JAY — Wilton author Patricia O’Donnell will be at the Jay-Niles Memorial Library on Wednesday, March 27, at 6 p.m.

O’Donnell will be talking about her newest book, “A Symmetry of Husbands”, as well as signing copies of her book. The book reading will be in the Memorial Hall, which is located in the upstairs area of the library.

Set in the aftermath of the 2016 presidential election, the book follows Abigail, who is grieving the loss of her close friend and growing suspicious of the circumstances surrounding her demise.

“It is about a lifelong friendship between two women,” O’Donnell shared with the Livermore Falls Advertiser. “A lot of the book looks back to how they became the adults that they became and how their friendship developed.”

When asked about the origin of the title, O’Donnell shared that it is derived from a poem that is read by one of the characters in the book.

“It came from a poem that one of the [characters] reads at her funeral,” she said. “The character in the poem looks through a kaleidoscope, and sees a symmetry of husbands and it’s kind of relevant to the story because the main characters are two women and their two husbands.”

“A Symmetry of Husbands” is O’Donnell’s fifth book. She is also professor emerita of creative writing at the University of Maine at Farmington, where she taught fiction writing and directed the BFA program in creative writing. Her work has appeared in The New Yorker, Agni Review, The North American Review, Prairie Schooner, and other journals and anthologies according to her website.

Originally a native of Iowa, O’Donnell always had an interest in writing, but never pursued it until the early 80s. “I think I got serious about fiction writing when I was a single mom wanting to go back to college,” she shared. “I wanted to go back to college and just study creative writing, because that’s what I really loved.”

O’Donnell is a graduate of the University of Northern Iowa with a bachelors and masters degree as well as a graduate of the University of Massachusetts at Amherst with an MFA in fiction. O’Donnell settled down in Wilton in 1987 with her husband Michael Burke and three children.

Despite having a long career in writing, her first book, “Necessary Places”, was not published until 2012, when O’Donnell was 60. Since then, she has released two more novels [“The Vigilance of Stars” and “A Symmetry of Husbands”] as well as a compilation of short fiction [“Gods For Sale”]  and a memoir [“Waiting to Begin”].

Furthermore, “Gods for Sale” won the Serena McDonald Kennedy Fiction Award for 2016 and her most recent book, “A Symmetry of Husbands”, is nominated for the Maya Angelou Book Award.

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