JONI: Anne Rivers Siddons, thank you for joining me. We’re having great fun with this website where we are privileged to feature the best authors. When we saw your newest novel, Off Season, we jumped at the opportunity to talk to you and, for me, the opportunity to talk with an old friend. I think so warmly of you and Heyward; it’s been far too long.

ANNE: Well, thank you. It has been a long time.

JONI: Anne, how many novels have you written now?

ANNE: I think it’s 18, Joni. It sounds insane, doesn’t it?

JONI: Oh, God. Well more than a dozen of them have been big New York Times bestsellers.

ANNE: They have, and I’m very grateful.

JONI: Right. Including Sweetwater Creek and Nora, Nora and Islands, and when I think of how many books of yours I’ve read, I can’t keep them all straight. But let me ask you – what was your biggest to date? What’s the one that everyone still associates with you?

ANNE: I think the one I hear more about – I guess it was because it was the breakout book, well one of two – either Peachtree Road, , which is about Atlanta, or Colony, which was about a summer colony up here in Maine where we are now.

JONI: Right.

ANNE: And somehow those two just seem to hit chords.

JONI: Well, of course I remember The House Next Door, because that’s when I had the privilege of publishing you at Simon and Schuster.

ANNE: I remember. And then we did make a movie of it, which was a surprise to me.

JONI: Have you had many movies made out of your books?

ANNE: Only two.

JONI: Only two!

ANNE: My first novel, which was called Heartbreak Hotel, was made into a movie called "Heart of Dixie," which Ally Sheedy and Virginia Madsen and several of the then-Brat Pack, who are certainly not Brat Packers any more. That was a while back.

JONI: Right. Well, before we get to Off Season, which I adored, I just want to ask a little bit about you and your secret to success, and your secret thoughts. What is it about you that makes you just continually tell these – I think of them as Southern – sagas, so charged with emotion?

ANNE: Well, I don’t really know, Joni. It’s just something I need to do. My mother always said, "You know it’s not too late to go back and get your teaching certificate."

JONI: Ah ha, that’s what it was. It was defiance.

ANNE: No, I’m fascinated with women of my generation who seemed always to have been on the cusp of things to me. We didn’t come along right in the middle of the women’s movement; we were just before that. And some of us managed it and, you know, took pretty good advantage of it, and some of us braved wildly through it. But the transition is what’s always fascinated me, and I found that I liked to write about women in transition from somewhere to somewhere else.

JONI: You infuse your characters with that Faulkner-esque mood, that incredible richness that I think only Southern writers seem to achieve. You and Pat Conroy.

ANNE: I don’t know where it came from and at times I wish I knew how to get out of it, but I can’t. Seems to me the place is as important as character, almost in every book I’ve ever attempted. It informs everybody.

JONI: And has Maine been a main theme for you? I mean, this is like the first time, isn’t it?