On today’s episode, we get to chat with southern novelist Mindy Friddle, whose third book (and first domestic thriller) Her Best Self is out now from Regal House Publishing. Her Best Self includes the perspectives of a constellation of characters, including first-person point-of-view from the protagonist, a small-town matriarch, as well as third-person from a range of characters including her husband, adult children, a neurodiverse grandson with an affinity for animals, and the antagonist, a magnetic grifter. Joining us for a conversation about the value in bringing not only multiple POVs to a thriller, but branching those perspectives out in all directions, Mindy casts the spotlight on puzzling through perspective, and building suspense.

Mindy Friddle is author of the novel, Secret Keepers, (winner of the Willie Morris Award for Southern Fiction). The Garden Angel, her first novel and SIBA bestseller, was selected for Barnes & Noble’s Discover Great New Writers. The South Carolina Arts Commission awarded Mindy a prose fellowship, and she has twice won the state’s Fiction Prize. Her stories and essays have appeared in numerous journals. She holds an MFA from Warren Wilson and lives on Edisto Island, South Carolina.

You can find Mindy online at mindyfriddle.com,

and on Instagram @mindyfriddle

Her Best Self is available from Regal House Publishing or support your local bookstore & this podcast by getting your copy of Her Best Self at Bookshop.org

A little about today's host-

Shawna Rodrigues left her award-winning career in the public sector in 2019 to consult and publish her first novel Beyond the Pear Blossoms. Her desire to connect and help others led to the launch of her podcast The Grit Show shortly thereafter. When she learned women host only 27% of podcasts, her skills and passion led to the founding of the Authentic Connections Network. She now helps mission-driven entrepreneurs better connect with their audiences by providing full-service podcast production and through a community for Entrepreneurs & Podcasters – EPAC. Podcasting is her primary focus, so she continues to support the writing community through this podcast, and her writing time is mostly focused on anthologies.

She offers a free 7 Steps to Perfect Your Podcast Title to anyone interested in launching a podcast. You can also follow her on Instagram-@ShawnaPodcasts, and learn more about the network and community at https://linktr.ee/37by27.

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Welcome to Author Express. Thanks for checking us out. This is the podcast where you give us 15 minutes of your time and we give you a chance to hear the voice behind the pages and get to know your new favorite author in a new light. I'm Shawna Rodrigues, one of your hosts, a fellow author, host of The Grit Show and Authenticity Amplified Podcast, and the founder of of Authentic Connections Podcast Network, which makes this podcast possible. Let me tell you a little about today's guest. Mindy Friddle's Southern fiction has been called down to earth and steeped in a sense of place by The Washington Post. A comic delight by Kirkus Reviews and beguiling by booklist. Her 3rd novel and first domestic thriller, Her Best Self, as New York Times bestseller, Patty Callahan Henry puts it, is a heart thumping, witty, and deeply layered novel about the things that matter.

Can't put down thriller with a literary voice. A Siva best selling author, she's won the Willie Morris award for Southern Fiction and has been selected for Barnes and Noble's Discover Great New Writers. Mindy holds an MFA from Warren Wilson and lives on Edisto Island, South Carolina. And we get to visit with her today. Thank you so much for being with us, Mindy.

Oh, thank you for having me. I'm thrilled to be here.

Yes. I can't wait to learn more about your new novel and more about your writing process and more about you. So we'll start with a little bit about you. Tell us something interesting about where you are from.

Well, I was born in the upstate of South Carolina, Greenville, South Carolina. I was an army brat, so lived all over the world. And I'm in I'm in South Carolina now on the coast near Charleston on Edisto Island, which has always been my dream to live here since I was a child and we vacationed here as a family. And I have been here 5 years today.

Today. I love that it's been your childhood dream to live there. My childhood dream was to live on this hill behind where I grew up. And somebody said, you can't just build a house anywhere, so I let go of that dream. But I love your dream more, living on an island. That is so wonderful. You made that happen. Congratulations.

Thank you. I I love it.

Yes. And so that dream, was it something that took a long time to, like, meticulously make happen or just once things came together, just boom, it happened immediately?

Yes. I mean, I had nurtured the dream as I said for years. And the circumstances just came together within weeks when the opportunity came for us to move away from the upstate. I mean, it was pretty magical how it happened. And I'm grateful every day that I'm here. I love living by the sea and the transcendent maritime forest and the ocean and the tidal creates and all the birds and the wildlife that come with that.

Oh, it sounds magical. I'm so excited for it. I love that you're grateful for that and see, like, the magical piece of it all coming together. That's so incredible. That's lovely. So to get to know you a little bit better, I'm gonna ask you one of those big questions that we make a little smaller. So if you could have dinner with anyone, living or dead, who would it be, and what's the one thing that you would serve?

Although I'm a novelist, I would love to have dinner with Walt Whitman.

Mhmm.

Because his Leaves of Grass I mean, reading that is it feeds your soul. It's such a transcendent, beautiful piece of work, and it's so optimistic. You can just pick it up and read any passage, and it's just very soaring. And I would love to have dinner with him. And I just feel like he's so wise and compassionate and such a fantastic creative mentor. And we would have chocolate cake and whiskey.

That is a good combination. I like the chocolate cake and whiskey. I'd have a little balance with that. I love it. I think he'd be pleased.

I think so. Yeah.

Yes. I like that. And you could have it on your island too. So because we get to choose those things. So I think he'd enjoy your island as well. Yes. That's beautiful. So tell us about your book in a sentence or 2.

Her Best Self is about a woman, Janelle Wolfe, who uncovers the truth behind her mysterious car accident with the help of this very alluring and menacing psychic killer. And in the process, Janelle unearth scandals that disrupt her family and her community. And it's a literary thriller.

Yes. So with this and literary thriller. This is your first literary thriller. Is that correct?

That's correct. It's like my 3rd novel. My first two novels were literary, southern novels, a lot of family dynamics. There are family dynamics in this, but there's, a couple of ticking clocks and a crime that happens and the mystery around it. So

Yeah. So what really drew you to bring the thriller, the suspense element into this book? What could have compelled that for you?

I guess I've always wanted to write a novel of suspense and the protagonist, and there's a constellation of characters in it, but the protagonist is Janelle Wolf, as I mentioned. And I started with her and I didn't really know where it was going. I just Her voice came to me very, in a very strong way. I just started free writing one day. She was wondering about the circumstances about something that had happened to her years before they had just totally upended her life. So I wanted to find out more about that and so did she. And so I just Mhmm. Followed her narrative and it led to some dark things.

But I will say that her best self also has humor in it. It's not totally dark. So there are some winks of humor among the dark twists. It's a friend of mine.

Well, you almost need that balance. Right? It's like the heavier you get, the more you need to have the light so you can see the balance of the 2 because it can't just be all one thing. Right? So what part of the book was hardest for you to write?

You know, that's an interesting question because some of it came very quickly and other parts were slower and I had to research. So the parts that were slower and I had to research were the parts about the family business, for example. It's a firm that employs temporary workers. And I had to sort of research about malfeasance and embezzlement and few things like that. I had to research a little bit about the town, even though it's fictional, it's based on a couple of towns. And I had to pull from some facts about the history of the town and what its industry was and that kind of thing. So I love research, but you have to know when, you know, not to get sucked into it too much, because it it, you know, you can spend days weeks. And you don't wanna shoehorn stuff in it just because you think it's interesting.

So there's a lot more balance to that part of it.

Yes. It is interesting how that happens because the creative process and the research process are almost 2 different angles and to try to figure out, like, which to focus on. And then that is such a great point about what's interesting and what's necessary. It couldn't be 2 different things and trying to, like, find that balance of, you know, you want your book interesting, but not to get off too much on those trails and to keep the things that are needed for the story. That's great. So So tell us more about you and your writing journey. Like, is this where you thought you would be at this point in time, or is it kind of your journey has taken its own path?

Both. I started out as a newspaper reporter. Actually, I was a journalist in college at the college paper, and that's what got me my first job in a small weekly paper in South Carolina. Then I worked at daily newspaper. So I was covering all sorts of things as a general assignment reporter. I mean, everything from school board meetings, town council meetings to, you know, women's luncheons and features. And so that's really great for a writer because you're out in the world. You've gotta talk to all sorts of people about all kind of subjects you don't really know about, and you have a deadline every day.

After a few years of being a reporter, I started writing fiction, but I really didn't have confidence. It took me several years to find my footing. And I had been so used to writing in a certain way, very tight, very succinctly. And I had to give myself permission to to as one of my writing teachers said, you can stop being so damn clear. It can be lyrical, you can kind of explore. For this novel, I have her best self, there are some embedded newspaper articles. They're fiction, but I actually used my newspaper reporting experience to write these articles that For the Haven Weekly Observer in the town that is Functions as a Greek chorus for the town, what townspeople are being told, what they are thinking about characters. And there are some hard news articles that talk about the crime that reveals things that the characters don't know.

And there's some lifestyle pieces. Janelle has one and one of her her frenemies in the past that she tries to piece together. So I actually wrote those articles to sort of explore the characters, but I ended up, my editor encouraged me to actually include them and embed them in the novel, which I ended up doing.

That is so fun. And what a great use of your past experience and expertise to kind of add this unique elements to make your novel more unique and more reflective of you and what you bring to the table. That is so I love how unique that is. That is great.

Thank you. It it was actually really fun.

Well, what are you working on now? Is there anything for I know you just had your book come out and you're still, like, closing up the tour and sharing about it, but do you have anything else that you're working on?

I write short fiction as well, and I'm actually working on more than one project. I used to just limit myself to writing 1, but I find enough I can kinda circle around and vary with my projects. Come back after I've drafted a novel, for example, and after I've written a short fiction piece and see it with new eyes, it helps. So I'm doing that. And I really don't have titles or really don't really have the handles to talk about this yet.

Yeah. Just keeping those juices flowing and exploring more things. That's wonderful. This has been such a great opportunity to get to know you and in your new book a little bit better. Thank you so much for joining us. What is the best way for people to connect with you and follow you and get to know you more?

Well, you can always visit my website, which has a lot more information about the book and where to get it, about all 3 of my novels. And it's easy. It's mindyfriddle.com, and that's M I N D Y F as in Frank R I D D L E. Or you can find me on Instagram @mindyfriddle.

Perfect. And we'll have that in the show notes so people can easily find that. And our last question for you, what is a book or story that inspires you the most?

And I'm glad you said a book because there's so many. Yes. I'm gonna tell you 1. And that is The Heart is a Lonely Hunter by Carson McCullers. Also The Member Of The Wedding. My parents gave me her novel, The Heart is a Lonely Hunter when I was about 12 for a Christmas present. And I was in awe of the beauty of that novel. And I was amazed that she'd been so re, you know, young when she wrote it.

And of course, she's this southern writer that's very storied and admired. And I'm just still blown away. I still reread that novel every couple years. It's beautiful. It's wise, empathetic, and it really made the question on me early on. And I was like, one day I wanna write a southern novel.

Oh, I love that. Thank you so much for sharing. Thank you so much for being here with us today, and congratulation on your latest novel, and thank you for sharing with us about it.

Oh, it was my pleasure and so much fun. Thank you for having me.

Thank you for joining us. I hope you take a second to give us stars or a review on your favorite podcasting platform. It really makes a difference in folks being able to find us. We'll be here again next Wednesday. Follow us on Instagram @authorexpresspodcast to see who's coming up next. And don't forget, keep it express to keep it interesting.