Friday, January 8, 2021

"The Heiress"

Molly Greeley was born in Ann Arbor, Michigan, where her addiction to books was spurred by her parents' floor-to-ceiling bookshelves. A graduate of Michigan State University, she began as an Education major, but switched to English and Creative Writing after deciding that gainful employment was not as important to her as being able to spend several years reading books and writing stories and calling it work.

She lives in northern Michigan with her husband and three children, and can often be found with her laptop at local coffee shops.

Greeley applied the Page 69 Test to her new novel, The Heiress, and reported the following:
From page 69:
The wind was a warm breath on my cheek, and I could hear the swish of tree branches from the woods down the hill. I had been frightened of those woods all my life; they seemed a fearsome place, shadowed and gloomy. I could never understand the impulse that drew people to seek out such untamed places, my mind skipping back to those old stories from my nurse, to wolves and bears and unnamed beasts with teeth and claws that pierced maidens' delicate flesh. It was always the maidens being pierced, in the stories.
If someone were to open to this page randomly when paging through the book, I'd say it would give them a definite sense of the interiority of the story, particularly in part one, when Anne is so physically confined and so exists largely inside her own head. However, there is a passage just before the paragraph quoted above, in which Anne is talking to her governess about the laudanum she takes each day; I didn't quote this because it really begins a page or two earlier. But it does give a definite sense of what the story is about - of what Anne is going to have to overcome - if the reader happened to start at page 69 and then, curious, read further back a page or two!
Visit Molly Greeley's website.

Q&A with Molly Greeley.

--Marshal Zeringue