Steveston author Evelyn Lazare felt a little bit surprised, proud, and a twinge of guilt.
She’d recently finished publishing her first novel, The Ladies Who Don’t Lunch, and fans began emailing her.
“You can’t leave us hanging like that,” Lazare recounts in a telephone interview with the Newson Monday afternoon.
Readers were lamenting the fact Lazare had closed the page on her characters too soon.
“After all, they weren’t dead at the end of the first book,” Lazare quipped.
A year went by and Lazare extended the run of her characters in The Ladies Who Still Don’t Lunch which is now out.
“I didn’t intend to write this as a series,” said Lazare whose previous writing experience was focused around her former career in healthcare, churning out strategic papers, grant applications, reports and proposals.
But one day, she decided to unleash the novel inside her that she had been longing to write and began creating the characters in her story of six women — ranging in age from 30 to 60 — who regularly convene for dinner, and while breaking bread together share their experiences, good and not so good.
Lazare vows she never eavesdropped in cafes or diners to find the framework for her characters whose collective essence is described as every woman’s friends’ lives in a blender.
As Lazare describes in her promotional material, the women go through pregnancies, marriages, divorces, illnesses and deaths, affairs and romances, career changes, retirements, fluctuating finances, and new homes. They celebrate major birthdays together, calm each other when their kids push their buttons, and congratulate each other when these same children marry. In short, they try to be supportive of each other and they succeed more often than not.
And with the continuation in the latest book, she has a chance to push further out into her own experiences to give them life.
“Readers really wanted to know what happened to them,” Lazare said, adding quickly she hasn’t planned another installment because it outstrips her own journey through life.
“Everybody asks me if there’s going to be a third book and my answer is that at some point the ladies are going to have to stop eating,” Lazare said. “The challenge with writing the second, and now maybe a third is that the women have now caught up to an age beyond which I have no experience.
“I don’t know really much about how women spend their lives when they’re in their 70s and 80s,” said Lazare, 67.
To learn more about the world she created, fans can hear Lazare speak during one of the Authors in Our Midst sessions Nov. 13 at the Japanese Cultural Centre. Registration is required and costs $8. She is also scheduled for a book reading and signing at Village Books & Coffee House in Steveston (12031 First Avenue) on Dec. 6 from 2:30-3:30 p.m.
Both The Ladies Who Don’t Lunch, and The Ladies Who Still Don’t Lunchare available at Village Books & Coffee House, as well as through Amazon.com.
