Jenna Bush Hager says her March Read With Jenna pick is a book as “beautiful as where it is set.”
“Wait for Me” by Amy Jo Burns unfolds partly in Appalachia, where the author grew up. Burns is from Western Pennsylvania.
“The book spans the lives of two women. We meet Elle Harlow who disappears in the ‘70s right upon her big break as a folk singer and Marijohn, who, years later, is searching for her own type of future,” Jenna says. “As these two women’s lives connect, we explore secrets long passed. “
Jenna calls it “an emotional mystery about what connects us.”
In an interview with TODAY.com, Burns said the book was inspired by a friendship she had with a woman and mentor 39 years her senior.
“I wanted to write a book about the best woman that I’ve ever met. Her name was Louise,” Burns says.
“She started out as my writing teacher, but she really quickly became my friend, and she was the first person to believe in me as a writer,” she continues.
Burns went on to write the novels “Shiner,” “Mercury” and “Cinderland,” plus, of course, “Wait For Me.”
She describes Louise as someone who “had everyone’s attention” when she walked into a room. “When someone like that has faith in you, it’s contagious,” she says.
The reason “Wait for Me” took her a while to finish, Burns says, is because she thought she had to write about how was sad that Louise was gone.
“It took writing this book a million wrong ways for me to realize that what I needed, and hopefully what a reader needs out of it, is more how I felt when I was with her right and how unstoppable she made me,” she says.
“She brought out the best version of myself. I just wanted to celebrate what it’s like to welcome like a meteoric woman like that into your life, and how it shapes everything,” she says.
Burns learned she was a Read With Jenna pick while at the school bus stop with her kids, the time of day that’s “most hectic for a mom.”
“It felt really perfect to me, because I used to think that the only way you could become a writer was that you would go off into the woods for months at a time, until you had an epiphany, and then you wrote this book and came back,” she says.
“My life has never been that way. My life has always been writing in the context of building a life and building a family. So the fact that my kids were there, even though I couldn’t tell them, it just it felt very earned and perfect.”
While reading, she hopes readers ask themselves, “What thing in life would I really go for if I wasn’t afraid? I think all the characters are really wrestling with that. I also hope a reader would ask themselves about the obstacles in life they’ve overcome that they never gave themselves credit for.”