We’re continuing our table talker series this week. We hope you’re enjoying these questions and being inspired to ask some questions around your tables!
Today we’re talking about guest books, which is something I’ve spent the summer doing as I’ve traveled around and met readers at book events. My new novel, The Guest Book, seems to evoke nostalgia in the hearts of all of us who have ever paged through a guest book– and added our own thoughts. Part voyeurism, part discussion among strangers who share an experience, encountering a guest book makes us want to reach for it and discover what’s inside.
I’ve written in a few guest books in my time– at inns or homes I’ve stayed in. I’ve also read my share of entries but have found them to be mostly newsy, chatty. The kinds of conversations you have with new acquaintances, not the kinds of things you’d share with a good friend. Wouldn’t it be so much more interesting if people shared the juicy stuff? I think that’s what makes us reach for a guest book– the hope that just this once we will read something that changes the game. Isn’t that why any of us read? To be changed?
A few weeks ago I was signing books at an event when an older woman leaned down and told me that she shared my love for Sunset Beach, NC, the real place where my novel is set. With her voice low she went on to tell me that she had a life-changing experience on that beach as she walked along and grieved her husband after his death, wondering how she could go on. She shared how she had looked out at the horizon where the sun seemed to meet the ocean and knew that this life was not the end and that her husband was out there waiting for her to meet him on the other side. “In that moment I knew I would see him again,” she told me with a smile, the lines around her mouth like ripples in a pond, expanding as her smile widened. “I knew I was going to be okay, then.”
Those are the kinds of stories I’d like to read in a guest book– the ones that touch our hearts and inspire our imaginations. Maybe one day I will find that entry I’m looking for, the one that changes the game. Maybe you’ll be the one who writes it.
Marybeth Whalen is the author of The Guest Book, a novel that is part love story, part mystery, part fun beach read. She is also a wife and mom of six and runs the site She Reads. You can find her at www.marybethwhalen.com.