Finding Myself Through Writing | Oprah’s Book Club #100 | Author Profile | Ann Napolitano

When I was 10 years old, our teacher gave us a vocabulary assignment where we had to put the words into sentences and make a scene or a little story with it. And that was the first time she'd asked us to do that. And so I went home to do the assignment and I thought it had taken me five minutes. And I looked up at the clock and 45 minutes had gone by and it completely blew my mind. It was the first time outside of play that time had disappeared like that. And I thought, this is magic and I want to write for the rest of my life. She kept journals, wrote wartime short stories and novels all through high school. Then, when I was 20 years old in college, I became sick with the Epstein-Barr virus and I was sick for three years. And it really became a defining moment in my life where I realized that life was short and things could change on a dime. And I decided to live the life that I wanted to live and not the life that I thought I should live. And that meant being a writer. That newfound freedom allowed Anne to turn to and hone in on her true focus. In 2004, the third novel she had written was finally published. Six years later, breaking news that shook the world. There was a plane that was flying from South Africa to London, but it crashed in Libya. And everyone on the plane died except for one nine-year-old boy named Ruben Van Nassau. And that story became the inspiration and foundation for her novel, Dear Edward. The piece of it that fascinated me the most, which was how could this boy go on? Like, how can you walk away from that wreckage, from the loss of your family and not only survive, but live your life? In 2020, it became a New York Times bestseller. And in early 2023, the harrowing story was adapted as a drama series on Apple TV+. We all feel that terrible sense of loss and also loss of identity at some point in our lives. And we have to either be destroyed by it or find a way to move through it. Her love for fiction writing combined with personal grief compelled her to further explore the complexities of the human spirit and deep human need for connection. Hello Beautiful shares some of that same DNA with Dear Edward. Except instead of a physical wreckage, the main character, William, steps out of an emotional wreckage. Her latest novel, Hello Beautiful, explores the beauty and the cost of love. Set mainly in Chicago during the 1980s, it tells the story of a young man silenced by tragedy. The book was inspired by Little Women, which is a book that I loved so much when I was a kid. It's part of my foundational DNA, I think, because I loved it so much when I was a little girl. And it was just inside me and came out in this novel. Leaving readers wondering, can love make a broken person whole again? It's a perceptive story of family and friendship and how the people we're bound to can also set us free. It is an extraordinary, moving story. And I am just thrilled to have Hello Beautiful as the 100th selection of Oprah's Book Club.