Suzanne Ketchum Adams is a
storyteller and writer living in the Greater Boston area. She has told stories at The Moth, Stories from the Stage, and other area venues. She is the Storytelling Director at Voices on the Green, a local storytelling series, where she coaches others to tell their own stories on stage. Suzanne has completed a novel, Family Scrapbook, for which she is seeking representation and publication.
Family Scrapbook is an upmarket family saga, of 93,184 words. Like Chorus by Rebecca Kauffman, Little Monsters by Adrienne Brodeur, and The Dutch House by Ann Patchett, Family Scrapbook examines the collision of memory, secrets, and sibling relations in the wake of an absent mother. Its structure of chapters alternating between past and present mirrors that of The Lost Girls by Heather Young, agented by your colleague Michelle Brower. Sally, childless and eight years sober, yearns to mend fences with her younger sister Grace and connect with her teenage nephew, but her guilt over a drunken transgression a decade earlier, two divorces, and doubts about her own sexual orientation leave her feeling stuck. In the midst of Sally’s attempts to face her past, a stranger contacts Sally, Grace, and their older sister Kit with a photograph of their long-dead mother, pictured with a man and a baby none of them have ever seen. To Sally and Kit the photograph is the beginning of an answer to their mother’s year-long disappearance from their Maine town during their childhood. But Grace, born after their mother’s return and reconciliation with their father, had been blissfully ignorant of their mother’s absence before her own birth, and reacts to the news with shock and denial. The family’s crisis and whirlwind of discovery is heightened when Angela, the stranger who sent the photos, suddenly shows up in town.
Suzanne is currently seeking representation and publication for her recently completed novel, Family Scrapbook. Secrets unravel when 3 sisters receive a mysterious photograph of their long-dead mother. Family Scrapbook is, an upmarket family saga of 93,184 words. Like Chorus by Rebecca Kauffman, Little Monsters by Adrienne Brodeur, and The Dutch House by Ann Patchett, Family Scrapbook examines the collision of memory, secrets, and sibling relations in the wake of an absent mother. Sally, childless and eight years sober, yearns to mend fences with her younger sister Grace and connect with her teenage nephew, but her guilt over a drunken transgression a decade earlier, two divorces, and doubts about her own sexual orientation leave her feeling stuck. In the midst of Sally’s attempts to face her past, a stranger contacts Sally, Grace, and their older sister Kit with a photograph of their long-dead mother, pictured with a man and a baby none of them have ever seen. To Sally and Kit the photograph is the beginning of an answer to their mother’s year-long disappearance from their Maine town during their childhood. But Grace, born after their mother’s return and reconciliation with their father, had been blissfully ignorant of their mother’s absence before her own birth, and reacts to the news with shock and denial. The family’s crisis and whirlwind of discovery is heightened when Angela, the stranger who sent the photos, suddenly shows up in town.