Novel From Holliston Resident and Braintree Library Director Lands on Publisher's Desk

The main character in Elizabeth Wolfe's Memories of Glory: A Novel is headstrong, imaginative and constantly waiting for something more out of life in her southeastern Massachusetts town.

Her coat unbuttoned, flapping in the wind, the reader first encounters Glory as she maneuvers her miniskirt to climb into a passing truck. The driver, offering her a ride to school and a bit of creepiness, isn't prepared for the teenage girl's backbone. "You sure have spunk. You're a magnet for trouble," he says after she bolts out of one of her trademark daydreams and tells him "Zeuss may strike you dead" when he at first refuses to stop the truck.

Wolfe, a Holliston resident and the director of in Braintree, said in a recent interview about her book and its top-five placement in a HarperCollins's competition, that Memories of Glory took decades of contemplation, about her own upbringing and the tumultuous late 1960s. But the book took only a brief span of months to write once it all came rushing out.

"Every book has to have some aspect of an author's life," Wolfe said. "You have to bring your own knowledge, experiences and judgement to it," even though the narrative events themselves are fiction.

Publisher HarperCollins has its imprint on works from Agatha Christie, C.S. Lewis, J.R.R. Tolkien and even Sarah Palin. A couple years ago, it created an online writing community – www.authonomy.com – to "flush out the brightest, freshest new literature around."

Last spring, Wolfe said she worked with a HarperCollins publicist in her capacity as library director for an event at featuring author Dennis Lehane (Gone Baby Gone, Mystic River). She then learned about the website and its monthly competition, discovering an outlet for Glory and her memories.

Each month, based on fellow writers and readers who comment on and rate manuscripts posted to the site, HarperCollins selects the top five books and gives them to its editorial board for review. Wolfe hit No. 3 in January, having received hundreds of comments and recommendations. A review could land in her email inbox anytime now.

"I think it's a pretty smart move on HarperCollins' part because all they have to do is provide a website that works," Wolfe said. "I'm biding my time and waiting like Glory with no control. Maybe I'll be crushed, maybe I'll be delighted."

In 2007, two decades after a title began floating around her mind (Conversations with Joyce – Glory's mother's name), Wolfe sat down in front of her computer and typed the first line. From there the words came steadily. "I kept typing and typing and typing," she said, with emotions from her childhood "pouring out."

After work and on the weekends, during the next 22 weeks, Wolfe crafted 22 chapters, slowly and deliberately traveling through the mind and life of Glory as the world of Vietnam and the moon landing zoomed around her.

"It was an amazing process, tremendously cathartic," said Wolfe, who grew up in Bridgewater and earned degrees from Harvard University and Simmons College. "I wanted to make it complicated, like people are."

Though the pace of the narrative builds slowly, the perspective switches quickly between the action, narrated by an older Glory, and her younger self's inner life.

"And where was good King Richard when you needed him?" she ponders during the truck ride in the first chapter. "Off to fight the silly crusades. That's a man for you. You can't count on good winning out."

A young girl's point of view also lends Wolfe's writing dashes of humor. "The high school principal phoned Ma just last week," Glory thinks. "He said I called in sick seven Mondays in a row. The man is an idiot – it took him seven weeks to figure out the pattern."

Wolfe said she has worked hard the past several months building her following on the HarperCollins website, and creating a Facebook fan page and Twitter account. If her review doesn't lend itself to publication by the company, she might put her book on Amazon, where authors can sell eBooks at prices they set themselves.

One story in her novel that rings particularly true, with a few alterations, involves a trip to the dump in Glory's dad's big old black Buick. "My father always bought the crummiest old Buicks," Wolfe said, and one time the car did catch fire, though less intensely than in a chapter called "The Dump."

When the Buick is consumed by flames, Glory's sister Penny saves their younger brother from the back seat, leading to her father experiencing a stroke, having been struck by fear "that could kill a man:"

"... in real life, no amount of saving or rescuing, no amount of wishing for a fairy tale ending could make it so," the older narrator thinks. "And though Glory wouldn't completely stop loving the autumn wind, she never laughed in its presence again."