Find Your Voice and Honor Your Truth: An Exclusive Guest Post From Adele Myers, Author of The Tobacco Wives — Our March Discover Pick

By Adele Myers / March 1, 2022 at 1:30 am

Hardcover $21.99 ~~$27.99~~

The Tobacco Wives

In Stock Online

Hardcover $21.99 ~~$27.99~~

Set in Bright Leaf, North Carolina, The Tobacco Wives is a beautiful and vivid story about a courageous young woman who stumbles upon a covered-up truth threatening to dismantle her small town. With a focus on Big Tobacco in 1940s North Carolina, this debut novel is certain to speak to historical fiction fans and readers who enjoy books with strong female protagonists. We were lucky enough to talk with Adele Myers and find out the inspiration behind The Tobacco Wives, our March Discover Pick, as well as how this historical fiction shines a light into both the past and present.

The Tobacco Wives is rich in prose and wildly atmospheric. Fashion, Big Tobacco, strong women seeking truth and justice. This book is easy to pick up, but hard to let go of. Where did this story start for you? What was the spark?

Growing up in North Carolina, I was fascinated by my grandmother’s stories about the women she called the tobacco wives. She was a hairdresser for the wives of the wealthiest, most powerful tobacco magnates in Winston-Salem, NC in the 1940s, and tales of these glamorous women captured my imagination.

Many years later, after graduating from journalism school at UNC-Chapel Hill, I found myself compelled to write about the wives. While they dazzled me as a girl, they were even more fascinating when I realized how powerless they were, in spite of their wealth and privilege. I decided to write a short story about them, and when my writing teacher at the time suggested that I consider turning it into a longer piece – it feels like there’s a novel here, she had said – the seeds of The Tobacco Wives were planted.

The seeds “germinated” for many years, over twenty years to be exact, until I picked up the short story again about 8 years ago and committed to writing a novel.

You so vividly brought post-war, mid-century North Carolina to life in these pages. Was there anything that you uncovered that surprised you when you were researching this book?

I was surprised by just how connected my entire family was to R.J. Reynolds Tobacco Company, much more so than I realized when I began writing the book. My grandfathers also served the wealthy tobacco families, one as a senior executive with Wachovia Bank (built by tobacco money) and the other as a home builder and cigarette factory worker. My Great-Uncle Joe King was a portrait artist who painted seven R.J. Reynolds Tobacco presidents and countless wives and children. He worked out of a converted art studio that was once a blacksmith shop on the Reynolds Estate.

My conversations with my father, who grew up in Winston-Salem, as did my mother, were also surprising. I learned that he spent his teenage summers working in the tobacco factories and remembered what his father had told him about the conditions and secrets held there. Many details in the book, such as using floor sweepings to make off-brand, reconstituted cigarettes (“recon” for short), came from my family members’ stories. One summer my dad worked over the vat where the sweepings were boiled into a slurry; he and his fellow workers could only manage 15-minutes at a time before having to go outside and throw up. The conditions were horrendous, and yet he talked about those days fondly.

What struck me most about these conversations was the immense pride that people felt back then about helping to build “the tobacco capital of the south.” In hindsight, it’s hard to believe that they didn’t know about the dangers of smoking, but during those years they truly had no idea. What was it like for them, I wondered, to be so proud of their work, only to learn that they’re producing products that kill people? How did tobacco town executives and workers react when medical studies linking smoking to cancer emerged in 1950? How would a tobacco wife react if she was the first to know, or better yet, if she discovered her husband had been covering it up? These questions took the book in an exciting direction and spurred me to learn all I could about the fall of Big Tobacco.

We just adore Maddie, but there are so many strong, courageous female characters throughout this novel. Where did you draw your inspiration for them?

My characters were inspired by a combination of real and imagined women. All writers draw upon their life experiences and relationships, and I’m fortunate to have had many strong women as role models. I also found inspiration in old photos, family names, videos, and movies. I pictured Dame Maggie Smith when I developed Cornelia Hale. Aunt Etta was a real person – my father’s aunt – but she wasn’t a seamstress and I never met her. Maddie is named after my grandmother the hairdresser, Madeline King Myers. That’s the fun of character development for me – pulling certain traits from one person, others from another, and adding in a dash of a woman you overheard at a coffee shop.

Historical fiction is so perfect in that it teaches you about the past, but also often draws parallels to current events, opening our eyes to different perspectives and lessons not learned. What do you hope readers take away from The Tobacco Wives?

So many of the issues in The Tobacco Wives are relevant to life today. Seventy-five years later, corporate fraud and greed are alive and well, with companies claiming ignorance while making millions off of addictive products. Just look at the Opioid epidemic and what’s happening with vaping. E-cigarette manufacturers marketed their products, which were supposedly designed to help people quit smoking, to teens. Teenagers who know the dangers of smoking and wouldn’t dream of picking up a cigarette started vaping because it was positioned as safe and cool. Thankfully, the FDA and FTC are finally cracking down on them.

Women’s rights in the workplace is prominent in my book, and it’s an issue that remains a real problem today. Women still earn less than men; on average, a woman earns 82 cents while a man earns $1.00 for the same job. Representation in leadership positions is also an ongoing issue with only 8 percent of Fortune 500 companies run by women. In my book, the percentage of women-held management positions was much, much lower, but while there has been some progress, there’s still a lot more that needs to be done to resolve the lack of equality.

The Tobacco Wives deals with heavy issues, and I hope that readers’ eyes will be opened to them, but it’s also a coming-of-age story about truth and courage. Maddie learns a lot about life over the course of one summer. Her illusions about Bright Leaf and the tobacco wives fell away. She saw the world more clearly. I would love for readers to identify with her, to be inspired even, to do what she did – find your voice and honor your truth.

We love to ask: what are you reading and recommending right now?

I’m reading The Magnolia Palace by Fiona Davis right now. It’s set in the Frick Museum, one of New York City’s most impressive Gilded Age mansions. It’s been described as a mystery that unfolds like a clever game of Clue. If you’re into secrets and betrayal set against a beautiful backdrop, I think you’ll like it.

As for what I’ve read recently, I just finished two books that I recommend. The first is Aftershocks, which is a memoir, a deeply moving one, by Nadia Owusu. She writes with raw honesty about loss, abandonment, and identity. Interspersed throughout the narrative are references to earthquakes that she uses to draw parallels to the emotional aftermath of her early trauma, the reverberations if you will. It’s heartbreaking, yet beautiful.

The second book is The Seven Husbands of Evelyn Hugo by Taylor Jenkins Reid. I loved being transported to Old Hollywood in this novel about an aging and reclusive movie icon who finally agrees to tell her life story to a young reporter. It was a fun, entertaining read with a mystery that propels the plot from the beginning. It’s supposedly based on the life of Elizabeth Taylor, which made it even more intriguing and sent me Googling to dig up details about the real movie star’s many husbands.