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Many years ago now, an acquaintance of mine, Steve Heller, wrote a marvelous first novel titled The Automotive History of Lucky Kellerman. When I met Steve, we were both in the early days of our writing careers, out trying to promote our respective books, and because, at the time, we were fellow Kansans, we wound up doing a book signing together. So of course, I went home from that with an autographed copy of Steve’s novel.

Had I seen Steve’s book in a bookstore, I would have passed it by, the title putting me off. A novel about the history of cars? No, definitely not my thing. Except that when I read it, it definitely was.

The cars, you see, represent the various stages of Lucky Kellerman’s life:

“Squinting at the purple Moon 8-80 Prince of Windsor sitting up on blocks, the green Hudson Hornet, the Jimmie Truck, the Studebaker Silver Hawk, and the battered Corvair all lined up beneath the canopy, he understood why he had parked them in that order, in perfect view from the window above his worktable. The reason was so obvious he had overlooked it all these years. Yet there it was, right in front of him. Each automobile represented an unmistakable stage in his life. By lining them up in the order they had come into his possession, he had assembled his automotive history.” —The Automotive History of Lucky Kellerman

I’ve been thinking quite a bit lately about Steve’s book and that particular plot device.

Off and on for some weeks now, I’ve been working on my website, cleaning up folders, getting rid of old graphics, freshening up others, and rearranging pages, etc. This past weekend, I worked on all my actual novel pages. At the time I first uploaded my website to the WWW, it seemed like a good idea to give each title its own individual page. But since those have now crept up to more than thirty, that’s an awful lot of pages to maintain—and at this stage in my life, I’m unabashedly all for whatever makes my life easier.

That being the case, I decided to consolidate all my title pages, condensing them to six. So I spent the weekend going through them all, deciding what bits to keep, what to get rid of, rereading synopses and quotes, and basically reacquainting myself with novels I haven’t thought about in years, despite the fact that I wrote them.

While I was doing all that, it occurred to me that like Lucky Kellerman’s cars, each of those books represents a stage of my life.

Lucky Kellerman needed a big carport to house the stages of his own life. I only need a
bookshelf.

When you talk to them, most writers will tell you that when they look back over the novels they’ve written, they don’t remember which passages just came pouring out of them, inspired by their creative muse, and which passages they struggled with and labored over, feeling as though said muse had deserted them forever. I’m no exception to that rule.

Glancing back over the body of my work, I realized that what I do recall is the events that
occurred in my life at the time I was writing each book.

Yes, believe it or not, writers are actually real people with real lives that take place in the real world.

No Gentle Love, my first novel, will always be special to me simply because it was my first. I was twenty-one when I began writing it, and a year later, right in the middle of it, I decided to return to college to obtain my master’s degree. In the process, I received a graduate teaching assistant’s post, and I remember all my fellow teachers periodically dropping by my office, fascinated by the fact that I was writing a book. When they learned I’d finally finished and sold it, they threw a big party for me to celebrate. I still have the T-shirt they gave me. So whenever I think about No Gentle Love, it’s not actually the novel itself, but all my college chums and college days that come to mind.

And Gold Was Ours — my sister had to be rushed to an emergency room and almost died. Desire in Disguise — I was a brand-new mother with a colicky baby keeping me up at all hours. As I went down the list of my books, I passed one milestone after another, each time struck by a wave of memories, some happy, and, yes, some sad. At one point, I recalled having drinks and laughing it up with good friends and colleagues who have long passed away, and I realized how much I still miss them.

So, now, I’m wondering: Do other writers associate their novels with various stages of their lives, the way I do? Do readers associate books they’ve read with various stages of their lives, as well? If so, what novels do you best remember, and why?

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