Alicia Bessette and Matthew Quick Venture into the Light
By David Jastrow
Alicia Bessette and Matthew Quick have been authoring books throughout the course of their marriage. Their long and intertwining road together has included a multitude of twists and turns that are rooted in Collingswood, NJ.
The Collingswood Book Festival is excited to welcome the writers back home on October 7. While the couple now resides in Coastal North Carolina, South Jersey is never far from their minds.
“We used to go to the Book Festival when we lived there and it was always a ton of fun and just great energy, a positive place with positive people,” Bessette said. Quick, who graduated from Collingswood High School and was an English teacher in Haddonfield, concurred.
“For me, it’s home,” Quick said. “People from that area are particularly loyal. When I go there, there is always a kind of sense of coming home. There are people in the community that will hug and kiss me, maybe because I know their kids, or I went to school with them, or I taught their kids. I almost dream weekly about the South Jersey area.”
Bessette and Quick write vastly different kinds of novels. Bessette is the Edgar Award-nominated author of the bestselling Outer Banks Bookshop Mystery Series, cozy beach mysteries set in the fictional Cattail Island of North Carolina’s Outer Banks. Quick is the bestselling author of The Silver Linings Playbook, which was made into an Oscar-winning film.
His latest novel, We Are The Light, centers around a protagonist named Lucas Goodgame who is struggling to come to terms with an unspeakable tragedy and tells the story of how Goodgame applies Jungian analysis to try and find the way forward.
While the styles, textures, and characters of their books are varied, there is a commonality in their protagonists’ struggles with coming to terms with personal misfortunes, insecurities, and facing a world that has shifted beneath them. Their stories share a lucid understanding of the humor and hardships that encompass the human condition.
“Coming up with the character of Callie and trying to get her scaffolding together, I knew I needed a good heroine for a cozy mystery, and I liked the idea of giving her a little personal trauma. Giving her something from her past that she is not quite over yet informs her decisions as she’s going about her life trying to solve these mysteries. I suppose it’s only natural you see some crossover in our work even though we work in very different genres, because we’ve been married for almost 26 years,” Bessette shares.
Quick’s approach to writing starts with a character who is in denial about something. “I’ve always been attracted to stories where the character is openly vulnerable and fragile,” Quick says. “Outside of genre writing, when you are writing character-driven fiction, I think you are always going to expose peoples’ vulnerabilities and their humanity.”
Alicia Bessette and Matthew Quick will be discussing their books, Murder on Mustang Beach and We Are The Light, on Saturday, and will also be talking about their lives as married authors and their different approaches to the art of writing, on October 7, 2023 at the 21st annual Collingswood Book Festival. We hope to see you there!
