Reader's Digest Select Editions

SUZANNE'S DIARY FOR NICHOLAS (Little, Brown)
by James Patterson
On the surface the diary looks simple enough. But inside is the powerful story of two people who found a perfect love on windswept Martha’s Vineyard. As a heartbroken young woman reads the diary’s tearstained pages, she learns the painful—and joyous—truths about love lost and found. Best-selling author James Patterson reveals his soft side with this stirring romance.

Excerpt from Select Editions’ Suzanne's Diary for Nicholas

When Katie got back to her apartment, a package was propped up against the front door. She thought it was a manuscript from the office. Couldn’t they leave her alone for a single day? She was entitled to a personal day now and then. She worked so hard for them. They knew how passionate she was about her books.

She was a senior editor at a highly thought of New York publishing house that specialized in literary novels and poetry. She loved her job. It was where she had met Matt. She had enthusiastically bought his first volume of poetry from a small literary agency in Boston about a year before.

The two of them had hit it off right away—really hit it off. Just weeks later they had fallen in love—or so she had believed with her heart, soul, body, mind. As she reached down for the package, she recognized the handwriting. It was Matt’s. There was no doubt about it.

Katie stared at the package. Finally she took a deep breath and tore away the wrapping. What she found inside was a small antique-looking diary. Katie didn’t understand. Then she felt her stomach knot.

“Suzanne’s Diary for Nicholas” was handwritten on its front cover, but it wasn’t Matt’s handwriting.

Suzanne’s?

Suddenly Katie’s head was reeling, and she could barely catch a breath. Matt had always been closemouthed about his past. One of the things she had found out one night after they had drunk two bottles of wine was that his wife’s name was Suzanne. But then Matt hadn’t wanted to talk about Suzanne.

The only arguments they’d ever had were over the silence about his past. Katie had insisted on knowing more, which only made Matt quieter. It was so unlike him. After they actually had a fight about it, he’d told her that he wasn’t married to Suzanne anymore. He swore it, but that was all he was going to say.

Who was Nicholas? And why had Matt sent her this diary?


ABOUT THE AUTHOR
	James Patterson Suzanne’s Diary for Nicholas is a big departure for a writer best-known for the violent murders and roller-coaster suspense of his successful Alex Cross detective series. James Patterson developed a passion for reading while working summers at McLean psychiatric hospital in Belmont, Massachusetts, to put himself through college. It was during this time that he also began writing. His first novel, The Thomas Berryman Number, was published at age 27—and won Patterson a prestigious Mystery Writers of America award. Yet the young author wasn’t convinced he could write full-time. Instead, he got a job as a junior copywriter at the J. Walter Thompson ad agency and worked his way to the top. Did anything about Patterson’s advertising career help his fiction writing? “Well, I met a lot of serial killers,” he quips. Patterson retired as the head of J. Walter Thompson five years ago. Exclusive interview with James Patterson
Beyond the Book The Delicate Art of Balance Balance is a watchword today. It’s as if the astrological sign of the scales dominates our lives: work and family, leisure and work, rest and activity, inner harmony, yin and yang—the Taoist principle of cosmic harmony. It’s something that the heroine of James Patterson’s Suzanne’s Diary for Nicholas, a physician, wife, and mother, tried to achieve. We typed “balance” into Amazon.com’s search engine and found over 2000 entries for books with that magical word in their title, from Living Your Best Life: Work, Home, Balance, Destiny: Ten strategies for Getting from Where You Are to Where You’re Meant to Be, to The Home Office: How to Balance Your Professional and Personal Lives While Working from Home, and even Al Gore’s Earth in Balance: Ecology and the Human Spirit. Our search also turned up a book entitled Horse Gaits, Balance and Movement, which made us wonder whether other members of the animal kingdom were as obsessed with finding balance as we are. Somehow we think not. Clearly, there are lots of resources for finding balance between work and family, which makes us think it is an elusive and desirable state. One book that caught our attention was The Western Guide to Feng Shui: Creating Balance, Harmony and Prosperity in Your Environment. Intrigued, we searched for feng shui on the Web and arrived at the American Institute of Feng Shui, which offers on-line courses in this ancient art that promises to create “harmony, good health, wealth and peace of mind.” Feng shui is the “[manipulation of] your surroundings such that you make an impact on your finances, health, and emotions.” This sounded good, so we turned to another site for more on feng shui—which means “wind-water” in Chinese. The World of Feng Shui site explained that the door of a house is vital in determining the luck of your home and that there are good and bad days for moving into a new house. Sounds strange, but if it brings balance into your life, why not try it? We decided to delve more deeply into the work-family equation. Is there a formula for perfectly balanced life? Plenty of sites promise an answer; you can decide for yourself if they’re right or not. One, The Center of Balanced Living, provides telephone coaching for the harried to help find satisfaction in life. And Women’s-Work.com offers pointers on flextime arrangements for women balancing family and work and managing stress in their lives. Our favorite family-balance site was the wonderfully named Bluesuitmom.com which helps women (who tend to bear the brunt of juggling) manage careers and family. It has information on how to make time for yourself, as well as links to professional organizers and work/life coaches, a burgeoning business. Some suggestions include paying people to do chores you don’t want to do yourself, such as house cleaning; delegating activities you don’t want to do; avoiding perfectionism; and using technology to balance your life. In order to get an, er, balanced view of the subject of work and family, we thought we needed a man’s perspective. “The Fatherhood Project” is a national research and education project that is examining the future of fatherhood and developing ways to support men’s involvement in child rearing. Its books, films, consultation, seminars, and training all present practical strategies to support fathers and mothers in their parenting roles.” The site offers advice, for instance, on how men can ask employers for parental leave or flextime, an important and increasingly popular option for both men and women who are striving for balance in their lives. We decided to try another Web search and up popped a site for a book with the irresistible title of My Well-Balanced Life on a Wooden Leg. We expected a tongue-in-cheek look at finding balance in life, but found a collection of autobiographical essays written by Alfred Gerald Caplin, a.k.a. Al Capp, the creator of Li’l Abner, the most popular comic strip of the ’30s, ’40s, and ’50s. It was Capp, who lost a leg as a boy, who coined the words Dogpatch, double-whammy, Shmoo, and Sadie Hawkins Day. His handicap—no pun intended—didn’t stop him from doing many things in life, though, as a youth, he was afraid he wouldn’t be able to chase women. So he invented Sadie Hawkins Day, celebrated on November 17. It is on this day that women are permitted to chase men, as many campus co-eds are wont to do on college campuses today. For more on the ’toon Li’l Abner and its creator, log onto LiLAbner.com. At this point, a look on the flip side of balance—vertigo, that dizzy feeling that usually comes from fear of falling—is in order. Vertigo may be an indication of a psychological problem or, more likely, an inner ear problem. To learn more about the subject, we typed “vertigo” into our search engine and ended up at the National Library of Medicine’s abstracts, and we eventually went to the Mayo Clinic’s newsletter, which had plenty of information for us. Do you know that vertigo, a common disorder, increases after age 50 and may be a sign of an inner ear disorder called Ménière’s disease? Of course, searching for vertigo inevitably leads to the influential Hitchcock film with Jimmy Stewart and Kim Novak, a favorite of cinema buffs, and if you don’t mind climbing a few stairs, you might want to go here. But our digressions are making our head spin! Back to balance. For tips on negotiating compressed work weeks, office flextime, and telecommuting, or on learning how to say “no” and mean it—all ways to achieve work-leisure or work-family balance—you may find the following sites useful. Good luck! www.parentsunite.org—Includes information on Family Leave Act, which all savvy employees should know about www.adv-leadership-grp.com and www.familiesandwork.org—Tips on on helping your child manage the transition from home to work and how to talk to your child about work www.trainingzone.co.uk—Tips on how to talk to your boss about work-life balance www.advancingwomen.com—Information for women on advancing in a career while pursuing alternatives to working 9 to 5 www.usahomebusiness.com—Dozens of ways to make money without leaving the comfort of your home —Karen Bruno

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