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ABOUT THE AUTHOR

J. M. Van Dyck is an award-winning novelist and freelance writer. Her published articles take on issues of change and transition.  Her fiction provides insight into families, relationships and the conflict of being human. She was born in Philadelphia and now resides on Florida’s left coast.

IN MY OWN WORDS

Love.

It’s both colloquial and elusive. Accessible to all, yet largely indefinable. Overrated and undervalued simultaneously.

Love wears stiletto heels and miniskirts. Love has large hands that hold the tiniest fingers. It jumps on sofas singing songs; it sulks in hidden places, peering from fearful eyes. Love is a sonnet and is also the quiet breath of sleep. It is angry and demanding. It is selfless. It is impatient. It waits for a decade, for a lifetime, unrequited. It is what we want. It is what we throw away. It is all we know and what we try to forget.

I became a writer because I had a perspective to share and a creativity using words as my medium. I had ideas about life that I wanted to tell you about and an ability to make you step back and interpret my work through your own experience. When my work is assembled now—four novels of high-end women’s fiction and a memoir—the theme of every story is love. Pure, dirty, simple and tangled. Love:

The O’Malley Trilogy (2008) – Five generations of mothers and daughters struggle with how to love each other by letting go.

Finding Frances (2010) – A son loves his mother enough to let her die as she wishes.

The Illusion of Secondhand Smoke (2011) – A grieving, abused woman learns to leave her past behind and love herself.

Girl in the Office (available) – A woman brings her heart to her workplace, and the men she works with think their lust just might be love.

Little Brother (available) – The story of my younger brother’s opiate addiction and how love is all I choose to remember after his death.

Storytelling informs. It contains the wisdom of the ages. It makes you remember and helps you forget.