s stories always resonate.

She  can write about anything, literally anything, with clarity, wisdom and a lot of humour. Some excerpts;

I’ve spent my whole life trying to get over having had Nikki for a mother, and I have to say that from day one,  it was much easier to have a dead mother than the old living one, the impossible one.”

When visiting prisoners in San Quentin,  Lamott says,

Those we saw and spent time with seemed to be sliding by, relatively seamless and calm. They’re mostly older; you sense that their testosterone levels are down. I like that in a prisoner.

And finally on dating …

 Some people my age – extreme middle age – train for marathons, or paddle down the Amazon, or skydive, or adopt. They publish for the first time.

Me? I may have done the most heroic thing of all. I went on match.com for a year.

Lamott explains what she is  looking for in a mate …

What I missed was checking in all day with my person, daydreaming about him, and watching TV together at night. There, I’ve said it: I wanted someone to text all day and watch TV with.

Another writer I have always admired is the late Nora Ephron. She used sharp wit and warmth to get her message across.

She was always funny …

 In my sex fantasy, nobody ever loves me for my mind.

and smart. She wrote about what mattered-  love and heart ache and moving on were her bread and butter.

And then the dreams break into a million tiny pieces. The dream dies. Which leaves you with a choice: you can settle for reality, or you can go off, like a fool, and dream another dream.

Author Christa D’Souza reminds me  of Ephron. She mines her life for stories whether it’s in her search for the perfect waist, her year as a teetotal or the insults of menopause from mood swings to a less than perfect waist. In her new book, The Hot Topic, the confessional D’Souza compares menopause to death and taxes.

(It’s)  something that will happen to everyone.  Everyone, that is, except me. Sure, I was getting hot flushes and felt anxious and kept putting my keys in the fridge and couldn’t sleep, but what did that have to do with anything? It’s amazing how dim smart women can be about this – I’d honestly kidded myself that I would carry on menstruating until I died.”

Last week I went to listen to D’ Souza at Grace Belgravia, a women’s club in London that hosts regular #gracetalks about serious health issues to members and nonmembers.

Also there was the feisty TV presenter Mariella Frostrup …

The room was packed with women, all curious to hear D’Souza, Frostrup and a leading London gynaecologist discuss the taboo topic of menopause. The women, many of whom I recognised, were all about my age. We’d had children at about the same time, we’d seen each other in the playground or at various children’s parties over the years.

Now we are embarking on a new phase of life, a phase without children at home or the prospect of creating any. What does that do to one’s carefully engineered sense of self as a mother, as a woman? How do we handle this change that is so much more than menopause? As per usual, I’ll be relying on some good books, like D’Souza’s, to get a handle on what it’s all about.

March, 2017

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