Local author Dare DeLano’s new novel, Abilene, is the small-town tale of three unique and powerful women who discover poignant emotional truths. It’s also an inspirational story about how to survive narcissism and gaslighting and come out stronger and more self-aware. DeLano’s eagerly anticipated debut has already received glowing reviews in advance of its November publication.
“This masterfully paced novel will magnetize you to its complex, vivid characters,” said Rachel Basch, author of The Listener. “Abilene will move you to tears,” said Karen Osborn, author of Patchwork and The Music Book.
DeLano is a winner of the San Diego Book Award for her past work, and on Thursday, Nov. 16, all are welcome to her for a launch party and Q&A. This free special event will be held at the Rancho Santa Fe Library from 5 to 7 p.m. Abilene-themed appetizers and beverages will be served.
For DeLano, the path from idea to finished book was arduous and success came with years of perseverance. She started writing this novel after she graduated from law school but put it aside as she pursued her legal career, married and had kids, and wrote other things, including an award-winning children’s book. But Abilene was always near to her heart, so when the time was right, she completed it and secured a publication deal.
DeLano is busy as an assistant city attorney in Escondido, but she maintains strong ties to the literary community too. She is part of a local writers group and a member of nonprofit San Diego Writers, Ink. A few years ago she completed a master’s degree in fine arts in creative writing, which deepened her literary links and bolstered her creativity. Today, she has an agent and several more books in the works.
When asked to describe Abilene, DeLano said, “It’s part mystery, part love story, part coming-of-age story.” Each character searches for something unique. “Len yearns for the father she has never known, her mother Cora searches for her lost love, and Jean must find her sense of self again after a shooting lands her in jail,” she said.
The novel is full of twists and turns and deals with topical current issues at the same time as it tugs on heartstrings. DeLano is thrilled that Abilene will soon be in readers’ hands, and she’s eager to share her happiness with the community at her launch party, which is open to the public. Following is an interview with the author as she shares her story with the Rancho Santa Fe Review.
Q: Please describe a couple of the food and drink options that you will serve at the party.
DeLano: There will be champagne because there is a scene where Cora desperately wants a drink and that is all she can find in the house. There will be steak skewers because when Jean is in prison, all she can think about is getting out and having a thick, juicy steak for dinner.
But the most fun for me will be the Jello shots and the butterfly cookies. The Jello shots go with a scene where Cora is at a new wave dance club in 1988. She’s taken psychedelics and is discussing Heideggerian philosophy with her friends, dancing until all hours, and taking Jello shots. So, a typical night in the ’80s!
I’m also serving butterfly cookies, which are related to the character Len. She has a bit of a gift. She can sense things, and sometimes has visions. As she and a friend are walking home from a store, Len closes her eyes and wonders about her father. When she opens her eyes, the air all around her is filled with orange butterflies. So, butterfly cookies!
Q: What are you most excited about with the publication of Abilene?
DeLano: There’s a special place in my heart for this novel because it is the first novel I ever started writing. I put it away and moved on with other projects, and many years later, when I pulled it out of the desk drawer, I was able to approach it in a completely different way. So, it is a really wonderful feeling for me to have this as my first published adult novel. I put a lot of my heart into it, so my hope is that people will connect with it emotionally.
Q: You won a San Diego Book Award, you have an MFA and you are a lawyer! What’s the thumbnail sketch of your career path and journey to becoming novelist?
DeLano: This path has been very long for me. If there is a theme to my journey, I would say it is perseverance.
I’ve pretty much always worked on a novel in the background, no matter what else was going on in my life. Like many other authors, I have a whole drawer full of writing that got me to this point—a couple of completed novels and a number of beginnings of books.
Way back in 2012, I landed my first literary agent for an historical fiction, and I thought I was on my way to having a novel published. I also wrote my children’s book at that time and published it through my own company. I thought it would be interesting to have both experiences—a book published by a traditional publisher and another via self-publishing.
Unfortunately, my historical novel never got picked up by a publisher, and eventually my agent left the business. My kids’ book got great attention, but I had to start back at square one with my adult novels. I just kept writing, got my MFA, and developed literary friends and mentors along the way.
When Abilene was complete, I landed a new agent, Jennifer Thompson of Nordlyset Literary Agency. She has been unwavering in her of me and my work.
Q: Your novel presents three strong, unique female protagonists. What are key traits that each woman possesses?
DeLano: Len’s story was the first part of this novel that came to me. She’s a precocious 12-year-old, who has a bit of a gift. She has blackouts that cause visions, and she can sometimes sense things before they happen. But probably her standout trait is that she is stubborn. She gets it in her head that a country music singer she saw on a TV program is her father, she sets her mind on meeting him, and nothing can dissuade her.
Cora is an idealist at heart, and her story is really one of lost love. Len’s father, the love of her life, left her before she even knew she was pregnant, and she never knew why. There is a secret that is revealed at the end of the novel—I’m not going to give it away here—but the lead up to revealing that secret was really important to me. I wanted to do that in a way that had an emotional impact. And to get that impact I had to really channel those feelings of first love—all the nostalgia, and the pain of that first heartbreak. Cora feels all those things throughout her search for Edison, and I needed the reader to come along with her in that journey.
Jean’s main traits are strength and perseverance. By the time the story starts, she has completely lost her sense of who she is and lost all faith in herself. She’s in jail for shooting her husband Roger after finding him in bed with another woman, and in thinking about how she got to this point in her life, she has to reassess everything she’s been through. She has to pick herself up from the absolute lowest point and find the strength to move forward from it.
Q: Why is the setting, Abilene, important to the story?
DeLano: Well, the characters in this story came into my head fully southern. Even though I live in San Diego, I am southern through and through. I grew up in Virginia and have deep family roots there. But I went to college in Dallas, so I spent a lot of time in Texas. I set the story in Abilene because I wanted to it be in a small town, and Abilene just sort of fit. I once spent a weekend there when I was in college—it was in the late 1980s just like my character Cora. There actually was a really cool club there, and I being amazed that in this small town in Texas there was this whole underground scene. I loved the idea of juxtaposing that against the much more traditional Texas ranch where Cora grew up.
Q: Your book tackles the theme of verbal abuse or gaslighting. Is there a point you’d like readers to take away?
DeLano: First and foremost, in my fiction I always just want to tell a story. If I ever get swept up in trying too hard to teach the reader a lesson the fiction doesn’t work. It can be too didactic.
I think as humans, we make sense of our world through story. Hearing someone else’s story can teach us things about our own lives, and help us make sense of the world. I included an emotionally abusive relationship in the novel in order to pull back the curtain to reveal how narcissists work and to show the devastating effects of emotional abuse. I tried to write it so that readers could recognize patterns and warning signs they might not have been aware of otherwise.
I did a lot of research. I read books on emotional abuse, I visited online communities and read a number of first-hand s from women who were in emotionally abusive relationships.
Many women talked about feeling like they were going crazy and like they just couldn’t trust their own perspective or judgment anymore. The narcissistic ab will invalidate your experience and your opinions and will turn everything around on you until you believe that you are the one who is argumentative and controlling and forgetful and lazy and selfish. It is a very slow creeping—the relationship doesn’t start out with those behaviors of course, it creeps in over time.
That slow creeping is quite difficult to show in fiction. But I really wanted to show it. In the beginning of the novel Jean doesn’t have a name for what she has been experiencing. She thinks that she’s lost her mind a bit—she thinks she is going crazy. Her journey is this sort of slow building to a realization that she has actually been manipulated and gaslit and subject to emotional abuse. Jean’s story is about her finding herself again after a traumatic marriage.
Q: For any aspiring novelists, what advice would you offer?
DeLano: Okay, how much time do we have? Because I feel I could talk about this for quite a while. The short version is this—write every chance you get, read everything you can, and find and become part of a writing community. I often hear people say, “If I only had time, I’d love to write a book.” But no one is ever going to hand you time—you have to make the time, carve it out and guard it carefully. and become active in a community of writers, because no one else can truly understand the struggles you will go through. And know that every single writer faces rejection—you have to love the work you are doing, and one of your goals must simply be to make the best art you can, so that you are proud of the work.
Because at the end of the day, all the rest—all the commercial things that we tend to call “success” may happen, or they may not. So, you have to persevere in your goal to write a great story that you are proud of.
For more information visit daredelano.com. “Abilene” was released Nov. 1 from Mint Hill Books, an imprint of Main Street Rag Publishing Company. “Abilene” is available on Amazon.com and other locations.
