Carole O’Neill’s guest today on the Online for Authors podcast is Christine Gunderson, author of the book Friends with Secrets, which is Christine’s debut novel. She wrote Friends with Secrets in her minivan in the school pick up line, at piano lessons, during drama rehearsals, at swim team practice, basketball practice, crew practice, and in lots of other unglamourous and uncomfortable places where only a parent who writes would write.

Like all writers, she started life as a reader. She was born and raised on a fourth-generation family farm in rural North Dakota where she devoured Laura Ingalls Wilder books in her very own little house on the prairie. She also burned holes in her chenille bedspread while attempting to read Trixie Belden books under the covers when she was supposed to be asleep. During these formative years growing up on the farm, she learned to haul grain, drive a combine, and pick rocks, skills that have yet to be useful later in life. Growing up on the prairie fifty miles from the nearest McDonalds has also given her an aversion to trees, and lifelong craving for wide open spaces.

She eventually left the farm to attend college and seek her fortune. She pursued the kind of jobs where one gets paid to talk and write and no one cares that she failed algebra. She worked as television anchor and reporter and a Capitol Hill press secretary, then left it all behind to stay home with her children, where algebra continues to baffle her all these years later. She currently lives in the Washington D.C. suburbs with her three children, Star the Wonder Dog, and a very patient husband.

When not writing, she is sailing the Chesapeake Bay with her family, playing Star Wars monopoly, re-reading Jane Austen novels or unloading the dishwasher.

In Carole’s book review, she stated that women have often been told, “You can have it all - just not at the same time.” Christine proves that theory wrong in her debut novel, Friends with Secrets.

Nikki and Ainsley are two modern women on opposite ends of the motherhood spectrum. Nikki has just been told she’s been replaced at her television station as their anchor, while she spends most of her maternity leave struggling to convince her newborn son that her breast milk will really satisfy him, while her three older children destroy the aisles of the grocery store playing baby food pong down aisle five.

Ainsley has no problem convincing her children of anything because she has the help of a nanny, housekeeper, cook, clothing designer and a husband with more money than God, who is running for congress.

How these two women become a force to reckon with is what keeps you laughing out loud from the beginning. The secrets they share require the skills of both women to unravel. When they discover a way to expose the truth of Ainsley’s past life that threatens her husband’s future, you can’t turn the pages fast enough to find out if they’re right.

Gunderson’s research comes from her real-life experience in television, proving you can balance motherhood, friendship, and career. This novel is a must read.

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You can follow Author Christine Gunderson

Website: https://christinegunderson.com/

Goodreads: https://www.goodreads.com/author/list/47221896.Christine_Gunderson

IG: @gunderchristine

FB: @christine.i.gunderson

X: @GunderChristine

LinkedIn: @Christine-Gunderson-b1274a315

Purchase Friends with Secrets on Amazon:

Paperback: https://amzn.to/3Xv54zd

Ebook: https://amzn.to/3zrvU3g

Teri M Brown, Author and Podcast Host: https://www.terimbrown.com

FB: @TeriMBrownAuthor

IG: @terimbrown_author

X: @terimbrown1

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