How are you? Would you like to come up? Spend quiet time away and we could look after you?.

I know the Louise Penny who wrote me after my husband died. (Did you catch those references in Still Life?) I know the friend who always found time to squeeze in a short visit when she was in town, and I found how she listened with her heart. I know the Louise Penny who loves gummi bears. That teen was at every subsequent appearance I attended at The Poisoned Pen. Louise started by asking her age, and when she was told thirteen, she asked if she’d read Rick Riordan’s mythological series, Percy Jackson and the Olympians. There was one teen in the audience, dragged there by her mother. I saw a woman who reached out to every member of the small audience. I first read Still Life in 2006, and met Louise in 2008 at The Poisoned Pen Bookstore in Scottsdale, Arizona. I only know that Louise Penny, the warm, kind woman who reaches out to others. (Doesn’t an author put herself into many characters?) Clara is a kind woman, who really wants to belong. I see her much more as Clara Morrow, and, she has said that as well. She herself is an example of the duality she writes about. I know that the real blessing here isn’t that I have a book published, but that I have so many people to thank.” I never knew that lonely Louise.

“I went through a period in my life when I had no friends, when the phone never rang, when I thought I would die from loneliness. However, here’s the final paragraph in the Acknowledgements in Still Life. I recently heard Louise Penny interviewed by her publisher, and, knowing Louise now, it came as a surprise to hear her say she identified with Agent Yvette Nichol.

Still Life by Louise Penny