A woman in Keller is celebrating something good.
Her debut novel hit book shelves on Tuesday, and publisher Harper Collins sends her on a book tour starting Wednesday.
"I'm going on a book tour. It's crazy. You know, I've always dreamed of being a writer. I always wanted to do this but I never really thought it would happen for me," said Amanda Churchill, a graphic designer, mother of two and now published author.
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The Turtle House is about a grandmother and granddaughter connecting over a beloved lost place and the secrets they each carry. The life of Churchill's own grandmother, a Japanese war bride, inspired the book. The grandmother, her military husband, and their children moved from Japan to a ranch in Roanoke, Texas, back in the '50s.
Churchill grew up with her grandmother but there wasn't much conversation about the life she'd left behind.
A cancer diagnosis gave Churchill the chance to connect with her grandmother on another level.
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"Some of the stuff she was telling me was like, I had no idea. So I knew that there was some good stuff there and towards the end of our interviews, she just kind of looked at me and was like, you know, this would make real good book one day," Churchill said.
Churchill started writing the book in 2014 after her grandmother died.
"I missed her so much and I had a baby, Jack who's my second child. I was up nights and up in the early mornings and I just started writing her stories down," Churchill said. "And, it's like, ok, we'll just start from the beginning and I'll just tell it third person and see what happens. And it became a novel just very quickly became half of the novel."
"My debut novel, The Turtle House, features a grandmother very much like my own. A grandfather who is distant at best, and abusive at worst. There is a granddaughter, begging to know more. There are an aunt and a father, Americanized, accidentally separated from their mother, not by geography, but by memory and culture. And there is a lost love. The one never forgotten," Churchill wrote in a magazine of prose and poetry.
While there are many parallels between the real life of Churchill's grandmother and the grandmother in her book, The Turtle House is fiction.
"It's just a home that my protagonist discovers just trying to escape her own home life and it's an old country estate in Japan," Churchill explained.
The biggest moment in her writing career happened in 2022 when Harper Collins, one of the biggest publishers in the country, picked it up.
"I didn't see a big five coming at me and the fact that it went to auction and there was, there was a fervor about it. I was surprised but it means that people are listening to stories that are a little different; like Asian American stories, stories of, of people coming to our country and, striving and doing something different. So it means a lot. It means a lot just not, not to me but to my family and other people like me," Churchill said.
Churchill's book tour will take her around Texas and Oklahoma through early April. It starts with an event in Dallas on Wednesday and a celebration in her hometown of Keller on Thursday.
Interbang Books
- Wednesday, February 21, 2024
- 6:00 PM - 7:00 PM
Keller Celebrates The Turtle House
- Thursday, February 22, 2024
- 7:00 PM 9:00 PM
- The Bowden
