Ward, Amanda Eyre 1972-

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Ward, Amanda Eyre 1972-

PERSONAL:

Born April 25, 1972, in New York, NY; daughter of Gary B. Ward (an investment banker and manager) and Mary-Anne Westley (a communications manager); married Timothy Ashworth "Tip" Meckel (a geologist); children: two sons. Education: Williams College, B.A.; University of Montana, M.F.A.

ADDRESSES:

Home—Waterville, ME. E-mail—[email protected].

CAREER:

Writer; worked variously as a teacher at Athens College, Athens, Greece, and as a creative writing teacher at the University of Texas, Austin; also worked at the University of Montana Mansfield Library, in Interlibrary Loan, and for several Internet start-up companies; contributor to the Austin Chronicle.

AWARDS, HONORS:

Austin Chronicle short story contest, third place, for Miss Montana's Wedding Day, 1999; Violet Crown Book Award, for Sleep toward Heaven.

WRITINGS:

NOVELS

Sleep toward Heaven, MacAdam/Cage Publishing (San Francisco, CA), 2003.

How to Be Lost, MacAdam/Cage Publishing (San Francisco, CA), 2004.

Forgive Me, Random House (New York, NY), 2007.

Contributor to books, including Politically Inspired, edited by Stephen Elliott and Gabriel Kram, MacAdam/Cage Publishing (San Francisco, CA), 2003. Short fiction has appeared in periodicals, including Mississippi Review, Story Quarterly, New Delta Review, and the Austin Chronicle, and on the Web site Salon.com.

ADAPTATIONS:

Film rights for Sleep toward Heaven were acquired by Sandra Bullock and Fortis Films, a division of Warner Brothers.

SIDELIGHTS:

When New York native Amanda Eyre Ward moved to Austin, Texas, to teach at the University of Texas, she could not ignore the frequent news reports of murders and executions in the state. "Just when I moved to Texas, there were executions on the news every day," Ward told Ray Routhier in an interview for the Portland Press Herald in Maine. "The aspect that seemed most interesting to me was the seven women on death row. I was told they watched Oprah together and made afghans together," Ward continued. Although she was never able to interview any of the women, she thoroughly researched them and their pasts. "I sort of got obsessed," Ward admitted.

The result of her work, whether dedication or obsession, is her first novel, Sleep toward Heaven, which was published in 2003. The three women in this tale, each touched by violence and murder in some way, provide three distinct narratives that weave together into the novel. Karen Lowens, known as the Highway Honey because she robbed and killed her victims at rest stops, sits on death row, ravaged by AIDS and condemned to die for the murders of men she says she killed in self-defense. Karen seeks peace with herself, her victims, and her traumatic childhood before facing the deadly injection. Celia Mills mourns for her husband, Henry, Karen's final victim, who was shot during a botched convenience store robbery; she drifts through life in a near stupor, wondering if she can ever forgive the woman who took her beloved Henry from her. Into their lives enters Dr. Franny Wren, the prison doctor, who struggles to reconcile her profession as a healer with the fact that she treats women who know to the minute when they are scheduled to die. Franny also deals with her flight from her fiancé and New York home after a young cancer patient dies in agony following a procedure she recommended. These three lives grow ever closer together until they finally intersect during an oppressively hot Texas summer.

"Ward's impressive debut novel is a powerhouse of melancholic emotions channeled through the jagged lives of her intricate cast of female characters," remarked Elsa Gaztambide in Booklist. The author's "spare but psychologically rich portraits are utterly convincing," observed a Publishers Weekly reviewer. "Ward's no-nonsense, unflinching prose and her complex but never confounding structure make this novel very tough to put down," commented Pam Houston in O, the Oprah Magazine. "But her greater triumph is her ability to humanize all of these characters" in the novel and make them recognizably individual and distinctly human.

In 2004, Ward's second novel, How to Be Lost, was published. In a review of the book for People Curtis Sittenfeld observed, "Ward's depiction of family, with its attendant love and guilt … will keep you turning pages." The book's protagonist, Caroline Winters, is reading through a magazine when she spots a picture of a young woman who resembles what Winters has always imagined her sister, who was abducted fifteen years earlier, would look like as an adult. Carol Haggas, writing in Booklist, called the book "a read-in-one-sitting treat, a delightfully satisfying blend of hip humor and poignant longing."

Forgive Me, which was released in 2007, tells the story of Nadine Morgan, a thirty-something journalist named after the famous South African novelist, Nadine Gordimer. Like her namesake, Nadine is strongly against apartheid, despite being a white woman of privilege. However, her career takes her all over the world, and she lives her life primarily on the edge of danger, reporting on big stories that frequently find her ruffling feathers. At the start of the book, she is at her father's bed-and-breakfast on Cape Cod, recovering from a nearly fatal experience at the hands of some Mexican drug traffickers she encountered while working on a story. Barely recovered, she is anxious to get to South Africa where individuals oppressed by apartheid are in the middle of testifying before the Truth and Reconciliation Commission. Having lived there, Nadine feels a particular personal tie to the goings on, especially the testimony relating to the killing of a young white teacher from her town who was murdered by a black mob. A contributor for Kirkus Reviews found Ward's use of flashbacks beneficial both to the structure of the novel and to the reader's understanding of the history of South Africa and apartheid. The reviewer added: "The journal episodes, meanwhile, are a distraction, the rare wrong note in a tightly constructed and oddly romantic novel." Evelyn Beck, reviewing for Library Journal, remarked that "one cannot help but be moved by the characters' desperate desire to find peace and meaning in a bewildering world."

BIOGRAPHICAL AND CRITICAL SOURCES:

PERIODICALS

Austin Chronicle, May 9, 2003, Marc Savlov, "Ward Wows Warners Dept."

Booklist, March 15, 2003, Elsa Gaztambide, review of Sleep toward Heaven, p. 1277; September 1, 2004, Carol Haggas, review of How to Be Lost, p. 66.

Kirkus Reviews, February 15, 2003, review of Sleep toward Heaven, p. 268; August 15, 2004, review of How to Be Lost, p. 776; April 1, 2007, review of Forgive Me.

Library Journal, April 15, 2007, Evelyn Beck, review of Forgive Me, p. 77.

O, the Oprah Magazine, April, 2003, Pam Houston, "Her Final Days: A First Novel Imagines Life on Death Row," pp. 149-152.

People, November 8, 2004, Curtis Sittenfeld, review of How to Be Lost, p. 60.

Portland Press Herald (Portland, ME), March 14, 2004, Ray Routhier, "Auspicious Debut; The Waterville Author's Revelatory First Novel Binds the Lives of Three Very Different Women, Including a Convicted Murderer on Death Row," p. 10E.

Publishers Weekly, March 3, 2003, review of Sleep toward Heaven, pp. 54-55; August 9, 2004, review of How to Be Lost, p. 228.

Texas Monthly, August, 2003, Mike Shea, "Killing Time: Two Young Novelists Offer Compelling Portraits of Serial Murderers—One Skin-Crawlingly Odd, the Other Surprisingly Sympathetic," pp. 62-64.