Spotlight & Giveaway: UNDER THE SOUTHERN SKY by Kristy Woodson Harvey

Today it is my pleasure to Welcome author Kristy Woodson Harvey to HJ!

Hi Kristy and welcome to HJ! We’re so excited to chat with you about your new release, UNDER THE SOUTHERN SKY!

 
Hi! Thanks so much for having me on HJ!
 

To start off, can you please tell us a little bit about this book?:

UNDER THE SOUTHERN SKY is the story of Amelia, an investigative journalist, who inadvertently discovers that a cluster of embryos belonging to her childhood friend Parker and his late wife Greer have been deemed “abandoned.” Parker is then put in the position to have to decide what to do with the last remaining piece of the woman he loved so much. The story is told from the perspectives of Parker, the father, Greer his late wife’s journal entries, Amelia, and Amelia’s good Southern meddling mama, Elizabeth. Each character has a secret and, as those secrets are revealed, they determine what will ultimately happen to the embryos.
 

Please share your favorite lines or quote(s) from this book:

1. This isn’t a house. It’s the fabric of my family, woven thread by thread, memory by memory.

2. Writing a different story is what life is all about.

3. Sometimes the nothing moments are everything.

4. I’ve given into the pull of the moon, to the song of the sea, to the magical divinity that exists, under the Southern Sky.

What inspired this book?

I was at a party and one of my friends pulled me aside. She was visibly upset because she had been to the doctor that day and he had told her that she and her husband needed to make decisions about their leftover frozen embryos. She said, “When we were freezing these embryos, all we could see is the babies we wanted. We never thought about what would happen next. We never thought about what we would do with the ones we didn’t have.” And then she said the magic words. “A lot of people are going to be going through this. You should write a book about it.”
I remember where I was standing and how I got chill bumps all over, as sure sign that she was, indeed, correct. I knew there was a story there. Only, I didn’t exactly know what that story was.

How did you ‘get to know’ your main characters? Did they ever surprise you?

Oh, yes! They absolutely surprised me. Writing characters is like making new friends. The more time you spend with them, the more you learn about them. Amelia and Parker, in particular, went down a different path than I had planned. I love it when that happens!

What was your favorite scene to write?

The one where Amelia and Parker are our in the kayaks in “the maze” in the middle of the night. I was inspired to write this scene and actually made my then seven-year-old son–who was an expert at navigating the marsh grass that makes up “the maze” take me kayaking at night so I could experience it for myself.

The stillness and cool of the night was refreshing, the way the moon painted a trail onto the water hypnotic. I watched as Amelia paddled lazily, turning left into the “maze,” as we used to call it, into a tall patch of marsh grass. The path through it changed often. It was one of our favorite parts of childhood to try to navigate it in a new way, sometimes suc- cessfully, sometimes getting stuck in the oyster beds below.
The kayak made a small splash as I dropped it into the water and slid in myself, holding a paddle in my left hand. I pushed away from the dock, realizing that there was almost no current tonight, and made the box with my arms that Mason had taught me almost thirty years ago. I slid the pad- dle in smooth, nearly silent strokes, marveling at how it could seem so dark and then—once your eyes adjusted to the brightness of the moon on the water, to the vividness of the stars—so incredibly light.
I reached the entrance of the maze quickly, expecting to paddle furiously to catch up to Amelia. But when I turned, she was sitting right at the edge, as though she was waiting for me.

What was the most difficult scene to write?

Strangely, Amelia’s “Modern Love” column. I love writing newspaper columns, but I rewrote and rewrote this one! (I can only include a little of it because it includes major spoilers!0

When I was fourteen years old, I cheated on a test. It was wrong. I knew it then, and I know it now. I’m sure if I had gotten caught the teacher would have said I was only cheating myself, but I think we all know that isn’t true. I was cheating off Parker Thaysden, who, even though he was three years younger, was the smartest guy in my math class. I told myself I hadn’t meant to look over and see his answer, that it was simply a coincidence that the problem I was stuck on was one that happened to be right in my view. But, deep down, I knew the truth.
Eight days later, I found out I could never have chil- dren, that I had primary ovarian insufficiency syndrome.
I thought it was because I’d cheated on my math test.
Twenty-ish years later, I still can’t explain the exact laws of karma (or, as might be obvious, the laws of exponents), but what I do know is that fate very rarely delivers upon that straight of a line.

Would you say this book showcases your writing style or is it a departure for you?

I think it showcases it. There is perhaps a little more depth of feeling in this story than some of my others, but I think it’s very similar in style.

What do you want people to take away from reading this book?

There are many, many ways to create a family!

What are you currently working on? What other releases do you have planned?

My fourth Peachtree Bluff novel, CHRISTMAS IN Peachtree Bluff, releases on October 26, and I absolutely cannot wait! Slightly South Simple, The Secret to Southern Charm, and the Southern Side of Paradise follow a trio of sisters, their mother and a big secret thet could reshape what it means to be a family. I am finishing edits on my 2022 novel, and I can’t wait to share more about it.

Thanks for blogging at HJ!

Giveaway: 2 Winners Will Receive an Exclusive Under the Southern Sky candle and “I Read KWH” tote bag.

To enter Giveaway: Please complete the Rafflecopter form and Post a comment to this Q: If you had leftover frozen embryos, what would you do with them? Destroy them? Adopt them out? Donate them to science? Why?

 
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Excerpt from UNDER THE SOUTHERN SKY:

I FOUND OUT MY MARRIAGE was over the day my “Modern Love” piece appeared in the New York Times. The Modern Love piece about my thoroughly modern love with Thad, about our decision not to have children, about how we were choosing travel and wanderlust instead, living life on our own terms.
Little did I know that he was really living life on his own terms. While I was going to work every morning and he was “writing his first novel” in the dated downtown Palm Beach apartment that his octogenarian grandmother rented to us for next to nothing, he was actually playing house with a CrossFit obsessed god named Chase. In fact, when I ran home from work to show Thad my piece at nine that morning, it wasn’t Thad I found on the wood-framed yellow couch in our living room. It was Chase. I knew him because he was a hairdresser. My hairdresser. But I had never seen him quite like this: hisneon green boxer briefs accenting his spray-tanned abs—both of which clashed horribly with the sofa, I might add—sitting nonchalantly under the portrait of Thad’s grandmother. She smirked inside her gilded frame, hair in a bouffant, choker pearls tight around her neck, earlobes dripping with rhine- stones. It didn’t take long for me to put the pieces together.
I dropped the newspaper, the pages falling through the air in slow motion.
I wondered if Chase had bathed in the pink tub in the tiny master bath, if he had watched soap drip off his toes against the green tiles with hand-painted daisies, chipped and faded with age. I wondered if he had drunk vodka out of our crystal glasses, the ones I was certain were of a vintage that poten- tially contained lead and that, every now and then, I was pos- itive were poisoning me.
As the last page drifted to the floor, I realized I had just written my love story for the entire world to read. And now it was over.
A baffled, wet-haired Thad emerged from the pink-and- green bathroom, a floral-print towel wrapped around his waist, and explained that I never came back home once I left for work, as though I were somehow in the wrong for discov- ering his affair. Lie to me. I promise I’ll believe you, I thought. But he didn’t. Instead, he tossed out the idea of the three of us—Thad, Chase, and me—living together. Ironically, our love was not that modern.
When people would console me later about the divorce, they would say, “Well, at least you split up before you had children.” I didn’t include in the column that I’d abandoned the idea of motherhood when I found out I was infertile at age fourteen. And I definitely left out the part about how the egre- gious number of baby showers I had attended over the past several years had made me curious about what it was like to feel flutter kicks in your belly. It had made me wonder what it might be like to take part in a rite of passage that was as nor- mal to my friends as getting our first training bras or learning to drive a stick shift.
Their words made me realize how alone I felt, how I had made a decision to never let anyone into my life who would love me unconditionally, or, maybe more important, that I would love unconditionally. People always think being loved will change them. But that’s not true. It’s really, truly loving—with the kind of love you couldn’t take away even if you wanted to—that turns you inside out.
Cold panic washed over me. I felt myself back against the wall and slide down it until I was on the floor, the last page of newspaper crumpled in my hand. That paper was the only thing keeping me tethered to earth. As it always did when I felt like I was losing control, my recurring nightmare flashed through my mind. In it, Daddy is washing his old Cadillac in the gravel driveway of Dogwood, the sprawling waterfront home that has been in my family since before the Revolution. My father is a small farmer, and, well, the family money has all but run out. They could sell the valuable property, make a nice life for themselves somewhere else. But then, my mother argued, where would that leave Aunt Tilley?Daddy’s nearly vintage Cadillac is dripping wet, and he is wearing one of those infomercial shammy gloves, rubbing soap circles on the car’s body.
The house starts off in good shape, like it is in real life, largely because Daddy, my brother, Robby, and I can fix abso- lutely anything. I could paint trim better than any profes- sional by the time I was twelve years old. Robby can fix a refrigerator, rewire a car, splice cable, anything you need. Even still, as a child I always had the feeling that the grand home filled with heirlooms—the mahogany dinner table where Washington once carved his initials, the gilded china, the monogrammed sterling silver—was falling in around us. The fading opulence seemed incongruous with the too-small dresses I was squeezing into for the third year in a row.
As Daddy washes his car in the driveway, Aunt Tilley walks out on the porch in one of her Victorian getups, com- plete with corset and parasol, which she took to wearing after she lost her mind, before I was even born.
Only, when I look up, it isn’t Aunt Tilley who is residing in the east wing now. It’s me. Old, alone, and crazy as a bat, with my beloved family home falling down around me. And Trina, my sister-in-law, is calling, “Amelia, darling.” That’s when I wake up, sweaty and cold.
Some people dream about losing their teeth. I dream about losing Dogwood.
I never told Thad about the nightmare. Now I was glad I hadn’t. Because, it seemed, I was destined to become the spinster aunt in the attic, the subject of many a good Southern cautionary tale. Just like my poor, dear aunt Tilley. She was a little unhinged, but she was still my favorite.
No! I scolded myself. I was not Aunt Tilley. I was Amelia Paxton, investigative reporter, award-winning journalist, seeker of truth and lover of righteousness. I tried to convince myself, as I walked out the door, completely unable to hear what Thad was saying as he ran after me, that this was better. This facilitated my life plan: Rise to the top of my game as a journalist. Check. Become executive editor. Check. Become managing editor. Check. Next stop: editor in chief. My husband, Thad, was an anchor around my neck. Of course, true love had also been a part of my life plan. That was when the tears began. He had been the one my heart searched for. He had been the one that changed everything. The thought split me in two: How will I live without him?
But I was a girl who had grown up huddling by the cast- iron radiator in my too-big room when we didn’t have enough money for the heat bill. I was a teenager who had replastered living room ceilings after a storm caused them to cave in. I was a woman who had discovered pay inequities in local manufacturing and exposed that the largest business owner in town was preventing women from exercising their legal right to pump breast milk at work. I was a warrior. I always had been. The dissolution of my marriage was nothing more than a bump in the road.
No use crying over what could have been, I reassured myself as I wiped my eyes, stood up straighter, cleared my throat, and dug around for my concealer. Modern Love, take two,equaled solitude. It equaled throwing myself into work. My writing had always been my only real safe place. By getting lost in someone else’s story, I could blissfully forget my own, at least for a little while.
And the interview I had scheduled that morning would lead to a story that I felt in the marrow of my bones would be groundbreaking. It had taken me months to get this interview in the first place, and I knew I could never reschedule, despite the fact that my entire life had just gone up in flames. Even as sure as I felt, though, I couldn’t have predicted how important that one interview would turn out to be.
But life is like that. Sometimes the nothing moments are everything.

Excerpt. © Reprinted by permission. All rights reserved.
 
 

Book Info:

Two childhood friends discover that love—and family—can be found in unconventional ways in this timely, moving novel from the USA TODAY bestselling author of the “beautifully Southern, evocative Peachtree Bluff series” (Kristin Harmel, internationally bestselling author of The Winemaker’s Wife).

Recently separated Amelia Saxton, a dedicated journalist, never expected that uncovering the biggest story of her career would become deeply personal. But when she discovers that a cluster of embryos belonging to her childhood friend Parker and his late wife Greer have been deemed “abandoned,” she’s put in the unenviable position of telling Parker—and dredging up old wounds in the process.

Parker has been unable to move forward since the loss of his beloved wife three years ago. He has all but forgotten about the frozen embryos, but once Amelia reveals her discovery, he knows that if he ever wants to get a part of Greer back, he’ll need to accept his fate as a single father and find a surrogate.

Each dealing with their own private griefs, Parker and Amelia slowly begin to find solace in one another as they navigate an uncertain future against the backdrop of the pristine waters of their childhood home, Cape Carolina. The journey of self-discovery leads them to an unforgettable and life-changing lesson: Family—the one you’re born into and the one you choose—is always closer than you think.

From “the next major voice in Southern fiction” (Elin Hilderbrand, #1 New York Times bestselling author), Under the Southern Sky is a fresh and unforgettable exploration of love, friendship, and the unbreakable ties that bind.

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Meet the Author:

Kristy Woodson Harvey is the USA TODAY bestselling author of six novels, including Feels Like Falling, The Peachtree Bluff series, and Under the Southern Sky. A Phi Beta Kappa, summa cum laude graduate of the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill’s school of journalism, her writing has appeared in numerous online and print publications including Southern Living, Traditional Home, USA TODAY, Domino, and O. Henry. Kristy is the winner of the Lucy Bramlette Patterson Award for Excellence in Creative Writing and a finalist for the Southern Book Prize. Her work has been optioned for film and television, and her books have received numerous accolades including Southern Living’s Most Anticipated Beach Reads, Parade’s Big Fiction Reads, and Entertainment Weekly’s Spring Reading Picks. Kristy is the co-creator and co-host of the weekly web show and podcast Friends & Fiction. She blogs with her mom Beth Woodson on Design Chic, and loves connecting with fans on KristyWoodsonHarvey.com. She lives on the North Carolina coast with her husband and son where she is (always!) working on her next novel.
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