Writes First Novel in Two Weeks
Davis wrote her first novel, 1987's Good-Bye and Keep Cold, one summer while her two sons were away on a two-week vacation to California with their father. "It was the first time I had been separated from them for more than just a few days, and it was awful. I remember I said goodbye to my sons at the door. I shut the door and said, 'I need something to keep me company.'" When she sat down in front of her typewriter to find that companionship in her fiction, Davis didn't intend to write the full-length novel that would become the highly praised Good-Bye and Keep Cold. She also didn't consciously write for a YA audience; that was the determination of her editor and the novel's publisher. "I assume this means there's still a lot of teenager in my soul," Davis once commented, "and that's okay by me. There is so much really wonderful writing in the Young Adult category that I feel honored to have a place there."
Twenty-two-year-old Edda Combs, the protagonist and narrator of Good-Bye and Keep Cold, recalls her childhood spent in eastern Kentucky, during which time she was the primary caretaker to a mother who was widowed and emotionally troubled.
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