-A guest post by Things I Never Told You author Beth K. Vogt-
My books are often sparked by a question that captures both my heart and my mind. For Things I Never Told You, that question was Is family worth fighting for?
And oh, what a family you meet when you’re introduced to the Thatcher sisters: Johanna, Jillian, and Payton and Pepper, the identical twins.
As I wrote the manuscript, I discovered more and more intriguing aspects about these fictional women as I neglected my real life in the process. It’s what writers on deadlines do.
Laundry and grocery shopping and cooking dinner? Sorry. Someone else has to deal with the normal aspects of life.
Guess what? I missed the Thatcher sisters when I wrote “the end” to the manuscript and sent it off to my editors. And I hope my readers connect to my heroines and my subplot characters, too, because they are true-to-life. I imagine people wondering, “Would I do what Payton did? What Jillian did?” as they read the book.
I might have crafted imaginary characters, but I wove a lot of real life into my novel. Things like
- dealing with complicated sister relationships
- facing a diagnosis of breast cancer
- being a “twinless-twin”—when one twin survives the death of their twin
- coping with delayed grief
- battling anxiety attacks
- questioning faith
The Thatcher sisters are anything but a perfect family. They’re not the kind of sisters who text each other every day to check in on each other or who meet on a regular basis to go shopping and have lunch. They have a history together, yes, but it’s interwoven with misunderstandings and secrets and silence.
One especially intriguing aspect of the Thatcher sisters is their faith journey. I purposefully chose to have my heroines not believe in God. Of course, there is a spiritual thread in my book because I’m a woman of faith and there will always be that element in any book I write. But I experience both in the world I live in: belief and unbelief. Faith and doubt. And I wanted to incorporate that in Things I Never Told You. It was interesting to write about women who were struggling . . . who were hurting . . . and didn’t have a strong faith in God to lean into.
Readers have families. Sisters. Or sisters-of-the-heart. Or daughters. Every reader at some point in their life wrestles with the question Is family worth fighting for? Within the pages of Things I Never Told You, readers can process what’s happening to the Thatcher family. I also hope that this fictional story helps them work through some of the things happening in their own lives.
Things I Never Told You by Beth K. Vogt
“With tenderness and skill, Beth Vogt examines the price of secrets, the weight of tragic loss, and the soul-deep poison of things left unsaid.” —Lisa Wingate, NYT bestselling author of Before We Were Yours
It’s been ten years since Payton Thatcher’s twin sister died in an accident, leaving the entire family to cope in whatever ways they could. No longer half of a pair, Payton reinvents herself as a partner in a successful party-planning business and is doing just fine—as long as she manages to hold her memories and her family at arm’s length.
But with her middle sister Jillian’s engagement, Payton’s party-planning skills are called into action. Which means working alongside her opinionated oldest sister, Johanna, who always seems ready for a fight. They can only hope that a wedding might be just the occasion to heal the resentment and jealousy that divides them . . . until a frightening diagnosis threatens Jillian’s plans and her future. As old wounds are reopened and the family faces the possibility of another tragedy, the Thatchers must decide if they will pull together or be driven further apart.
