I've never read any Mary Higgins Clark (1927-2020), but I've listened to Mary Higgins Clark and just finished hearing her memoir, Kitchen Privileges.
Whatever kind of writers you may be, dear readers who are writers: Kitchen is a must.
Over many years Ms. Clark persisted at her love, never giving up, developing her craft. The recipient of countess rejection letters, she maintained her sense of humor and joined writers' groups, constantly striving to make her short stories more appealing and improve her writing skills.
Never does she lose her cheery disposition found throughout the book, despite the many family tragedies she suffered: the early deaths of her father, husband, and two brothers. She lived to be 92 and died about a year ago.
The audio is blessed by her mellifluous voice which always adds to the enjoyment of a heard book when the author reads it whenever the author can come close to the beauty of Ms. Higgins' sounds. In the book, she mimics several characters in her life and successfully produces their voices, cadences, and inflections.
The publisher, Simon & Schuster, likens Kitchen to a Bronx version of Angela's Ashes, but I find the comparison a terrible exaggeration since there is no way Ms. Clark's upbringing remotely resembles that of the hardships endured by Frank McCourt and his family.
She was married three times, the first and last being happy unions, but the middle marriage lasted all of approximately two sentences, about as long the marriage itself (later, annulled), and this "intrusion" in the book's theme seems out-of-place and thrown in at the last minute, perhaps by a demanding editor to keep it honest?
This was one of those rare books I was sorry to see (or hear) end. Maybe, I will join the millions and read one of her 51 books, her second, Where Are The Children?, published originally in 1975 when she was 45 and now in its 75th printing, according to Wikipedia. Her first, Aspire to the Heavens, was plagued, she says in her memoir, by the title. It was re-issued as Mount Vernon Love Story in 2000, the year before Kitchen Privileges was published.
With five children suffering the sadness of the early death of their father and Ms. Clark alone to raise them, she wrote, rising daily at 5 a.m. when everyone else was sleeping. We can do it, too.
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