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Note to Book Clubs
Growing up with a nutty mother twisted me for life. Mom was forever telling low
stories of her small-town days, of crackpots and odd behavior. Her quirky acquaintances populated my world.
Her homespun expressions deeply infiltrated my own.
Some of her stories found their way into Even Sunflowers Cast Shadows.
Friends ask, how much of the novel is true? I reply, it's all true. It just didn't happen this way. Or as my mom
put it when she read the book, "This is your story, not mine."
Yet I deliberately drew on her family lore to write the novel. It felt important
to me capture my mother's colorful childhood, which had been so much a part of mine as I grew up. Oral history
fades. A novel is forever.
-- Douglas Armstrong
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