Nancy and her mother Jane Wright Patton
April, 2005

Nancy Thayer

I was born December 14, 1943 (Sagittarius!) in Emporia, Kansas, the first of three children, and for six years, the only one.  My parents read to me a lot, and from Winnie-the-Pooh on, I knew I wanted to be a writer. 

I  grew up in Wichita, Kansas, where I worked, in high school, as a “soda jerk” at a drugstore.  What a great job!  I was allowed to make myself  any kind of sundae I wanted.  . . .my specialty was hot fudge sauce, marshmallow fluff, whipped cream, and nuts.  I didn’t really care about the ice cream.

I attended the University of Wichita, got married at twenty, and moved to Kansas City, where I finished my bachelor’s degree and got a master’s in English literature.  I also got to travel with my academic, peripatetic, husband.  We lived  in Iowa, Paris,  Kansas City, Milwaukee, Amsterdam, Wisconsin, Vancouver, Massachusetts, and Helsinki before being divorced at the end of the seventies.

During my twenties I either taught freshmen English in various colleges or hid away at home, writing fiction I was too timid to send around.  I wish I had taken more creative writing courses.  I did take one at the University of Iowa taught by C.D.B. Bryan, who was immensely helpful.  I recommend writers’ workshops to any aspiring writers. 

Gradually my short stories were accepted by various college literary reviews, and in 1978 my first novel, Stepping, was accepted by Doubleday, who published it in January of 1980.

By then I was divorced, with a son, Josh, who was 5, and a daughter, Sam, who was 3.  We lived in Williamstown, Massachusetts, with two cats and one dog, who kept us safe and sane. 

In 1982, I flew to Nantucket to visit a friend, and met Charley Walters, who owns a music store where he sold  records back then, sells  CDs now, as well as, once again, records, which are now called “vinyl.”   We married in 1984, and since then we’ve lived on Nantucket island, in a wonderful old house built in 1840.  I’ve got a big half moon window in the attic, where I write and gaze out at the harbor, watching the lighthouses flash as the ferries and boats sail in and out.  We have two cats and, at the moment, no dog, which is fine, because Rex  thinks he’s a border collie, and herds me around the house, especially when it’s time to eat.

I’ve had fifteen novels published and hope to write as many more.  Most of my novels involve the theme of  families.   I’m fascinated by families.  (When I was young, I wrote a poem to my sister called “You are the flower, I am the weed.”)  Even now I can easily spend an hour talking with my blue eyed blond baby sister about whether our father loved her more than me.   I probably became a writer from trying to figure out families, but my own  children are still an endless sources of mystery, and I don‘t think I’ll ever  figure them out.  (No doubt a good thing!)

Josh is now 32.  He does mysterious thing with computers and runs his own software business, Xen Software LLC.  My daughter  Sam is an interfaith minister who teaches yoga in Northampton and  is director of the Agape  Interfaith Ministry.  My friends are part of my family, too, especially David Gillum, who is senior safety officer at the University of New Hampshire.  He started off as Josh’s partner and now is one of our family’s best friends and an endless source of support, information, and laughter.  I also treasure my friendship with Dionis Gauvin, a friend of my daughter’s.  I’ve watched Dionis go to Kyrgyzstan for the Peace Corps, to Yale Divinity School like Sam, and now she’s in law school at Hofstra University.  Next stop, the U.N.?  

For about ten years, I served on the  board of trustees of local library and helped start The Friends of the Nantucket Atheneum, which was an enormous pleasure.  When I was a child, our family made weekly trips to the library and came home with piles of books, feeling as satisfied as  misers with  wheelbarrows of gold.   Perhaps because I live on an island,  I’ve come to think of libraries as lighthouses for our souls.  No matter how strange the coast line or stormy the weather, they are there, beaming a steady light toward us, leading us toward knowledge, information, advice, laughter, consolation, beauty, peace, and hope.