You may see elements of yourself in Mary Simses’ delicious summer romp, “The Wedding Thief,” the tale of two sisters in love with the same man.
We meet the Harringtons on the precipice of the wedding of Mariel (the pretty one) to Carter Pryce, the man who Sara (the smart one) is still in love with. When Mariel asks her to stand in for a bridesmaid who canceled, Sara decides to sabotage the nuptials and win Carter back.
Why did Simses dream up the bridesmaid-zilla tale?
“Ideas rarely land in my head fully formed,” admits the New Englander and longtime Costco member, who has spent the last two decades in Palm Beach working in the trust and estate law firm she opened in 2001 with her husband Bob.
She believes this story began germinating years ago at a party when and a box of conversation starters was passed around. Hers asked: Would you rather be the smartest person in the room, or the best looking? “I voted for smart,” says Simses, who didn’t think about it again until she observed an incident of sibling rivalry.
The novelist, who grew up an only child was intrigued, put the two ideas together and thought, “hmmm, that could make a good book.” When she told friends about the concept their reaction was: Woooo, that sounds juicy! She knew she was touching a nerve.
Tapping into topics that make readers say, “Woooo!” is an activity Simses has enjoyed since childhood. While she fantasized about becoming an author, her practical nature led her to major in journalism and later get a law degree. The J.D. landed her a 15-year position at a division of Prudential Insurance. “I really began to miss writing, and sometimes feared I’d get into a car accident because while driving my mind wandered as I created characters and wrote dialog in my head.”
Simses eventually enrolled in a fiction class taught by published author Jamie Callan. Short stories began pouring out, but it was a novel that Callan encouraged her to write.
“I just didn’t know what to write about,” Simses explains, until the morning she heard a woman on the described how her grandmother died before her eyes uttering, “erase my hard drive.”
The responsibility of keeping a family secret became the theme of “The Irresistible Blueberry Bakeshop & Café.” Published in 2013, we meet Manhattan attorney Ellen Branford as she strives to fulfill her grandmother’s dying wish: Find the hometown boy she once loved and give him a letter. It premiered as a film on the Hallmark Movies Mysteries Channel on October 2, 2016.
The same year Simses published “The Rules of Love & Grammar,” starring newly jobless, newly single, and suddenly apartmentless Grace Hammond—a grammar whiz who hasn’t yet found the right set of rules for fixing her own mistakes.
“It’s the stuff of real life that gets my imagination going,” shares Simses, who knows that in one weekend, the best and worst things can happen to someone. With the reality of the coronavirus impacting the world on the day Simses talked with the Costco Connection, she says the biggest challenge to working on her fourth book is wanting to hang out with her husband and daughter Morgan, 22. “I find myself talking too much, cooking too much, making too many cups of coffee—and knowing how blessed I am.”
Hope Katz Gibbs is a freelance writer in Claremont, CA. She was left at the altar, but that’s a story for a different day. This article first appeared in the July 2020 issue of The Costco Connection.