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When I was a girl, growing up as an American expatriate in such places as Venezuela and London, England, I had the rare opportunity to see the world and to view my own country as our global neighbors do. 

But no matter how far we traveled, every summer I would beg to be sent to my grandmother's house in Indianola, Mississippi.  It's a small town where my brothers used to joke that if you were driving through and blinked, you'd miss it.  They claimed that the 'Welcome to Indianola' sign had the words ‘turn your clock back twenty years' written at the bottom.

By the time I was old enough to notice, the town's theater had long since been closed, and the playground across the street from my grandmother's house still contained the same equipment my mother said she'd played on as a girl.  Metal slides and monkey bars sat baking in the hot Mississippi summer sun, paint-chipped swings dangling over bald cement with fringes of crabgrass and dandelions sprouting along the edges.

It was the town where my mother, along with her four sisters and brother, had grown up and she hadn't regretted leaving at eighteen when she left for college.  But for me, it was a place of open arms, and the soft, powdered cheeks of my grandmother who loved all her ‘grand-chilren', but always seemed to love me best.

Grace Marie Collotta Bianca was born in 1914 in Indianola as a second generation Italian.  Her parents owned a grocery store and she had two cousins who flew with the American Air Force on D-Day.  She stopped attending school after the eighth grade, but later in life would own and manage a successful shoe store on Main Street.  We always got shoes for our birthdays, and MoMo, as we all called her, gave me my first pair of heels-much to my mother's chagrin.  They were white patent-leather with a square toe and buckles on the top and I'm sure I thought I was pretty hot stuff in my short skirts, knee-highs and white patent leather shoes with the square heels.  As with everything my grandmother thought was high-class and beautiful, she called them ‘swanky.' 

But what I remember most about my grandmother was her stories.  She was an insomniac, and would come and lie down with me when it was time to go to bed and after turning off the lights would tell me the stories of her past- about how she's always wanted to be a movie star but knew the scars on her back (from a Christmas tree's candles that had set her nightgown on fire when she was a girl) would prevent her from ever gracing the big screen.  She spoke of growing up with her sister Rosalie and how they were the belles of the town, and all the parties they'd gone to, and the people they'd known.  Rosalie and MoMo married two brothers-an event which made the local newspapers-and when my mother was born, they posed for a picture for Ripley's Believe it Or Not since my mother made the sixth generation of first born girls in the same family.  My mother's great-great-great-grandmother, who'd been born in 1834 in Italy was pictured in the photograph.

MoMo was the queen of bling and had jewelry boxes overflowing with costume jewelry.  One couldn't look swanky if one wasn't draped in pearls and sparkly jewelry.  My cousins and I would laugh because she'd put on her makeup and jewelry before going outside to walk the dog and we would tease her that if there was ever a fire, she'd take the time to ‘put on her face' before she'd let the firemen see her.  She kept a tube of lipstick near the front door, always prepared to look swanky in case a visitor stopped by.

MoMo had trunks of evening gowns worn by her five daughters, dresses with voluminous skirts and rhinestones embedded in tulle and she'd tell me the stories of who'd worn them, where and with whom.  She let me borrow one for my senior prom, along with some of her jewelry so I could look swanky.  And I did.  But it was more than how I looked; swanky was a feeling more than anything.  It was the way you held your head when you walked, the way you looked people in the eye and smiled with confidence.  It was knowing your own secret.

My grandmother turns ninety-five on April 9^th, two days after my novel, The Lost Hours is released.  She's been battling Alzheimer's for more than a decade and before I started the book I went to visit her for the first time in many years.  She's in a nursing home and I was pleased to see that her daughters are making sure her hair is colored and she has a swipe of color on her lips. 

I was on my way to a booksigning, so I was dressed and had my makeup and jewelry on and as I sat and held her hand I was pretty sure she didn't recognize me.  Her eyes were blank and she mumbled things that didn't make any sense.  But every once in a while when I'd say something, the light would return to her eyes and I'd recognize the grandmother I'd once known.  As I prepared to leave, she squeezed my hand and looked directly into my eyes and said, "Swanky."  That's when I realized that she knew exactly who I was.

I dedicated The Lost Hours to MoMo.  In the book the protagonist, Piper Mills, was raised by her grandmother but never paused long enough to hear her grandmother's stories, never believing she had any story to tell.  It's only after her grandmother has Alzheimer's that Piper uncovers her grandmother's scrapbook, including a newspaper clipping about the body of an infant found floating in the Savannah River, that Piper realizes how very wrong she'd been.  She opens a Pandora's box into her grandmother's past, bringing to light her family's darkest secrets.

MoMo would have liked this book.  As a fan of the old gothic soap opera Dark Shadows, she loved stories full of intrigue and romance. And she would have been thrilled to see her name in a book.  I was blessed to have my grandmother in my life for so long, and to have had the time to listen to her stories that I now share with my own children.  They are part of MoMo's legacy, along with her jewelry that I wear with pride, and my own version of how to be swanky.   And I think of her every time I grab a tube of lipstick as I head out the door to face the world.

Karen White, The Lost Hours, scrapbooks, Penguin Books