Journey to Self-Discovery

I’m so delighted to be with the Pearl Girls today. Thank you. And I’m thrilled to get to share a little of Dear Mr. Knightley and the story behind it. Dear Mr. Knightley is my first novel and it’s the main character’s, Samantha Moore, tale of self-discovery — a journey I think we all go on more than once in our lives.

In Sam’s case, she survived a tough childhood by hiding behind literary characters, adopting their personas when scared, in danger or when she needed understanding friends. But as the story opens, this device begins to hurt her (as all hiding eventually does) and others. She must lay it down to find her own voice, her own life and her own story. And we get invited into her journey by reading her letters to Mr. Knightley.

For me, this story started on my own journey of self-discovery. I was injured in 2009 and many of the ways I defined myself were removed for a time – tennis, running, tae kwon do, cleaning the house, driving carpool, volunteering, even standing in the kitchen cooking . . . I was housebound for several months recovering, praying, reading and, eventually, writing. A novel — and the extraordinary opportunity to write more — came from this time, but most importantly I learned to better trust God with my life, the good and the hard stuff.

For the reading, I first turned to all the Austen novels — my “home base” when reading — and then I read Webster, Dumas, Dickens, the Brontes . . . And the idea for Dear Mr. Knightley started to roll from there. I saw a character pushed by her past and started to play with how that would and could define her future. Sam and all the wonderful people, literary and real, surrounding her started to form.

And as she became real, so did her journey — seeking truth, life, love, and God. I found the best way to express this very internal and emotional journey was through letters. Letters allows the reader to feel like the story presents a first person view, but it does not. There’s a delicious layer we see that Sam can’t — there is what she is willing to tell Mr. Knightley, what she tries to withhold and how she interprets events — any or all of which can look different to us than to her. I loved the format and what I could reveal within it. Because oftentimes we ourselves can’t see the journey we’re on until it’s behind us.

The letters also allowed me to incorporate my love for Jane Austen in an organic way — as we can see Sam hide, even when she does not, and we watch her discover and recognize the pain it and she causes. And Austen was a fun and meaningful addition because our favorite movies and books play such an important role in our lives. We can relate to Sam’s desire to almost live within them.

But we can’t live within fiction and that’s part of the point too. I purposely made Sam’s life bigger, tougher, and more challenging than many of us face so that we could more easily and safely sneak into her emotional world and realize her struggles are universal. I think we all strive to define ourselves, face insecurity and fear, seek a place to stand and belong, and search for a family to love. I hope readers resonate with this journey, feel emotional camaraderie with Sam and understand that an ultimate loving Father exists. And I hope they find themselves wrapped up in an amazing story.

So there it is. That’s Dear Mr. Knightley and a bit about me. Again, thank you so much for inviting me here and I sincerely hope you’ll check out the book and let me know what you think.

What started as a journey to self-discovery, ended up a novel. @MargaretMcSweeney @Katherine_Reay
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Katherine Reay has enjoyed a life-long affair with the works of Jane Austen and her contemporaries. She diverted a bit in college and studied history and sociology at Northwestern University and then earned a Master’s degree in marketing from Northwestern as well.

After living all across the country and a few stops in Europe, Katherine and her family live in Seattle, WA, where she runs, writes, cooks and tries to clean the house. You can also find Katherine on her website, Twitter  on Twitter, and lurking somewhere within the pages of her first novel, Dear Mr. Knightley.

New from Katherine Reay:

Samantha Moore has always hidden behind the words of others—namely her favorite characters in literature. Now, she will learn to write her own story—by giving that story to a complete stranger.

Growing up orphaned and alone, Sam found her best friends in the works of Austen, Dickens, and the Brontë sisters. The problem is that she now relates to others more comfortably as Elizabeth Bennet and Jane Eyre than as herself.

Sometimes we lose ourselves in the things we care about most.

But life for this twenty-three-year-old is about to get stranger than fiction, when an anonymous benefactor (calling himself “Mr. Knightley”) offers to put Sam through the prestigious Medill School of Journalism. There is only one catch: Sam must write frequent letters to the mysterious donor, detailing her progress.

As Sam’s program and peers force her to confront her past, she finds safety in her increasingly personal letters to Mr. Knightley. And when Sam meets eligible, best-selling novelist Alex Powell, those letters unfold a story of love and literature that feels as if it’s pulled from her favorite books. But when secrets come to light, Sam is — once again — made painfully aware of how easily trust can be broken.

Reay’s debut novel follows one young woman’s journey as she sheds her protective persona and embraces the person she was meant to become.

Purchase your copy here.

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