May Cobb discusses My Summer Darlings
Special guest host: Jesse Q Sutanto
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May Cobb. My Summer Darlings (Berkley, $27.00 Signed).
Three lifelong friends plus a dangerous, sexy new stranger in town add up to a scorching summer of manipulation, obsession, and murder, from the acclaimed author of The Hunting Wives.
A woman in the forest thinks she’s going to die.
I know he’s coming back for me.
Jen Hansen, Kittie Spears, and Cynthia Nichols have been friends since childhood. They are now approaching forty and their lives have changed, but their insular East Texas town has not. They stay sane by drinking wine in the afternoons, dishing about other women in the neighborhood, and bonding over the heartache of their own encroaching middle age and raising ungrateful teens.
Then Will Harding comes to town, moving into one of the neighborhood’s grandest homes. Mysterious and charming, he seems like the answer to each woman’s prayers. He’s a source of fascination for Jen, Kittie, and Cynthia, but none of them are ready for the way Will disrupts their lives.
As Will grows closer with each of the women, their fascination twists into obsession, threatening their friendships and their families. When he abruptly pulls away, each woman scrambles to discover the source of his affection. But what they’ll uncover is far more sinister and deadly than any of them could have ever imagined.
May Cobb grew up in the piney woods of East Texas where both THE HUNTING WIVES and BIG WOODS are set. After college, Cobb moved to San Francisco where she studied Victorian Literature for her Master's, and gravitated towards that era's detective novels, known as "sensation novels", such as Wilke Collins' THE WOMAN IN WHITE.
Cobb then lived in Los Angeles for a few years where she worked for filmmaker/writer Ron Shelton and his wife, the actress Lolita Davidovich.
She is currently finishing a book about the late, jazz great, Rahsaan Roland Kirk, a project which has been in the works for twenty years. Kirk was a human phenomenon—a multi-instrumentalist who was best known for his miraculous ability to play three saxophones simultaneously. During his brief life, he defied staggering odds—from blindness, to prejudice, to a paralyzing stroke—in order to play the music that came to him through dreams. His story is what made Cobb want to become a writer.
May Cobb currently lives in Austin, Texas, with her husband and son. Her writing has appeared in The Washington Post, The Rumpus, Austin Monthly, and Texas Highways Magazine.
Jesse Q Sutanto grew up shuttling back and forth between Jakarta and Singapore and sees both cities as her homes. She has a Masters degree from Oxford University, though she has yet to figure out a way of saying that without sounding obnoxious. She is currently living back in Jakarta on the same street as her parents and about seven hundred meddlesome aunties. When she's not tearing out her hair over her latest WIP, she spends her time baking and playing FPS games. Oh, and also being a mom to her two kids.