Years ago, when Patti Callahan Henry married and started her family, she had no idea that she would someday be a best-selling author. 

A clinical nurse specialist and a strong Christian, Henry had met her husband, Patrick (yes, he’s actually named “Patrick Henry!”) at Auburn University, where the two were students.  After the wedding, Henry quit work to become a full-time wife and stay-at-home mother.

But a decade later, when her oldest child announced that she wanted to be a writer, Patti realized she had abandoned that dream herself.  So she sat down and began the task of teaching herself to write.  Six years later, Henry’s first novel was published to widespread critical acclaim. 

A finalist for the Townsend Prize for Fiction and one of only four authors chosen in 2006 by the Reader’s Club of America, Henry’s fourth novel, Between the Tides (Penguin/New American Library), will hit the shelves on June 5, 2007.  It tells the story of Catherine Leary, a young woman who lives with buried memories of a childhood tragedy.  When Catherine’s father dies, he leaves instructions for Catherine to return to the scene of the accident. 

A professor of English literature, her father has always told Catherine that life is a story—and now he wants Catherine to reclaim hers, so that she can finally be set free.  Along the way, Catherine will unravel a family mystery and start a brand new chapter of her life.

Henry spoke with me about her new book and what it’s like to finally live the dream.  Here’s what she had to say. . . .

Between the Tides is your fourth published novel.  Can you tell us a little about the inspiration for it?  Where it came from and what was in your heart when you decided to write it?
Between the Tides is actually the first book I ever wrote.  This is the novel I wrote when I knew I wanted to be an author, when I made a promise to myself to write. I wrote it seven years ago—then rewrote it, rewrote it again and finally put it away. I pulled it out again last year and rewrote it for the last time. It was a challenge that I couldn’t shirk any longer. 

As I rewrote the book, I began to see, as we usually do when we engage in a creative act, a mirror to my own journey—not in literal terms, but in the journey of returning to something I said I’d never look at again (just like Catherine Leary, my main character, who said she’d never return to Seaboro).

As for the inspiration, I wanted to tell a story about a woman who refused to look at the past.  Her heart was shut off and guarded, and I wanted her to awaken to who she really was and the promise of a life fully lived.

The major theme of Between the Tides is about finding the courage to face the truth, so that we can live with an open and healed heart.  Where did this theme come from?
Well, there are many things in the novel that force Catherine to find truth, but another character in the novel uses three questions to help her open up and talk.  These questions are: