The Guardian (53 page)

Adrienne Willis is forty-five, a divorced mother of three, whose husband left her for a younger woman. Paul Flanner, at fifty-two, is a successful surgeon who lived a life devoted to his work. Because both the characters are older than my typical characters, Noah and Allie, in the final third of The Notebook, notwithstanding-they are facing dilemmas that are different than any dilemmas I've written about in the past. There are children and elderly parents to worry about, both of which add a different type of challenge to the relationship as it unfolds. At the same time, both have reached that point in time where they seem to realize that although that not all of their dreams for their own lives have come true. In the course of writing, I grew to care deeply about both characters.

Nights in Rodanthe is probably the most romantic of the novels I've written to this point. From the setting to the characters, the story was written to show how people can fall in love at any age, and often when they least expect it.

The Challenge of

A Bend in the Roadby Nicholas Sparks

A Bend in the Road was a challenging story to conceive and a difficult story to write, though in all honesty, the reasons had more to do with events in my own life than the process of putting the words down on paper. Originally, I'd intended to start my writing new novel in January, 2000, but there were two major events that made work of any kind difficult.

First, my third son was born on January 11th; within days of that event, I learned that my younger sister, who'd been battling cancer for years, had just been given a few months to live. I live in North Carolina and my sister lives in California and I wanted to spend as much time with her as I could; I also wanted to bond with my new child and the push and pull, the wonder of life and tragedy of death, made concentration of any kind difficult. Every ninth day, I flew to California to stay with my sister for four days, and those trips continued through the end of May when she finally passed away. My sister, for those who don't know, was the inspiration for Jamie Sullivan in A Walk to Remember, and she was not only a sibling, but along with my wife and brother, my best friend as well. Her loss, along with the death of both my parents, were without a doubt the most difficult things I've been through.

Despite the travel, despite the stress and lack of sleep due to the new baby, I nonetheless did try to write. I wrote half a novel in those six months, though I realized that the story simply wasn't working. My deadline was in January which gave me six months to write an entirely new story, and my editor came down to help me conceive of something that might work.

Knowing that all of my novels have come from family events, my editor suggested we start there and because my brother-in-law was on my mind, the first character became a young widower who had to raise a child on his own. This was Miles Ryan, and from there, I was able to pin down a plot that I thought might work. The end result is A Bend in the Road, and in many ways, I think it's my best novel to date. It's both poignant and suspenseful, and I hope that those who read it will find it a story that moves them.

Inspiration for

The Rescueby Nicholas Sparks

It's taken a while, but I've finally come to the firm understanding that no matter how long I live, I'm never going to have things figured out. My life for instance. If I stand back, chin in hand, and evaluate the things that have occurred in the first 34 years I've been around, I can't help but realize it's been one incredibly unpredictable ride. Up and down, shifting and tilting, suddenly spinning when I least expect it-at no time have I even had the chance to sit back and enjoy the thing without worrying what may be coming with the next gyration.

It's easy to imagine that everything in my life is wonderful; that I walk down the street as rose petals fall gently from the sky. And I'll admit that I consider myself very fortunate with regard to the success I've achieved in the publishing world. But a big part of the success comes from the stories themselves, and their origins have been anything but easy. I've suffered through the loss of both my parents (my father was the inspiration for Garrett Blake in Message in a Bottle), I've watched my younger sister struggle bravely with cancer, only to pass away in the end. (She was Jamie Sullivan in A Walk to Remember.) I watched two wonderful people who taught me what true love was really all about die within months of each other, (Noah and Allie in The Notebook). And I have a son who provided the original inspiration for my latest novel, The Rescue.

My fourth novel was my most challenging novel to date and though I won't go into many details (since I do want you to read the story), I can say that this is a novel that closely parallels my own life over the past four years. All the feelings, all the emotions, all the dreams and fears of Denise Holton (the main female character in The Rescue) are the same as the ones that my wife and I went through at various times; the sacrifice she made for her child was the same one that my wife and I had to make as well. It was a special book to write, and hopefully, you'll find it a special book to read.

Nicholas Sparks

Nights in Rodanthe

Three years earlier, on a warm November morning in 1999, Adrienne Willis had returned to the Inn and at first glance had thought it unchanged, as if the small Inn were impervious to sun and sand and salted mist. The porch had been freshly painted, and shiny black shutters sandwiched rectangular white-curtained windows on both floors like offset piano keys. The cedar siding was the color of dusty snow. On either side of the building, sea oats waved a greeting, and sand formed a curving dune that changed imperceptibly with each passing day as individual grains shifted from one spot to the next.With the sun hovering among the clouds, the air had a luminescent quality, as though particles of light were suspended in the haze, and for a moment Adrienne felt she'd traveled back in time. But looking closer, she gradually began to notice changes that cosmetic work couldn't hide: decay at the corners of the windows, lines of rust along the roof, water stains near the gutters. The Inn seemed to be winding down, and though she knew there was nothing she could do to change it, Adrienne remembered closing her eyes, as if to magically blink it back to what it had once been.

Now, standing in the kitchen of her own home a few months into her sixtieth year, Adrienne hung up the phone after speaking with her daughter. She sat at the table, reflecting on that last visit to the Inn, remembering the long weekend she'd once spent there. Despite all that had happened in the years that had passed since then, Adrienne still held tight to the belief that love was the essence of a full and wonderful life.

Outside, rain was falling. Listening to the gentle tapping against the glass, she was thankful for its steady sense of familiarity. Remembering those days always aroused a mixture of emotions in her-something akin to, but not quite, nostalgia. Nostalgia was often romanticized; with these memories, there was no reason to make them any more romantic than they already were. Nor did she share these memories with others. They were hers, and over the years, she'd come to view them as a sort of museum exhibit, one in which she was both the curator and the only patron. And in an odd way, Adrienne had come to believe that she'd learned more in those five days than she had in all the years before or after.

She was alone in the house. Her children were grown, her father had passed away in 1996, and she'd been divorced from Jack for seventeen years now. Though her sons sometimes urged her to find someone to spend her remaining years with, Adrienne had no desire to do so. It wasn't that she was wary of men; on the contrary, even now she occasionally found her eyes drawn to younger men in the supermarket. Since they were sometimes only a few years older than her own children, she was curious about what they would think if they noticed her staring at them. Would they dismiss her out of hand? Or would they smile back at her, finding her interest charming? She wasn't sure. Nor did she know if it was possible for them to look past the graying hair and wrinkles and see the woman she used to be.

Not that she regretted being older. People nowadays talked incessantly about the glories of youth, but Adrienne had no desire to be young again. Middle-aged, maybe, but not young. True, she missed some things-bounding up the stairs, carrying more than one bag of groceries at a time, or having the energy to keep up with the grandchildren as they raced around the yard-but she'd gladly exchange them for the experiences she'd had, and those came only with age. It was the fact that she could look back on life and realize she wouldn't have changed much at all that made sleep come easy these days.

Besides, youth had its problems. Not only did she remember them from her own life, but she'd watched her children as they'd struggled through the angst of adolescence and the uncertainty and chaos of their early twenties. Even though two of them were now in their thirties and one was almost there, she sometimes wondered when motherhood would become less than a full-time job.

Matt was thirty-two, Amanda was thirty-one, and Dan had just turned twenty-nine. They'd all gone to college, and she was proud of that, since there'd been a time when she wasn't sure any of them would. They were honest, kind, and self-sufficient, and for the most part, that was all she'd ever wanted for them. Matt worked as an accountant, Dan was the sportscaster on the evening news out in Greenville, and both were married with families of their own. When they'd come over for Thanksgiving, she remembered sitting off to the side and watching them scurry after their children, feeling strangely satisfied at the way everything had turned out for her sons.

As always, things were a little more complicated for her daughter.

The kids were fourteen, thirteen, and eleven when Jack moved out of the house, and each child had dealt with the divorce in a different way. Matt and Dan took out their aggression on the athletic fields and by occasionally acting up in school, but Amanda had been the most affected. As the middle child sandwiched between brothers, she'd always been the most sensitive, and as a teenager, she'd needed her father in the house, if only to distract from the worried stares of her mother. She began dressing in what Adrienne considered rags, hung with a crowd that stayed out late, and swore she was deeply in love with at least a dozen different boys over the next couple of years. After school, she spent hours in her room listening to music that made the walls vibrate, ignoring her mother's calls for dinner. There were periods when she would barely speak to her mother or brothers for days.

It took a few years, but Amanda had eventually found her way, settling into a life that felt strangely similar to what Adrienne once had. She met Brent in college, and they married after graduation and had two kids in the first few years of marriage. Like many young couples, they struggled financially, but Brent was prudent in a way that Jack never had been. As soon as their first child was born, he bought life insurance as a precaution, though neither expected that they would need it for a long, long time.

They were wrong.

Brent had been gone for eight months now, the victim of a virulent strain of testicular cancer. Adrienne had watched Amanda sink into a deep depression, and yesterday afternoon, when she dropped off the grandchildren after spending some time with them, she found the drapes at their house drawn, the porch light still on, and Amanda sitting in the living room in her bathrobe with the same vacant expression she'd worn on the day of the funeral.

It was then, while standing in Amanda's living room, that Adrienne knew it was time to tell her daughter about the past.

Fourteen years. That's how long it had been.In all those years, Adrienne had told only one person about what had happened, but her father had died with the secret, unable to tell anyone even if he'd wanted to.

Her mother had passed away when Adrienne was thirty-five, and though they'd had a good relationship, she'd always been closest to her father. He was, she still thought, one of two men who'd ever really understood her, and she missed him now that he was gone. His life had been typical of so many of his generation. Having learned a trade instead of going to college, he'd spent forty years in a furniture manufacturing plant working for an hourly wage that increased by pennies each January. He wore fedoras even during the warm summer months, carried his lunch in a box with squeaky hinges, and left the house promptly at six forty-five every morning to walk the mile and a half to work.

In the evenings after dinner, he wore a cardigan sweater and long-sleeved shirts. His wrinkled pants lent a disheveled air to his appearance that grew more pronounced as the years wore on, especially after the passing of his wife. He liked to sit in the easy chair with the yellow lamp glowing beside him, reading genre westerns and books about World War II. In the final years before his strokes, his old-fashioned spectacles, bushy eyebrows, and deeply lined face made him look more like a retired college professor than the blue-collar worker he had been.

There was a peacefulness about her father that she'd always yearned to emulate. He would have made a good priest or minister, she'd often thought, and people who met him for the first time usually walked away with the impression that he was at peace with himself and the world. He was a gifted listener; with his chin resting in his hand, he never let his gaze stray from people's faces as they spoke, his expression mirroring empathy and patience, humor and sadness. Adrienne wished that he were around for Amanda right now; he, too, had lost a spouse, and she thought Amanda would listen to him, if only because he knew how hard it really was.

A month ago, when Adrienne had gently tried to talk to Amanda about what she was going through, Amanda had stood up from the table with an angry shake of her head.