Dear Reader,

Today’s guest author, Fran Hawthorne says…

I’ve been writing novels since I was four years old, though I was sidetracked for a few decades by journalism. During that career, I wrote eight nonfiction books, mainly about consumer activism, the drug industry, and the financial world, and was also an editor or regular contributor for The ‘New York Times’, ‘Business Week’, and many other publications. But I never abandoned my true love: My first two novels, ‘The Heirs’ and ‘I Meant to Tell You’, were published in 2018 and 2022 and together won or were named a finalist for nine awards.

‘Her Daughter’, my third novel, is the story of a family where the father deliberately gaslights the daughter to alienate her from the mother, and it’s set partly in Santa Monica, where I lived for a year–walking along the cliffs, over the highway, and down the smelly staircase to the beach that my characters Alice and Esme love.

You can win one of five copies of ‘Her Daughter’ that Fran is giving away. Send an email to, franhawthornewriter@gmail.com and please include your shipping address in case your a winner.

Drop Fran and email and welcome her to the book club…

Finding My First Childhood Home

By the time I was 10 years old, I’d lived in seven different houses, in seven different cities, in three different states. Once I sort-of settled down as an adult, I began to wonder what those houses had actually looked like.

I easily managed to track down three of them. The one in Lowell MA looked the same but with a new paint job–beige instead of yellow. The one in Encino CA also looked the same on the outside, though dramatically renovated inside. But the one in Lexington MA? Our sweet, turquoise-shingled split-level had become a hideous McMansion. My husband and son guffawed, as I insisted that this wasn’t the house where I lived during third and fourth grades.

Finally, last fall, I found House Number 1, in Philadelphia.

I’d always known the name of the street, almost like a mantra. Then I learned that my sister had, amazingly, remembered the address. Moreover, a long-time friend lived barely a mile away. So I went for a visit.

We inched down the narrow street of identical red-brick row houses, number by number.

What did I recall about the house I moved into when I was one week old and left at age four? Sitting at a long table in the basement playroom, eating cake at my sister’s birthday party. Standing in the front yard and looking down the grassy slope to the street where the moving van waited. My mother often mentioned that it was on a corner.

The house where I stood now had the correct address and was indeed on a corner, but its front yard was too small, the slope too short. The street didn’t seem wide enough for a moving van. Still, to a four-year-old about to go an incomprehensible 3000 miles across the U.S., I suppose those spans were huge.

I walked down the alley running alongside. I stared up at the second floor. One of the black-shuttered windows would have been my bedroom window.

No, I wasn’t suddenly flooded with memories. But at that moment, imagining myself at one of those windows, standing at the first place I’d ever lived in, I couldn’t breathe.

Now I have only four more homes to find (if I add the apartment in Santa Monica CA, where we moved during twelfth grade and which provided an important setting for my new novel, HER DAUGHTER).

Santa Monica, Woodland Hills, and Playa del Rey, CA, and Media, PA: Here I come!

— Fran Hawthorne

Enter to win one of five copies of ‘Her Daughter.’ Send an email to, franhawthornewriter@gmail.com and please include your shipping address in case your a winner.

Thanks for reading with me. It’s so good to read with friends.

Suzanne Beecher
Suzanne@DearReader.com