Episode 55
Estranged Sisters -How a Literary Thriller offers relatable characters & bitterly high stakes
Get ready for an exhilarating ride as we dive into a riveting discussion with the multi-genre author, Mary Carroll Moore. From her culinary adventures as a food journalist to her transition into literary thrillers, Mary's journey promises excitement and inspiration. Delve into her latest book, "A Woman's Guide to Search and Rescue," where estranged sisters, both aviators, twist and turn through gripping situations, all while exploring the enduring power of female bonds. But that's not all – discover an exclusive peek into her upcoming book, "Last Bets," set on a Caribbean island amidst high-stakes gambling and a looming tropical storm. Join us for a fascinating exploration of fierce heroines, unexpected plot twists, and the captivating art of storytelling.
A little about today's author -
Mary Carroll Moore is a bestselling and award-winning author of 14 books in 3 genres, chef and former cooking school instructor. Her latest novel, A Woman's Guide To Search & Rescue, is a cross-genre literary thriller that details a woman's escape for survival and how she flees to her estranged sister...who doesn't even know she exists. A story that highlights women as heroes, the power of sisterly bonds and what happens when family finds each other, Mary keeps the reader hooked!
Mary has her MFA and has taught writing throughout the world. Her incredible writing journey started after attending Le Cordon Bleu in Paris where she went on to write cookbooks for the California Culinary Academy and a culinary column for the LA Times for over a decade. Some of her expert topics include:
· A Woman's Guide To Search & Rescue - The WASP Pilot Who Inspired This Story (Mary's Mother)
· Incorporating Yourself Into Your Characters - How Writers Bring Their Experiences To Books
· From Award Winning Cookbook Writer To Writing Novels - Mary's Unique Journey.
Support your local bookstore & this podcast by getting your copy of A Woman's Guide to Search and Rescue at https://bookshop.org/a/90599/9798987531709
A little about today's host-
Shawna Rodrigues left her award-winning career in the public sector in 2019 to consult and publish her first novel Beyond the Pear Blossoms. Her desire to connect and help others led to the launch of her podcast The Grit Show shortly thereafter. When she learned women host only 27% of podcasts, her skills and passion led to the founding of the Authentic Connections Network. She now helps mission-driven entrepreneurs better connect with their audiences by providing full-service podcast production and through a community for Entrepreneurs & Podcasters – EPAC. Podcasting is her primary focus, so she continues to support the writing community through this podcast, and her writing time is mostly focused on anthologies.
She offers a free 7 Steps to Perfect Your Podcast Title to anyone interested in launching a podcast. You can also follow her on Instagram-@ShawnaPodcasts, and learn more about the network and community at https://linktr.ee/37by27.
Be sure to follow or subscribe to Author Express wherever you listen to podcasts and to follow us on Instagram @AuthorExpressPodcast
Learn more about our hosts, the guests we've had, and their books -
Transcript
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Shawna Rodrigues [:Welcome to Author Express. Thanks for joining us today. I'm Shawna Rodrigues, one of your hosts and the founder of Authentic Connections Podcast Network, which makes this podcast possible. This podcast is where you discover the voice behind the pages of your next favorite book, and I'm excited about the author we have for you today.
Shawna Rodrigues [:Mary Carroll Moore is a bestselling and award-winning author of 14 books in 3 genres, including the Pen/Faulkner-and Lambda Literary Awards nominated young adult novel, Qualities of Light, the prequel to A Woman's Guide to Search and Rescue. She received her MFA from Goddard College and has taught throughout the US and abroad at various writing schools and universities since 1998. Her writing craft book, Your Book Starts Here, won the New Hampshire Literary Awards “Reader's Choice” Award. Before moving to fiction, she worked as a chef, a cooking-school owner, a cookbook author, and a syndicated columnist for the Los Angeles Times. Over 200 of our essays, stories, and articles have appeared in magazines and literary journals. She lives in New Hampshire with her family, and we are excited that we get to chat with her today and learn more about her writing and her latest book. Welcome, Mary.
Mary Carroll Moore [:Thank you. I'm so glad to be here.
Shawna Rodrigues [:Yes. I'm excited for you to be here as well. So, the first question we always start with is tell us something interesting about where you are from.
Mary Carroll Moore [:Well, I grew up in Baltimore, which is known for its seafood and crabs especially. So, I grew up with a father that loved weird food like, you know, whole crabs put on the table and you have to eat all of it. So, I have no fear of food. That's probably why I became a food journalist. I can eat anything.
Shawna Rodrigues [:You're set. You can eat anything. Do they have soft shell crabs in Baltimore?
Mary Carroll Moore [:Yes.
Shawna Rodrigues [:Okay. Because I was thinking of Maryland. I had a trip with Baltimore too. Yep.
Mary Carroll Moore [:Yes.
Shawna Rodrigues [:Yes. That was always such a unique thing. I never heard of that before I was there.
Mary Carroll Moore [:Oh, they're so good. I was trying to plan my visits to my family just when soft shell crab season was in.
Shawna Rodrigues [:That's pretty limited. Right?
Mary Carroll Moore [:Yeah. It's just certain months in the summer.
Shawna Rodrigues [:That makes sense. You got to catch them at just the right point. That makes perfect sense. Well, good. Well, I'm excited to learn a little more about it. Can you tell us if you could live anywhere in the world, because you live right now in New Hampshire, but if you could live anywhere in the world, where would it be and why?
Mary Carroll Moore [:Paris, because I used to live there when I was in my 20s. I had an apartment that was actually owned by Paco Rabanne, who was the perfume manufacturer, and I loved France. And I lived there for a year and just adored it. You know, food again. Right?
Shawna Rodrigues [:Yes.
Mary Carroll Moore [:It’s all about food.
Shawna Rodrigues [:Yes. I know you have quite the gamut between, like, soft shell crabs all the way to, like, I think of pastries. When I think of French, I think of, like, the cassoulets and everything is beautiful, but I think of breads and the pastries and the other beautiful things they have there. And that makes sense because you also, didn't you, like, win a Julia Childs award for one of your cookbooks?
Mary Carroll Moore [:My 1st cookbook won an award, and I, you know, I just well, anything to do with food is my thing. I just love food. And all my books, all my novels have food in them, so
Shawna Rodrigues [:well, there's always room for food. I think that's one thing that we can work into anything. I love it. So, speaking of books, let's talk a little bit more about your latest book, which came out not that long ago in the spring. Is that right?
Mary Carroll Moore [:Well, actually, it came out in October.
Shawna Rodrigues [:October. The more recent.
Mary Carroll Moore [:So, it’s just out. Like, 2 months. Less than 2 months. Yes.
Shawna Rodrigues [:Oh, that's so exciting. So, A Woman's Guide to Search and Rescue. Can you, in a sentence, sum up for us what that book is about?
Mary Carroll Moore [:Yes. 2 estranged sisters, both female aviators and one of them is running from the law and the only place she can hide is with this estranged sister. So, she crashes her plane. She's on the run, and she has to hide with this woman who's never met her and never wants to meet her.
Shawna Rodrigues [:Oh, that is quite a premise. I love this. I love we go from talking about Paris and food to crashing planes and strange family members. That's so exciting. So, tell us more. Like, what do you hope readers are going to gain from reading this book?
Mary Carroll Moore [:Well, the comments I've gotten mostly is that it's a page turner and people read it in, like, 2 or 3 days. So that's a huge compliment for me. I tried to make the thriller part very exciting and very tense. It has search and rescue, ground operations. It has flying. It has a bad guy chasing this woman through the winter, trying to get to her, and the 2 estranged sisters meeting. But the more important part for me is the relationship between the sisters, how I wanted to write about how women are really heroes and they rescue each other. Women's relationships are so important in this world right now, and that's why these 2 women who finally find family together, they’re biologically related, but they're not really family until they have to rescue each other. So that was the whole premise of the book.
Shawna Rodrigues [:I love that, and it has a great title as well. So, explain to me. I love that you have a prequel that's actually a young adult. So how does that actually tie into things. Did you start with a prequel that led to the book, or how did that all happen?
Mary Carroll Moore [:Yes. I couldn't let go of the characters, so I wrote the prequel which is about Molly, the daughter of one of the pilots. And I was so fascinated with the mother, the pilot, and who she was. I couldn't get to her in that young adult book, so I had to write another book. And so, I wrote this other book to find out who she was, and then I realized in the story, I wanted to put in somebody that she couldn't control because she's really into controlling her life. So, she couldn't control this estranged sister who comes out of nowhere and needs shelter from a criminal.
Shawna Rodrigues [:Wow.
Mary Carroll Moore [:It was really terrible of me, you know. I was very mean writer and forcing these 2 women to reunite when they didn't want to.
Shawna Rodrigues [:Yes. I love it, though, but it sounds that you have very vivid characters that kind of have their own agenda and their own way of coming together and not wanting to come together.
Mary Carroll Moore [:Yes. They surprised me, actually. I do plan my books, but I write a lot from the, you know, seat of the pants. I'm a pantser, so I, like, do a lot of planning, and then I let it go. And then I see where the characters are going to take me because these guys took me some places I did not expect. Like, the plane crash in the beginning was not planned, and that came in a later draft because I needed some excitement. So, I thought, I'm just going to have her crash. You know?
Shawna Rodrigues [:That works. That'll bring some excitement. That is fun. I love that everything is so lively and that it can evolve as it's going to kind of go where it needs to be. And you write in multiple genres. So, has that just been you writing, like, what your characters and where you find interests kind of led to that, or tell me more about that?
Mary Carroll Moore [:I started out as a food journalist. I was a syndicated columnist for the LA Times syndicate, and I wrote, as you know, all these books, all these cookbooks. And then I decided I wanted to learn fiction, so I basically stopped my food career, which was very lucrative and steady and in 30 years of it and went back to school and got my MFA, and I started writing fiction because I thought, you know, if I die and I have never written any fiction, I would be very sorry. Because this is the thing that's always fascinated me. I love reading fiction. So big deal. It was a big deal.
Shawna Rodrigues [:Very big job. That's so exciting, and you've done some exciting things once you've made that transition into doing fiction. So, do you miss doing the food writing and being in the food world at all, or are you really happy with the shift you've made?
Mary Carroll Moore [:I love cooking. I still, you know, we have 15 for Thanksgiving, and I make incredible number of dishes and it's a groaning board for sure. We all groan afterwards, but I don't miss the, you know, I've been a professional chef, and I don't miss the routine of it. I like the spontaneity of cooking now and not necessarily having to create recipes and test them and, you know, that was easy to give up, that part. But I love to cook.
Shawna Rodrigues [:Yes. And I'm guessing the hours for a shop. That's one thing I always thought would be kind of hard is the hours that you work.
Mary Carroll Moore [:And you always smell like garlic, always. Everything you own.
Shawna Rodrigues [:That's too funny. The things that people don't expect, but this makes very good sense. You always smell like garlic. I love it. That's fabulous. So, with your career, like, where do you see yourself in 10 years of your writing career?
Mary Carroll Moore [:Well, I have another book coming out in the spring. This will be my 3rd novel that takes place on the Caribbean Island and it has to do with gambling, high risk gambling, and a woman artist who gets herself involved in a high-risk backgammon tournament, believe it or not, in the middle of a hurricane. So, again, I'm making really mean decisions for my characters. So, when that one's done, I've been getting request right now for a sequel to Women's Guide to Search and Rescue. People come up to me and say, I cannot let go of those characters. I want to know what happens to them, which of course is wonderful to hear, but that means I have to write another book.
Shawna Rodrigues [:So, chances are you'll be revisiting what you've already done, but it sounds like the high stakes, the action piece is really part of your writing as well as the relationship element, which is kind of an exciting combination.
Mary Carroll Moore [:Thank you. I'd say I'm a literary thriller writer, which is a weird cross genre thing that's not very common, but there is a growing group of literary thriller writers now. And I've always loved that kind of writing where the action's fast and it's hard to put down the book, and yet the characters are so well developed. It's almost like they have a poetic side and a lyrical side, and that's the thing that I love as a reader. So that's what I write.
Shawna Rodrigues [:Yeah. As a reader, I can read multiple genres if the characters are really well developed, and they are some, I'm drawn to them. Like, character driven writing is what I love. So that's definitely,
Mary Carroll Moore [:me, too.
Shawna Rodrigues [:Yeah. And the fast pace is an exciting thing to make fun of it. So, I'm excited for your book and for its recent release, and the success is going to be having with it.
Mary Carroll Moore [:Thank you.
Shawna Rodrigues [:What is the best place for folks to find you?
Mary Carroll Moore [:I'm on all of the online booksellers like Amazon and Bookshop.org and Barnes and Noble and Target and Walmart, blah blah blah blah. And they can also go to my website. I have all the information about my books on my website, marycarrollmoore.com, and it's 2 R's, 2 L's, and 2 O's.
Shawna Rodrigues [:So good that you have that so that you can just check it off. Just do the doubles. If you think it needs 2, it probably does. That makes it easier. And in the show notes, we'll have the link to that so folks will even know more for sure that they got the right letters and got it all lined up. That is perfect. So, for our final question, what book or story inspires you the most?
Mary Carroll Moore [:I love Peter Heller who is a literary thriller writer, and his book, The Dog Stars, which was his debut novel, is about in a postapocalyptic time where a pilot is in search of other people that are still alive and takes a huge risk and finds love and companionship. And so, I kind of, I got inspired by that book and the idea of some a pilot. They're, you know, they're loners in a way, finding love and companionship. And so, that was, he's one of my heroes as far as literary thriller writers.
Shawna Rodrigues [:That's so exciting. That's wonderful and great for us to know another name, and people find your book and are excited about that. And when is your book coming out this spring? Do you have a date yet?
Mary Carroll Moore [:April 21st, it's going to be out. It's called Last Bets, and it's about those 2 artists of different generations forced together on an island at a high stakes backgammon tournament and a tropical storm hurricane coming. So, it's a really fun read. I try to do fast, fun reads that have great characters.
Shawna Rodrigues [:No. That sounds great. So, Last Bets will come out in April. So, if we get connected to your website, we'll know more about those things.
Mary Carroll Moore [:Thank you.
Shawna Rodrigues [:Perfect. Thank you so much for being here. It's been great chatting with you.
Mary Carroll Moore [:You too. Thank you, Shawna.
Shawna Rodrigues [:Thanks for joining us. I hope you take a second to give us a review or a couple of stars on your favorite podcasting platform, and we'll be here again next Wednesday. Follow us on Instagram at Author Express Podcast to see who's coming up next. Don't forget. Keep it express, but keep it interesting.
