Roses (Meacham)

Author Bio
• Birth—ca. 1938 or 1939
• Where—Minden, Louisiana, USA
• Raised—Texas
• Education—B.A., North Texas State University
• Currently—lives in San Antonio, Texas


Beginning in the 1960s, Ms. Meacham taught English to high school students in a handful of cities in Texas. She published three romance novels in the mid-1980s with Walker & Company, but she mostly found the process burdensome. “I didn’t like the isolation,” she said. “I didn’t like the discipline required. I didn’t like the deadlines. So I put away my pen. The romance novel was not my calling.”

Ms. Meacham was a decade into her retirement, growing increasingly bored...when she returned to Roses, a manuscript that she had started in the 1980s. When she completed the novel, one of her friends made a call to a niece, who just happened to be married to David McCormick, a literary agent in New York. Mr. McCormick agreed to take on the book and later sold it to Grand Central, which published it in January 2010. Reviewers compared it to those door-stopper-size, soap operatic novels by the likes of Belva Plain and Barbara Taylor Bradford that were popular in the late 1970s and ‘80s. [She is currently working a a sequel to Roses.]....

Tumbleweeds [2012], which takes place between 1979 and 2008, begins in a small West Texas town and revolves around two star high school football players who fall for the same girl. Yet other than the contemporary setting, it is very much of a piece with Roses, with twists piled atop twists, and well-intentioned characters who seem to make a wreck of things. (Adapted from the New York Times "Texas Weekly.")