THE WRITER’S EYE with guest author, Rhonda McKnight

This month we delve into a rich topic for inspiration:  family history. Award-winning author Rhonda McKnight explains how the idea for her first Lowcountry Southern women’s novel originated from her parents’ family stories. 

 Rhonda and I met a couple or more years ago when we were invited to participate on an author panel at the Mount Pleasant branch of the Charleston Library System in South Carolina.  Shortly after we met, I read Rhoda’s novel The Thing About Home and was transported with her protagonist Casey Black—a disgraced social media influencer in search of refuge and connection to a family she’s never known—to the beautiful South Carolina Lowcountry on a three-hundred-acre farm.

Rhonda was a 2024 Christy Award finalist and received the Emma Award for The Thing About Home.  She has also written several other award-winning bestsellers, including Unbreak My Heart and An Inconvenient Friend. She writes book club fiction and romance about complex characters in crisis.  Here, she talks about how  family stories inspired her current novel: 

I'm a writer and anything you say or do may end up in my next book. 

There are T-shirts, mugs, and certainly no shortage of good-natured jokes that allude to the idea that writers write about people they know and sometimes themselves. I am guilty, because although I write fiction and make up most of the events in my books, my inspiration of late has come from people who no longer live…my ancestors. For me, storytelling has become both an act of remembrance and a way to honor the resilience and beauty of the people who came before me. 

But no one could have ever convinced me that I would be telling these kinds of stories. I was a romance author who moved to South Carolina to begin caregiving with my mother. I came up with the idea for my first Lowcountry Southern women’s fiction novel while listening to my parents tell stories about our family—stories I never learned when I was growing up. 

The past and present speak to one another through dual timelines in my current novel, Bitter and Sweet. It is the story of two estranged sisters who because of their desire to honor their grandmother’s request, work together to reopen their family’s eighty-seven-year-old restaurant. Along the way they learn complicated truths about themselves and their family history. Nearly half of the book takes place during the years 1915-1938, so readers spend time with their great-great-grandmother, Tabitha Cooper, as she’s attempting to build the family’s restaurant business in Charleston, South Carolina. 

Bitter and Sweet’s contemporary story was inspired by the death of my maternal grandmother, who passed away during childbirth. The high Black Maternal mortality rate in the United States has received media attention over the last couple of years; not nearly enough, but more than in the past. I’ve published twenty-seven books. It was time for me to write a story that addressed this issue and the heartbreak it leaves families to grapple with. 

The historical thread of the book came from another remarkable woman in my family: one of my aunts. She was like a mother to my mother, and therefore a grandmother figure to me. This aunt, much like the character Tabitha, saved her own life through her skill in the kitchen. 

Stories like Tabitha’s matter because so many of us have women in our histories whose talents—cooking, sewing, quilting, growing food, canning vegetables—literally kept our families alive during the Great Depression. I always say recognizing and honoring that resourcefulness and resilience is my reasonable service. 

Many authors set stories in the Lowcountry, but there are relatively few Black authors telling these tales, despite the fact that Black people make up over twenty-seven percent of the Lowcountry’s population—almost twice the national average. The descendants of enslaved Africans, including the Gullah people, still live on the land where their ancestors were freed from enslavement. They continue carrying on traditions and language that have survived centuries. Yet their voices are underrepresented in Southern literature about the region. I believe in the power of fiction to keep those stories alive in a way that feels as real as sitting at the kitchen table with an elder telling you how things used to be. 

Though I will never deny being a Jersey girl at heart, South Carolina has folded around me like a warm and welcome blanket. I am strengthened and inspired by my family’s history, the land, and the ancestral foods that connect me to generations past. Every pot of perlou rice, every sweetgrass basket, every hymn sung in church is an echo of something older than me. I want my books to be that kind of conversation: intimate, rich with detail, and filled with love for my ancestors. Their stories are my inheritance. And as long as I’m able, I will keep telling them.