Anne Rivers Siddons
Anne Rivers Siddons was born in 1936 in Fairburn, Georgia, a small railroad town
just south of Atlanta, where her family has lived for six generations. The only
child of a prestigious Atlanta lawyer and his wife, Siddons was raised to be a
perfect Southern belle. Growing up, she did what was expected of her: getting
straight A's, becoming head cheerleader, the homecoming queen, and then
Centennial Queen of Fairburn. At Auburn University she studied illustration,
joined the Tri-Delt sorority, and "did the things I thought I should. I dated
the right guys. I did the right activities," and wound up voted "Loveliest of
the Plains."
During her student years at Auburn, the Civil Rights Movement first gained
national attention, with the bus boycott in Montgomery and the integration of
the University of Alabama. Siddons was a columnist for the
Auburn Plainsman
at the time, and she wrote, "an innocuous, almost sophomoric column" welcoming
integration. The school's administration requested she pull it, and when she
refused, they ran it with a disclaimer stating that the university did not share
her views. Because she was writing from the deep South, her column gained
instant national attention and caused quite "a fracas." When she wrote a second,
similarly-minded piece, she was fired. It was her first taste of the power of
the written word.
After graduation, she worked in the advertising department of a large bank,
doing layout and design. But she soon discovered her real talents lay in
writing, as she was frequently required to write copy for the advertisements.
"At Auburn, and before that when I wrote local columns for the Fairburn paper,
writing came so naturally that I didn't value it. I never even thought that it
might be a livelihood, or a source of great satisfaction. Southern girls,
remember, were taught to look for security."
She soon left the bank to join the staff of the recently founded
Atlanta
magazine. Started by renowned mentor, Jim Townsend, the
Atlanta came to
life in the 1960's, just as the city Atlanta was experiencing a rebirth. As one
of the magazine's first senior editors, Siddons remembers the job as being, "one
of the most electrifying things I have ever done in terms of sheer joy." Her
work at the magazine brought her in direct contact with the Civil Rights
Movement, often sitting with Dr. King's people at the then-black restaurant
Carrousel, listening to the best jazz the city had to offer. At age 30, she
married Heyward Siddons, eleven years her senior, and the father of four sons
from a previous marriage.
Her writing career took its next leap when Larry Ashmead, then an editor at
Doubleday, noticed an article of hers and wrote to her asking if she would
consider doing a book. She assumed the letter was a prank, and that some of her
friends had stolen Doubleday stationary. When she didn't respond, Ashmead
tracked her down, and Siddons ended up with a two book contract: a collection of
essays which became John Chancellor Makes Me Cry, and a novel of her
college days, which became Heartbreak Hotel, and was later turned into a
film, Heart of Dixie, starring Ally Sheedy.
As Ashmead moved on, from Doubleday to Simon & Shuster, then to Harper & Row,
Siddons followed, writing a horror story, The House Next Door, which
Stephen King described as a prime example of "the new American Gothic," and then
Fox's Earth and
Homeplace, about the loss of a beloved home.
It was in 1988, with the publication of her fifth book, the best-selling
Peachtree Road, that Siddons graduated to real commercial success. Described
by her friEND and peer, Pat Conroy, as "the Southern novel for our generation."
With almost a million copies in print, Peachtree Road ushered Siddons
onto the literary fast track. Since then the novels have been coming steadily,
about one each year, with her readership and writer's fees increasing
commensurately. In 1992 she received $3.25 million from HarperCollins for a
three book deal, and then, in 1994, HarperCollins gave Siddons $13 million for a
four book deal.
Now, she and her Heyward shuttle between a sprawling home in Brookhaven,
Atlanta, and their summer home in Brooklin, Maine. She finds Down East, "such a
relief after the old dark morass of the South. It's like getting a gulp of clean
air...I always feel in Maine like I'm walking on the surface of the earth. In
the South, I always feel like I'm knee-deep." But she still remains tied to her
home in the South, where she does most of her writing. Each morning, Siddons
dresses, puts on her makeup and then heads out to the backyard cottage that
serves as her office. And each night, she and her husband edit the day's work by
reading it aloud over evening cocktails.
Siddons' success has naturally brought comparisons with another great Southern
writer, Margaret Mitchell, but Siddons insists that the South she writes about
is not the romanticized version found in Gone With the Wind. Instead, her
relationship with the South is loving, but realistic. "It's like an old marriage
or a long marriage. The commitment is absolute, but the romance has long since
worn off...I want to write about it as it really is: I don't want to romanticize
it."
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Anne Rivers Siddons - Off Season (2008)
Review Coming Soon.
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Other Books by Anne Rivers Siddons:
Heartbreak Hotel (1976)
The House Next Door (1978)
Fox's Earth (1981)
Homeplace (1987)
Peachtree Road (1988)
Kings Oak (1990)
Outer Banks (1991)
Colony (1992)
Hill Towns (1993)
Downtown (1994)
Fault Lines (1995)
Up Island (1997)
Low Country (1998)
Nora, Nora (2000)
Islands (2004)
Sweetwater Creek (2005)
Burnt Mountain (Coming August 2010) |
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