The Night Garden

In her first novel since the acclaimed memoir The Toaster Broke, So We're Getting Married, Pamela Holm brings us a poignant, funny story about monogamy, motherhood, and the wonders of gardening. Dawn, an exterminator by day and an artist by night, and her charmingly morbid nine-year-old daughter, Jewel, find themselves with a room to rent out when they move out of Dawn's boyfriend's house and into a new home. They soon hear from Harlan, a frustrated documentary filmmaker whose world is quietly crashing down on him too. Over the course of a year, Dawn, Jewel, and Harlan's worlds become intertwined as they transform their lives and bring the neglected garden of their new home back to life. About the author: Pamela Holm is a freelance artist living in San Francisco. She has written a myriad of essays that have been published in a variety of newspapers and magazines including Image Magazine, SOMA, San Francisco Magazine, the San Francisco Chronicle, and the Denver Post. The Toaster Broke, So We're Getting Married, is her first memoir helping her to discover that laughter is the best therapy and writing continues to be her passion. From the AuthorAs Denzil and I made plans for our future, I couldn't help but see everything through a filter of the past. I had spent the past several years of my life as a single mother struggling to make ends meet while working as a freelance artist. After dodging calls from collection agencies, contemplating buying a $5,000 wedding gown seemed surreal, and after my pantheon of bad boyfriends, the fact that I actually wanted to get married still amazed me. Partly in an effort to deal with these confusing emotions and partly because I was so amused by my own strange behavior, I began to write about getting married. For six months I wrote about everything I thought and did. I wrote pages and pages, I filled notebooks, I scribbled on the backs of ATM receipts and napkins, anything I could get my hands on. Post-it notes with cryptic messages like "burn CD for dinner," and "a veil that made me look like a beekeeper" were stuck to the walls around my desk. Writing a memoir was never my intent, but I was happily surprised when these notes decided to turn themselves into a book.