Marilyn spent her early years in Norris, Tennessee. After having lived in twelve different towns in the US, and two different countries overseas, she has returned to her East Tennessee roots and settled in Tellico Village with her husband John.
Books by Marilyn Smith Neilans
Interview with Author
How long did it take you to write the novel?
I literally began composing it in my head as the events were unfolding. As I began to face the daily challenges and difficulties of making life care decisions for my failing mother, I realized that I had no real experience in this area. I was quite certain that I was not the first middle-aged daughter to feel overwhelmed and lost. The strong need to form a bond with other women in these circumstances turned into a compulsion to write, and I began putting it all down on paper as soon as I returned to my home after Mom’s funeral.
Because of my life’s own complicated path, and because of the emotional stress of remembering the details that I put down in the book, it took me 17 years to get it to publication. When readers respond with comments like this: “I couldn’t put it down. I laughed a little, cried a little, and thought a lot about my own parents,” I feel I have successfully communicated with my peers.
What will your next book be about?
It will be a memoir “as told to,” and will be about another family’s interesting lives as they reform and regroup after fleeing their homeland of Estonia to re-establish themselves first in Germany in a displaced persons camp, then in the United States. This one is much less emotionally stressful for me to write! Look for it to come out late in 2013 or early 2014.
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My Latest Blogs
09 April 2017
Okay, folks ... hold on to your hats.Coming this fall will be a new rowdy redneck romp from one of our favorite writers ... B J Gillum, author of "King of the Kudzu" and numerous other humorous novels.
If you have never heard of Swamp Buggy Races, held three times every year (for the past fifty years or so) on the Mile-O-Mud track in otherwise fancy-schmancy Naples, Florida, prepare to be enlightened and entertained by the colorful participants and spectators.
16 August 2016
When I was first introduced to Ku Adams, in Tellico Village, I was told a little about her interesting background: I learned that she had escaped from her native Estonia with her mother and grandmother in 1944 - when she was 3 years old. Her homeland had suffered under two on the greatest evil powers the world had ever known: Stalin and Hitler. Hher mother knew, when she heard the Russian tanks rumbling down her street, that she had to take her family and flee ... right then, at that moment.
