Meet Erica

I have one of those backstories that gives aspiring authors hope. After I made the decision to leave traditional academia back in my early thirties, I wrote three memoirs, all roundly rejected by hundreds of editors. But I kept writing because I couldn’t not, and then one day I took a cooking class and got an idea for a novel. By that point I’d given up all expectations, so it was a book I wrote just for me. For the love of it. And of course, as these things go, that was the book that got published, two months before my 50th birthday.

I am now the author of six novels, including The School of Essential Ingredients, The Scent Keeper, and No Two Persons. I rewrote one of those early memoirs, using all the skills I’d picked up along the way, and now House Lessons: Renovating a Life is out in the world as well. My books have been published in over two dozen countries, and chosen as a Reese’s Book Club and Indie Next picks. If you’d told my thirty-year-old self this was going to happen, she wouldn’t have believed you (although she would have wanted to).

If I’ve learned anything as a writer, it is to keep writing, to keep learning, whether that is about the rhythm of a sentence, or the particulars of free-diving or cooking or the sense of smell or the business of diamonds. I am voraciously curious, geekily in love with the sound of words and the music of syntax, captivated by the workings of human minds and emotions. I believe in the life-changing effects of serendipitous encounters, the big lessons in small moments. I believe in the possible evolution of each human.

Which leads me to now.  After four novels of interconnected stories, and one magically-real coming-of-age story, I’ve written a thriller. It all started some 15 years ago, soon after The School of Essential Ingredients was published. In one of those serendipitous moments, I happened to meet a young woman at a party who asked me what my novel was about. When I said cooking and compassion, she looked at me, a wicked little sparkle in her eyes, and said, “I wonder what you’d write if your name was Erika Stone.”

It was a challenge, an invitation, a door, if you will, but it took me some time to walk through it. Almost another decade of being a woman in our world, until one day, that door just blew open and into my imagination walked Jayne Armitage, the unreliable narrator of Sharp as Ink. Jayne was whip smart, funny, and at times justifiably angry, a disenchanted academic turned romance writer turned…well, we won’t ruin the story. My husband calls her “alter-Erica,” but I think her voice is inside so many of us. I hope you find her as fascinating as I did.