NEWS FEATURE: Lynne Hinton’s New Novel Tells a Darker Story

c. 2004 Religion News Service (UNDATED) An odd alliance between a widow and her husband’s illegitimate adult daughter emerges from the tangled emotions at play in Lynne Hinton’s newest book. Love, loss, infidelity, betrayal, grief and suffering all come into play in the popular writer’s novel, “The Last Odd Day” (HarperSanFrancisco). In this slim volume, […]

c. 2004 Religion News Service

(UNDATED) An odd alliance between a widow and her husband’s illegitimate adult daughter emerges from the tangled emotions at play in Lynne Hinton’s newest book.

Love, loss, infidelity, betrayal, grief and suffering all come into play in the popular writer’s novel, “The Last Odd Day” (HarperSanFrancisco).


In this slim volume, the popular author departs from the simple sweetness of her earlier works, which included “Friendship Cake” and two other books in the Hope Springs series. This time around, she still examines relationships, but it is a darker story and Jean, her lead character, is a loner and not part of a community.

“She doesn’t have a community like the women in Hope Springs,” Hinton says. “She has managed her life all by herself. But that’s one of the things that she realizes has been a flaw in her living.”

Hinton, a preacher’s daughter and native North Carolinian, was ordained in the American Baptist Church. She is a writer and minister who worked as a hospice chaplain and took a year off to study filmmaking at the N.C. Schools of the Arts.

She is white, but her churches have included predominantly white and predominantly black congregations in the United Church of Christ. She first encountered the African-American, Asian-American and Native American women authors who inspired her to write when she attended seminary at Pacific School of Religion in Berkeley, Calif.

Her new book sometimes resonates with the cadence of mountain folk. Other times, the interior monologue of Jean is as ragged as the grief that pervades her life. And, sometimes one can hear the theologian speaking.

This book, Hinton says, draws more upon her worldview than earlier novels.

“The one theme I like to work with in my writing is the notion of surprising friendship,” says Hinton, who now lives in New Mexico. “The one thing I would hope for is that readers’ hearts might open up just a little bit and make room for somebody they had originally written off. To me those relationships which surprise us with grace and joy surprise us the best.”

Far too often, people don’t open themselves to relationships they think won’t meet their needs, she says. It happened to Lynne Hinton. It happens to Jean in “The Last Odd Day” when she meets Lilly and must confront her own failings as a wife.


When Hinton assumed leadership of her last pastorate, First Congregational United Church of Christ in Asheboro, N.C., she had a tough time with the woman who had been its previous pastor. So she avoided her.

“Personality-wise, she was very, very different from myself,” Hinton says. “She was dignified, sophisticated, by the book. And I’m loose and I’m undignified and folksy and fly-by-the-seat-of-my-pants as a pastor. We had a hard time with each other. I didn’t really want anything from her and I don’t think she was sure of my pastoral responsibilities.

“I just closed myself off to her. It turned out one day she came to see me and we talked seriously. I told her how difficult it was for me and she said to me, `What I really came here for is I would like for us to be friends.’ I worked at her soup kitchen on Wednesdays and even though she is not the friend I would call at 3 o’clock in the morning, she still became a very important friend of mine.”

Unlikely friendships and uncommon liaisons knit her new book together. Hinton says she doesn’t really have themes in mind when she begins her books. But she admits to being “fascinated by unlikely allies. I deal with it in my writing because I want that in my life.

“I like having friends who aren’t like me, who don’t look like me or have a similar background,” she said. “I think it enriches my life to move outside of my comfort zone and develop relationships with folks with whom I think I have nothing in common.”

In the novel, Jean ends up living in that kind of world. She must face her husband’s infidelity while she wrestles with her own grief. She must mourn past sadness. Eventually she faces the unexpected with honesty and grace.


(Cecile S. Holmes, longtime religion writer, is an assistant professor of journalism at the University of South Carolina. Her e-mail address is cholmes (at)sc.edu).

DEA/JL END HOLMES

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