美国国家公共电台 NPR Family, Death And A Road Trip In 'Ashes To Asheville'

SCOTT SIMON, HOST:

Some books can sweep you away in the first sentence. Sarah Dooley's new book "Ashes to Asheville" begins with a riff that includes sisterhood, death, cute pets and saucy 1 widows. Let's get the author to read it.

SARAH DOOLEY: (Reading) Right before my sister Zany steals our dead mother off the mantle 2, I'm trying to decide which sock to stuff in haberdashery's mouth to shut him up. He's barking every five seconds - yip yip yip (ph) - all shrill 3 like a smoke detector 4 with its batteries low. It's a wonder Mrs. Madison hasn't come downstairs in her slippery cheetah 5 robe waving Mr. Madison's ancient handgun. She keeps that thing in her purse, says a widow as pretty as her needs protection, especially with, what she calls it, her assets. I thought she was talking dirty the first time I heard that till momma Shannon explained she meant money.

SIMON: And Sarah Dooley, who's written several bestselling novels for young adults, including "Free Verse" and "Body Of Water," joins us from the studios of West Virginia Public Radio. Thanks so much for being with us.

DOOLEY: Thank you for having me.

SIMON: The death of a parent, and I will even say a mother, might be the saddest event that can happen to a child. I wonder if you hesitated before opening a book with a mother and ashes on the urn 6?

DOOLEY: I definitely did take a few minutes pause to think about that. But the story that Fella and Zany had to tell about their - not only the mother they lost, but the mother that they still have was so important that it overrode 7 any doubts that I had.

SIMON: Let's explain Fella, OK? We need to do that with the name, I guess, anyway, don't we?

DOOLEY: We do. So Fella is the narrator she - her name is Ophelia, and she goes by the nickname Fella. She's 12 years old, and she's the one telling the story. And she's hitting the road with her 16-year-old sister Zoey Grace who goes by Zany.

SIMON: Yeah. And they can't stay, as you put it, with the mother they've known - why is that? - after their mother dies.

DOOLEY: Because of the laws in place governing the legalities of same sex marriage at the time that Fella and Zany were growing up, which was the early 2000s, their mothers were not able to be legally married. And so when Mama Lacy passed away, her biological child Fella, who's telling the story, was sent to live with Mrs. Madison, her grandmother.

Zany, on the other hand, stayed behind with their other mother because she was biologically related to Mama Shannon. So when they lost Mama Lacy, which they couldn't have foreseen, their family structure was shaken, not only by the loss of one mother, but by Fella then losing the only other mother she knew as well as her sister and having to go live with a virtual stranger.

SIMON: What's the road trip that Fella and Zany undertake?

DOOLEY: Zany shows up in the middle of the night to sweep Fella away, along with Mama Lacy's ashes. She wants to celebrate Mama Lacy's birthday by scattering 8 her ashes in the last place that they ever felt at home as a family together, which was Asheville, N.C.

So they're going from the Beckley, W.Va. area to the Asheville, N.C. area. And they think they can make it there and back before anybody wakes up in the morning. Of course, they've never gone on a long road trip alone together, so they don't know what's lying in wait for them.

SIMON: Yeah. And, boy, are things lying in wait for them. I think it's safe to say it's a basic property of storytelling that any book that opens with an urn on the mantle, you know, something's going to happen to those ashes, don't you?

DOOLEY: That's right.

SIMON: Do you hope youngsters might - youngsters? - young adults, young readers will read about Mama Lacy and Mama Shannon - the happy couple we learn about, one of them now gone at the at the center of the story - and learn something about love, getting along?

DOOLEY: I like to think so. I been asked a lot of times why I chose to write about a nontraditional family or a family that was different, but Mama Lacy and Mama Shannon are such typical parents. They fight. They argue. They tease each other. They embarrass their children in public. They struggle with finances.

And they struggle with household decoration and car repair and just all the little details that make a family typical and that make up a life together. And so I hope that readers can take away from the book that no matter what your relationship looks like, there's a lot more that make people the same than that make them different.

SIMON: Yeah. Why do you think you became a writer?

DOOLEY: (Laughter) I grew up with parents who modeled storytelling as a way to deal with hardship. So if we were struggling to find a place to live or struggling to pay the rent or struggling to deal with any number of issues that you run into growing up poor in Appalachia, my family modeled storytelling as a way to navigate 9 that world.

So it's not just that something's wrong, it's what is the story and what is the uplifting twist to the story and what is the end of this story? You're going to move forward through the tart 10 - the hard part, and you're going to end up at the happy ending. So I had storytelling modeled to me from the start.

SIMON: Did you find a lot you could relate to in children's literature when you were growing up?

DOOLEY: I did, and I do. I still read a lot of children's literature. I think there are some amazing voices. I read and re-read books like "Homecoming" and "The Outsiders" by S. E. Hinton. And those are books that I can pick up and go home to again as somebody who moved a lot and didn't have necessarily a childhood home to go back to. Those books are my childhood home.

SIMON: And you wanted to write stories like that?

DOOLEY: I did. I wanted to write stories for kids and about kids who didn't necessarily know the path that they were expected to take, and so we're forced to find their own path. Those are the kids who I think have the best adventures.

SIMON: Yeah. Sarah Dooley - her new novel "Ashes To Asheville." Thanks so much for being with us.

DOOLEY: Thank you so much for having me.