Sunlight Finds You: A Guest Post by Laura Moriarty

The first thing I knew about my latest novel, Sunlight Finds You, is that it would be a love story, a story about how a first, deeply felt love can shape a person as much as the place they live in and the times they survive. Nora Chesnow is a teenager when her family moves to St. Petersburg, Florida in the late 1940s. I love so much about this era: the music, the dances, the homemade poodle skirts, and the post-war optimism that seemed especially strong in coastal Florida. After learning all I could about St. Pete's history via books, old tourist guides, and maps, I treated myself to a mid-winter visit, and had the most delightful research trip of my life, pedaling along Tampa Bay on a borrowed cruiser bike. In the booming 1940s, St. Pete's population doubled in size; since then, the population has doubled again. But it's one of those vibrant, still-growing cities that cares for its past, and many of the midcentury landmarks Nora would know are still beautiful, and still in use. I was able to take an after-hours tour through St. Petersburg High School, built in Mediterranean Revival Style in 1926, where Nora would first catch sight of Leonard reading in a courtyard, the wall behind him bright with bougainvillea. Years later, she would send him a desperate letter, not knowing if it would reach him, from the Open Air Post Office downtown, which still uses carriers on bikes to deliver St. Petersburg mail.  

But I also knew the novel wouldn't be nostalgic. My mom grew up in Florida in the 1940s and 1950s, and in the years  before she died, she and I talked a lot about what it was like to come of age when there were fewer options for women, legally as well as socially. Those conversations with my mom, and reading what other women of that generation wrote about their experiences, got me thinking about how so many girls and women had to navigate a narrow path, even though they of course had all the same desires and dreams of self-determination that we do now.

And yet drafts of Sunlight Finds You didn't come alive until I found Nora's voice, which is entirely her own. She tells the story of her turbulent adolescence from the remove of several decades, and though she deeply regrets her mistakes, she understands and remembers why she made them. She was young. She was in love. She believed lies, including the lies she told herself. The Nora who tells the story is wiser and more sure of herself; but just as a modern city might preserve elegant reminders of the town it was, a wise woman, at her buoyant core, might remain as open-hearted as the girl she was, the girl she so vividly remembers being.

As I wrote, Nora's voice didn't feel invented so much as summoned, and it was a voice I grew to love dearly. I hope readers will feel that way, too.