Author of the week: Leila Meacham

last updated 8 January 2015

Writing an epic of the modern South wasn’t what 65-year-old Leila Meacham had in mind when she decided to pray about what to do with the rest of her life, said Jennifer Rodriguez in the San Antonio Express-News. A former English teacher, she had published a few romance novels in her 40s, only to quit fiction writing because she found the work too isolating. She boxed up one unfinished, 1,000-page manuscript and simply consigned it to a closet shelf. But 10 years into her retirement from the classroom, Meacham was growing restless. One morning, lying in bed, she turned to God for guidance. “And I heard him say, ‘You’re going to take down your novel and finish it,’” she says. Even then, she delayed the project another three weeks before finally asking her husband to fetch the old pages.

Meacham apparently never expected that the East Texas heroine of the finished novel—Roses—would draw comparisons to Gone With the Wind’s Scarlett O’Hara, said Craig Wilson in USA Today. “I was shocked when I first heard that,” she says. “I’ve seen parts of the movie, but I never sat for three hours to see the whole thing.” Yet Meacham’s comeback book turns out to be “one of those sweeping Southern sagas in which love is lost and cotton is king,” so it’s no wonder it has reminded some critics of Margaret Mitchell’s classic. As she waits to see if the early buzz turns into major sales, Meacham is busying herself with a new project. “Another epic,” she says. “I love writing about Texas.”