Patricia O'Donnell

Four characters' lives intertwine in this novel, spanning the 1950's through the present.

In the opening scene of Waiting to Begin Patricia O'Donnell speaks to incoming students at a university, telling of her transformation from a rebellious young woman to the writer and professor standing before them. Pat feels the story is not wholly true however, that some of the professor was in the younger woman, and that there is "something of that young woman--lawless, braless, rude and exuberant--in me now." Here's the real story, she writes. I knew the exuberant young woman, as a student in the same MFA writing program Pat attended. She arrived in Amherst, Massachusetts in the middle of a snowy winter, in a beat-up Chrysler with two young kids. I found this inspiring. Pat tells of her parents, who followed her from Iowa, that leaving their promising daughter, a single mother in a motel room, was "not what they had expected." Pat struggled at first but placed a story in the New Yorker, found love with a fellow student, and went on to establish a creative writing program. Waiting to Begin is a love story in other ways, as Pat revisits her devastated hometown in Iowa, concurrently telling of a heart-wrenching event unfolding in her daughter's life. Pat O'Donnell is a courageous writer just as she was a courageous young woman, writing openly with remarkable sympathy. She remains an inspiration. --Douglas Whynott, author of The Season of Sugar

When Anna Donoghue agrees to spring her aged father from his nursing home and drive him halfway across the country to the Iowa town she grew up in and has no wish to see again, she believes that he is the only traveler in their car with something to find there. But the old man, helpless with Parkinson's, is impelled by unspoken business that will rock her ordered world. And so will the revelations coming from Anna's only child, heretofore-perfect 19-year-old Chloe--revelations gleaned from fragmented phone calls with Anna's husband David, who is searching for Chloe in Boston's backstreets. When Anna and her father reach Iowa, their road trip takes several directions at once, all leading straight to the heart of self and family. This story of three generations calls forth the strands that connect us one to another. Necessary Places asks what takes us away from those we love, what return is possible, and how to find the forgiveness that can carry us home.