Darling Girl

Publisher: Green Place Books

DG is five the first time her mother goes away. She’ll go away again and again before DG finally understands why: mental illness and a manipulating husband. DG’s family aren’t like other families. Her father moves them constantly. Moving, along with the stigma of mental illness, isolates the family. In public, they seem the perfect American dream. In private they grow increasingly unstable. Darling Girl unfolds in a series of vignettes spanning ten years and four continents. Traveling through the fifties and sixties and from apartheid South Africa to the capitals of Europe, the family live like so many dancing bears in a traveling circus with her father as the ringmaster. DG’s story is both personal and universal. She’s on a journey from innocence to experience; to the realization that her mother’s illness isn’t the family’s only problem, it’s not even the main one.

A native of nowhere and a traveler everywhere, Ms. Watkins has been on the road since the day she was born. Although rooted in the deep South, she has visited all seven continents and particularly enjoyed being ship-wrecked in Antarctica. Having worked in banking, computers, a nonprofit educating girls about STEM opportunities, and in education teaching middle-schoolers everything from American History to Comic Books to Philosophy to Writing, she retired in 2014 and began writing shortly thereafter. When not writing or traveling, she reads and putters in the garden. A survivor of a large family, she has one stepson, two grandsons, and daughter-in-law, all of whom she adores. She shares a home with her husband —Mr. Wonderful – three cats, and a great deal of clutter.