Paying tribute to her mother before she passed inspired Lucille Guarino’s first novel, Like Wine. Several years later in 2022, after amassing drawers full of half-finished stories and ideas for stories, she woke up from a dream and went straight to her laptop and didn’t stop until it was finished. And in March of 2024 Elizabeth’s Mountain went from concept to publication and became a recipient of the Reader’s Choice Award and the Literary Titan Gold Book Award as well as a finalist for the Hawthorne Award.
An avid reader of most genres, Lucille admits to loving emotion-heavy stories with strong female characters that are as realistic as they are inspiring. She has lived most of her life in northern New Jersey and now lives in Lexington, South Carolina with her husband, and close to her two daughters and grandchildren.
Her newest novel, Lunch Tales: Suellen, is scheduled to launch in February of 2025, and is the Grand Prize Winner in A Woman’s Write 2023 writing competition. Suellen is personal for her, depicting the trials and tribulations of so many women, every one of them a champion in their own story.
An interview with Lucille Guarino
Why do you write in the genre that you do?
Emotion-heavy women’s fiction is the genre that captures me the most.
Besides my love of books, where I’ve experienced more living than I could manage in one lifetime, writing them takes the top spot. Imagine living all those experiences we read about in books and still coming out of them unscathed, where every book is its own world that we get to visit for a while.
Through reading, I’ve experienced shock, longing, hurt, and misfortune. I must have died over a hundred times, and I’ve fallen in love even more times than I can count. And I never get tired of it.
I’ve put myself in the shoes of some of the most colorful and inspirational characters. I’ve cried with them, laughed with them, and learned from them.
The genre that always seems to stay with me—even long after I’ve finished those books—is the one where the character overcomes difficulties and hardships. The outsider, the resistor, the sufferer. The disheartened, and the griever.
When my granddaughter, Sofia, was around sixteen months old, she and her older sister, Olivia, were in a contest to see who could eat a very sour candy without making a face.
No matter how many times Sofia tried, she couldn’t keep her face still. Frustrated and wincing, she finally cried out, “But I want to be a champion!”
Haven’t we all felt that way? No matter what age, we want to champion our choices, and be the champion in our own story.
In creating characters for my novels, I try not to forget that. I will advocate for them – whatever their struggle or sacrifice – they are to become the champions in their own life. Hopefully, their ‘real life’ stories will champion others.
Are you more of a fan of plot-driven stories or character-driven stories?
Character-driven all the way. I love following a character’s arc throughout a story, seeing how they grow and change, and the emotional tools they use to navigate their complicated situations.
It can be subtle or radical, but it’s the inner journey that speaks to me the most, the thought process of what they’re going through and how they cope, which is why I like the intimacy of writing in the first person. I like getting inside my character’s heads.
In my novel, Elizabeth’s Mountain, Elizabeth is ninety when she tells her story—spirited and wise. Her granddaughter, Amanda, is selfless but resolute in her goals. Joe is slightly wounded, yet reliable and conscientious. Jesse is impulsive and driven.
In my first Lunch Tales novel, which will be published in early 2025, Suellen is snarky and rebellious. All of them have interchangeable weaknesses and strengths, often competing, sometimes overtaking. And then there are those bewildering times when weakness turns to strength. The plot fuels the story forward, but an interesting character fills it with curiosity and vigor.
Do you ever use dreams as inspiration for your writing?
I do use dreams as inspiration for my stories. Elizabeth’s Mountain came to me in a dream that followed a phone conversation I had with my ninety-two-year-old aunt. She was living alone in Florida during the pandemic, and I could feel her loneliness.
I thought about what it must be like to have lived ninety-some years, all that she had seen and lived through, and now going through an isolating time. After waking from a dream, I went right to my laptop and started writing Elizabeth’s Mountain, and didn’t stop until it was finished. Two years later, it went from concept to publication.
Dreams are very powerful. They capture the imagination in very insightful and creative ways. Some of my best ideas came from dreams.
Fill in the blank: “People will like your book if they like stories about…”
Elizabeth’s Mountain explores enduring relationships through a lens of 1950s American historical and contemporary romance. People who are drawn to stories that span different periods and showcase the complexities of life and love will like this multigenerational romance novel.
Alternating between the perspectives of Elizabeth and Amanda, readers will journey through love, trauma, and fear as they tackle life’s challenges. The parallel drawn between Elizabeth’s past and Amanda’s present is particularly poignant, their male counterparts, Joseph and Jesse, enriching the story with their steadfast support and commitment. While this story is under the category of women’s fiction, men too, have said that they enjoyed this book as it also delves into the intricacies of family saga.
If Hollywood bought the rights to your book, would you want it to be turned into a movie or series?
This is a fascinating question because many of my early readers who reviewed Elizabeth’s Mountain have said that it should be a movie, so their impression of its telling was a lot like mine when I wrote it.
While writing Elizabeth’s Mountain, it played out in my mind like a movie in all its cinematic glory. I could even hear music playing. For Elizabeth, it was Teresa Brewer singing “Till I Waltz Again With You.” For Amanda, Ed Sheeran’s “Thinking Out Loud.” A well-told simple story with authentic characters, the balance of tense scenes with peaceful ones, the imagery of the scenic Blue Ridge Mountains…it has all the elements for a good movie.
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