Mockingbird Summer

by Lynda Rutledge

Each friend represents a world in us, a world possibly not born until they arrive, and it is only by this meeting that a new world is born. —Anaïs Nin

May you live in interesting times. —Ancient Curse

And the world you grow up in always feels like the way it has always been and will always be. Until it isn’t.

“A book, like music, is very personal. You bring yourself, your own story, to everything you read. It’s a book’s boon and bane. But it’s also its raison d’être—its reason for being—to meet you where you are. Exactly like a great piece of music.”

There is a young moment when the world can suddenly reveal that it doesn’t revolve around you.

Everybody’s got their own story, she realized as she locked eyes with the driver of a passing car . . . and they’re swirling around me every moment of every day. All she had to do was be open to seeing them.

Because while a journalist’s job is to tell what is true, a novelist’s job is to tell what is truth, to create a world in which you’d want to live, in which everything is just, even if only in the end.