How often do you read a book and you wish you were the
heroine? AND want to sleep with her boyfriend, AND wish your rich best friend
would tell you about a kick-ass estate sale that
no one knows about?
Then you haven’t read Savannah Blues, by Mary Kay Andrews,
yet! But now’s your chance … FOR FREE!
Both Mary Kay Andrews and I are hosting a double-whammy joint
giveaway starting today! Leave a comment either on her blog and/or mine for TWO chances to win signed copies of her books! You have until midnight Saturday EST.
I read Savannah Blues, and loved it so much that I
fast-forwarded to Blue Christmas to get myself in the holiday mood!
I have NO IDEA how these books hadn’t come up on my radar
yet, but when the esteemed Mary Kay herself suggested I’d enjoy them, my
interest was piqued.
In Savannah Blues (2002), Weezie is an antiques picker, with
big dreams of opening her own antique shop; she just needs that one big score
to make her dreams come true. Throw in a snooty ex-husband, his
snootier/sluttier new wife, dreamy chef boyfriend, rich BFF, and crazy family,
PLUS A DEAD BODY, and you’ve got the makings of an awesome estate-sale hopping mystery/romance/rollicking
Southern novel.
EVERY SINGLE WOMAN I’ve told that I’ve spoken with Mary Kay
Andrews (from my grrrls pool team to newspaper co-workers to neighborhood
dog-walking buddies) has squealed in delight: “I LOVE HER!” A few of you (junkers)
have also been astounded, not knowing that she is a junker/dealer in real life.
It’s no secret that Mary Kay Andrews is in reality Kathy
Hogan Trocheck, former Atlanta Journal Constitution reporter (who covered the
“Midnight in the Garden of Good and Evil” murder trial in Savannah!), and
award-winning and New York Times bestselling author of many novels, including the Callahan Garrity
mystery/detective series.
She is also an unapologetic junker, and even has her own
booth in an antique mall!
Kathy and I started emailing each other a few months ago,
and when I asked if she’d ever been interviewed by a junker, she graciously
agreed to an “exclusive” junker interview (below)!
She also writes a blog that is hysterical. If you don’t want to read about screeching to the side of
the road to pick up a curbside oriental rug (post #1), her love of Jeff Lewis
on Flipping Out, or the sleepovers she’s hosted for reading groups, much less
her love of Broadway musicals…. Well, if you don’t, I pretty much don’t want to
know you.
Before I gush too much, here’s my version of an interview.
We were on the phone for nearly 90 minutes, and in my excitement, I often
forgot to type and instead started gabbing myself. You’ll get the drift….
VRS: When did you get involved in junking?
MKA: My mom was a junker. A junker’s home is the home of the
newly-wed and nearly dead—an elephant’s graveyard. We were a working-class
Irish family with 5 kids. I had asthma and was out of school a lot, so I went
junking with her. And she always loved old stuff. She sold real estate, and was
always getting things out of the houses she sold, so it was a natural evolution
for me.
When my husband and I got married, we moved to Savannah
[from Florida], and we literally only had a mattress, boxspring, dresser,
kitchen table, 2 chairs, 2 armchairs, and all of it had come out of houses mom
had sold. I worked 2-11 on the morning shift, so on Saturday mornings I’d get
up and go to estate sales in the ’70s. I had no money.
I actually really started junking in Ohio. I went to a
writers’ workshop at Antioch College, as a student, to see Sue Grafton, as I
was trying to write a mystery. I went and she was great and very helpful. When
I got back, I sold my first manuscript!
VRS: It’s no secret that I prefer estate sales, but how
about you? Do you prefer them, or yard sales, or thrift stores? And why?
MKA: Estate sales hands down! You’re buying wholesale, and
other dealers haven’t found the goods yet and marked it up. I like the hunt,
but I don’t enjoy slogging through the rat droppings and mildew in some of
those homes. But I will!
Hissy Fit has junking in it, too, because the protagonist is
an interior designer. It was a shock to me that readers like junking as much as
I do. My editor calls it decorator porn.
You always think about the one that got away. One estate
sale I went to had tons of books. I’d gone through them, seen a copy of Gone with the Wind,
and folded inside was program from the premiere of the movie, signed by
Margaret Mitchell. It was $1. I thought: Maybe I should get it, but I didn’t.
Later I went to “my guy” [a trusted dealer, just like Mr. Greenaway in Savannah
Blues] and asked him if I should’ve bought it. He said an autographed copy of ANYTHING
of hers was valuable, that Margaret Mitchell didn’t like to autograph—that’s
got to be a first edition. I went back, and the dreaded “Book Lady” got it.
My dream is when I pull up and the hearse is backing up!
VRS: I feel like I know your characters, they SHOULD be my
friends, we could go junking together, and have a great time. They are so real
to me. I saw on one review of Blue Christmas that someone had written a comment
saying, “What Weezie needs to do is glue-gun that holiday arrangement blah
blah blah….” Do you get a lot of that?
MKA: People do get into the books, they forget that there’s
a line. It’s fiction; I make it all up. I get emails from people …. One guy was
really mad; he’d read Savannah Blues, and said he really enjoyed it, but then
said, “If you want to know why Daniel walks away from Weezie, it’s because she
keeps pushing and pushing.” I want to say it's FICTION. I make it up.
People assume that the things characters do or say or
believe are things that the author does and that’s not necessarily so. I’m not
any of these characters. I live vicariously through them. I’m 54, married to
the same man!
VRS: That being said, have you ever snuck into an estate
sale like Weezie did? Because I have…
MKA: Uh, no.
VRS: An older woman who lived on the street behind me had
died and the estate sale was the next day. I knew she had great patio furniture
that I wanted, so the night before, I hopped the fence, put sold tags on it,
and then waltzed in the next morning!
MKA: OK, I actually did, come to think of it. The house had
been sold and the owners had put all the stuff from the basement, attic, and
garage at the curb for trash pickup. My friend and I both had a sleep disorder,
so we would walk at 2 am, and she said, “They’re gonna move into that house,
you know they’ve cleaned it out, it’s all just sitting there..." so we did!
VRS: Good for you!
MKA: Sometimes, I’d be at an estate sale, and I’d see the
tape on the door: “do not enter.” I never purposely did, but there was a part of
me that said, what if I just opened the door and looked? And that’s why I
decided Weezie would go in the window. If she was a bad person, she would’ve
taken things, but she just wanted an unauthorized preview.
I try to have her observe junk etiquette, because it’s
important. You and I both know that we’ve seen people letting others cut in
line, thinking what’s it to you? Well, we’ve been waiting, they’re only letting
in 10-12 people in at a time, and that means we might not get in there. Weezie
doesn’t jump lines or change prices or anything like that. When she sees
something that’s very cheap, she has a twinge, some Catholic guilt. She’s a
good person.
VRS: I know you have a booth at Seaside Sisters on Tybee Island. What’s your booth like?
MKA: It’s an 8 x 5 booth—teeny. The idea was I’d do it with
2 other friends, but it’s mostly me now. I’m bad with numbers, maybe dyslexic.
I thought it was a big space and I had all these plans, but there’s space for
nothing. I buy what I like, and put it down there. I bought some of those felt
Christmas stockings with sequins and felt appliques (40s-50s?), some McCoy. I
have a thing for children’s things, and there’s a turquoise Bates bedspread. I
had a pair—I thought it made it clear that they were sold as a pair—of
chalkware Chinese figurine lamps. Now there’s just one.
I buy what I like, and what people would like to put in a
beach house. There’s a wool U.S. Naval Medical Corps blanket I got in
Brimfield. There’s a bunch of books that I blogged about—it was a little
den-like room with bookshelves with 60 years worth of books. She’d been a teacher, and
had boxes of phonics, flashcards, etc. I got a lot of that. And one whole wall
was a Vegas-style bar, 100s of decanters and shotglasses. She really liked to
rock! The upstairs was packed with vintage—tons of sequined cocktail dresses,
it was amazing.
VRS: What are you looking for now?
MKA: Since I’m furnishing the Tybee beach house, what I
really want is a 1920s one-piece bathing suit. I love Floridiana, the older the
better. I have vintage postcards of St. Petersburg, which I blew up and framed.
My big thing is tin litho watercans and beach pails—Florida kitsch. I have a
tin screen-door push, like the old ones…. When we lived in Raleigh, I was
pissed off that we had to move there [her husband’s job took them to NC from
Florida], so I decorated the whole house in 50s Florida kitsch. A tin Nehi door
push, barkcloth drapes from an auction, the blown-up framed St. Pete postcards,
side tables of stacked luggage, and a 40s, maybe early 50s, ballerina lamp.
Her body is coral, and it’s got a raw silk nubby chenille trim lampshade. I’ve
had her for years.
VRS: How’s the Tybee house [aka the Fixer Upper, also the
title of her next book] coming along?
The house is virtually furnished, down to washcloths and
swanky swig glasses, so now we’re just fixing it up and painting. All my stuff
is down in the basement. And 2 storage sheds.
VRS: Where are your favorite places to shop?
MKA: Of course Brimfield, and Paris, and Ohio. And Florida. I love St. Pete. The old people from up north, they bring all their boxes
and ephemera, they never unpack them and their stuff doesn’t fit in their new
life. They die, and then none of the family can be bothered with it, so it all ends up
in an estate sale or auction, or thrift stores. I also love Ohio. They didn’t
throw things away! In the south things get mildewed; in Ohio, things are packed
in amber or something.
VRS: How’s the blogging going? [MKA is also on Myspace]
The books have done really well, now blogging is my one-man
band way of trying to do some viral marketing.
I love blogging because it’s writing and it’s immediate. I’m
a frustrated columnist; it’s immediate gratification and writing about what’s
on my mind. And maybe I can drive some new readers to my books.
Blogging’s frustrating though: I’ll do a post and I’ll see
that others have lots of comments, but I may not. Is anybody out there? And if
you are, let me know!
When I write a book, I finish it in September. It won’t be
in stores until June, and by the time I know whether or not people like it,
I’ll be trying to finish the next book. So that’s why blogging is so incredibly
satisfying. I can write about whatever I want: bad chick movies, my current
rant, whatever.
One time after the election, I posted a photo of a guy
leaping with joy, yet I know people don’t want to hear what I think about
politics. My job is to take people away… but I couldn’t contain how happy I
was. That generated the most comments that I’d received in quite a while. It’s
fun for me—when I was a reporter, I got to do guest columns occasionally and I
always loved it. It’s a really fun outlet for me.
VRS: Does it come naturally? Is it easy?
MKA: I think it does comes naturally, maybe not easily, but
I do try to give myself some standards. I write in the vernacular. I don’t do a
lot of OMG or LOL, because that’s not the kind of writing style that I was
trained to do. But obviously, I’m writing first person, like I’m talking to a
person. I try to be honest, but obviously some things you’ll leave out.
Sometimes I do add personal stuff, like when I went to see South Pacific and
kept thinking I wish my mother were with me. And I kept thinking of my dad’s
“Sam and Janet Evening” knock-knock joke.
I make a living selling my books and I don’t write to try to
impress. I try to entertain. I’m not on a soapbox. That’s the fun of blogging;
I can do what I want. It’s when I started writing bad words, and in the first
person, and possibly trying to offend.
(More random quotes on junking):
I don’t think you can fake its passion or enthusiasm. I have
friends that go junking with me, but they don’t love it like mother’s milk,
they don’t gotta have it like I do.
It’s fun, rewarding, and creative. My husband gives me crap,
but he’s sitting on a chair that I found at an antique mall in St. Louis, with
his feet on a pumpkin-pine carpenters trunk—my first antique that I bought with
money I made from selling my first magazine article.
I’m a decorator in denial. I don’t do golf, poker, or
tennis. I junk. I bring it home and fluff.
*****
If you’re a junker, I KNOW you’ll enjoy these books! HURRY UP and enter one or both of our contests to win signed copies of the trilogy, which she has so generously donated.
And if you have a 1920s one-piece bathing suit, send it her
way!!!
XOX
Mary Kay Andrews’ books:
Savannah Blues (2002)*
Little Bitty Lies (2003)
Hissy Fit (2004)
Savannah Breeze (2006)*
Blue Christmas (2006)*
Deep Dish (2008)
The Fixer Upper (2009)
* with Weezie Foley, the antique picker
Kathy Hogan Trocheck’s books:
Every Crooked Nanny (1992/Callahan Garrity)
To Live and Die in Dixie (1993/Callahan Garrity)
Homemade Sin (1994/Callahan Garrity)
Happy Never After (1995/Callahan Garrity)
Heart Trouble (1996/Callahan Garrity)
Lickety Splity (1996//Truman Kicklighter)
Strange Brew (1997/Callahan Garrity)
Crash Course (1997/Truman Kicklighter)
Midnight Clear (1998/Callahan Garrity)
Irish Eyes (2000/Callahan Garrity)
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