This week’s Inheritance Books are from Cathy Lamb, author of thought provoking women’s fiction. 

Hi Cathy, welcome to Inheritance Books, please tell me a bit about yourself

I was born in Newport Beach, California and spent my first ten years playing outside like a wild vagabond.

As a child, I mastered the art of skateboarding, catching butterflies in bottles, and riding my bike with no hands. When I was ten, my parents moved me, my two sisters, a brother, and two poorly behaved dogs to Oregon before I could fulfill my lifelong dream of becoming a surfer bum.

I graduated from the University of Oregon with a B.A. in Elementary Education and a M.S. in Curriculum and Instruction. I was a teacher for over seven years, and loved it, but to be quite frank, I only became a teacher until I could (hopefully!) become a writer. Teaching allowed me weekends and summers to write and travel plus I didn’t starve.

I’m a full time writer, and I love it. (Most of the time. Sometimes it makes me crazy and I eat too much chocolate.) I’ve been married over twenty years and we have three teenagers who are naughty only now and then.

I write novels and short stories and I write best between ten at night and two in the morning. When I am first writing a book, I write 2,000 words a day, 10,000 a week or I don’t let myself go to bed on Saturday night until it’d done. After I write my first draft, I edit it eight times before I send it to my publisher. I’ll usually edit it another four times after that. By the twelfth edit, I am done, done, done. It is out the door and out of my head and I’m onto the next plot.

That’s a great word count! I’m envious. Mind you, I can’t stay awake much past 10pm, so I’ve got no hope of getting that much done.

Which book have you inherited from the generation above? Why is it special?

I inherited The Chronicles of Narnia from the generation above. Of course, I inherited hundreds of other books, too, because I grew up with a mother who loved to read and insisted we love it, too. I chose the Narnia books to talk about here, though, because as a child they just lit my imagination on fire. I was transported to a whole new world. It made me daydream, it made me think, it made me see outside the box of my suburban neighborhood.

I do think that those books were key in terms of turning me into a writer.

Which book would you like to leave to future generations? Why?

I would leave Night by Elie Wiesel. Heartbreaking, true, a testament to his unbelievable courage and strength under an impossible situation. It’s also a reminder of the atrocities that humans have committed against each other and continue to do so. The Holocaust should never be forgotten, never relegated to a paragraph in the history books. I would also choose it to honor Mr. Wiesel’s life since that point.

I would also leave The Color Purple, Infidel, The Color of Water, The Immortal Life of Henrietta Lacks, Unbroken, To Kill A Mockingbird, The Diving Bell and The Butterfly, The Glass Castle, Angela’s Ashes, The Help, The Book Thief, Of Mice and Men, The Red Tent, The Kite Runner, and One Thousand White Women. Oh, and for fun The Time Traveler’s Wife, The Art of Racing In The Rain, and The Guernsey Literary and Potato Peel Society. I could go on and on here about books I’d leave….but I’ll stop because I was only actually asked for ONE!!

Only one! So I’ll have to ignore all of those others you’ve mentioned and only let you have Night (which sounds really good).

Cathy, thank you so much for sharing your Inheritance Books with us. All the best with your writing career.

Cathy’s book If You Could See What I See is available now. You can find out more about Cathy on her website or on Facebook.