Amanda McTigue
Amanda McTigue
- Article by Waights Taylor
February 2012
“I don’t see language, I hear it.” That’s how Amanda McTigue describes the way writing comes to her. This multi-talented North Carolina native, who comes to us via Yale University, is an author, poet, playwright, one-time actress, theatrical producer, lyricist and librettist. The published author of a number of children’s books, she has written several operas in collaboration with Jeff Langley, Director of the School of Performing Arts at Sonoma State University. The two are now composing an original consecration ceremony for the opening of Sonoma County’s elegant new concert hall at the Green Music Center in September 2012.
Somehow, within the demands of all these various artistic pursuits, she has found time to write her first novel to be released in May 2012 by Harper Davis Publishers. Going to Solace is set in her native North Carolina in 1989 and tells a multi-faceted, multi-character story (how could it be anything but multi-this and multi-that from this talented person).
“God spare you the need, but should one of your loved ones take sick—mortal sick—and need a place from which to die, you could do worse than Solace.” With that poetic and descriptive sentence in the language of the North Carolina hill people, McTigue takes the reader on a six-day period up to and including Thanksgiving Day, as three families struggle with loved ones facing life-ending illnesses. August Early, a retired trucker who has never set foot in a hospital, has to see to his wife’s placement in a hospice facility called Solace, while he worries about the care of his twin granddaughters orphaned when his only daughter died of a drug overdose. Maggie Dulé, now living in California, breaks a vow never to return to her North Carolina home when her mother, a woman she has hated for years, becomes deathly ill. Cadence Greevey, a sweet fourteen-year-old girl who unfortunately operates with the mind of a much younger child, passes unnoticed by all around her, as she tries to understand and cope with her mother’s placement at Solace leaving her at home alone. Cadence’s estranged father, Bobby O. Greevey, is trying to get home to help his daughter when…Enough, you just gotta read the book to watch, feel, laugh, cry, and empathize with all these fabulous characters as you get to know them and the others trying to help them cope with life’s great ending moment.
McTigue describes her book as a set of crossroads: the crossing from life to death; the intersections of people’s lives; and the crossing of cultures and races as the world has become more global. If you think this book is about race (read black and white) and stereotypical Southerners, you are in for a big surprise. You will also love the sparse, but precise use, of the North Carolina hill country dialect—it’s delightful and literate.
While some may see this book as a “woman’s novel,” McTigue will turn your head when she says, “No, I think it could just as easily be called a ‘war novel’ or ‘science-fiction novel.’” Think about that for a while.
Member in the Spotlight Editor: Osha Belle Hayden
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