A born storyteller

Sometimes you just know. You can actually feel the knowledge crawling around in the marrow of your bones, so deep is the way you know it.

That’s how it was for me with Susan Reinhardt. I knew that funny woman was born to tell stories that swung high with humor, like a child on a playground swing, over the otherwise sometimes drab landscape of life.

She quickly became my favorite newspaper columnist. She’s also Mama’s favorite columnist, which, of course, is nothing that I should be bragging about.

The mark of a good columnist is determined by the “buzz” factor — that is how many people talk about your latest column or place it on their refrigerator doors and, most of all, how they identify with it. Repeatedly, Mama, my sister and I would find ourselves discussing Susan’s latest travail as a working mom, struggling-to-be-good wife and harried daughter.

Finally, I couldn’t constrain my unabashed admiration so I wrote a fan e-mail to Susan. In the subject line, I wrote: You should be writing books! I sincerely meant it because people who tell stories like Susan tells stories should be read by more people than just the devoted audience that she has in Asheville, N.C.
That e-mail gave birth to a great friendship. I prodded and pushed while Susan persevered until she had a book deal in New York. Her first book (I know there will be plenty more) is with Kensington and is called “Not Tonight, Honey. Wait Until I’m A Size 6.”

In typical Susan fashion, it is an off-centered, only-from-her-mind kind of book about everything from motherhood to daughterhood to cosmetic surgery and all points in-between. Like Susan, it is refreshingly kooky.

Susan was born to tell stories. It was first evident to me when I read her columns. It was undeniable to me after we spent a girls’ weekend at the Greenbrier Resort in West Virginia. When the evenings would end, we would retire to our rooms after tip-toeing past the hallway signs that read, “Shhhh. It’s quiet time down South.”

I would take a hot bath then slide between the silky sheets under a cozy down comforter and fall soundly to sleep by 11 or so.

Not Susan. When we met for breakfast the next morning, she would recount how she had pulled out her laptop and wrote until 2 in the morning.

“You’re kidding,” I remarked after a long moment of staring incredulously.

She shrugged. “I do that every night. It’s my best time to write what I want to write.”

I can’t comprehend how she does it: How she sees life in such an oddly unique way or how she can write after 5 p.m. In fact, I’m not much for writing after noon because after a certain time, my feeble words lock themselves in my soul and go to sleep until the next day.

Susan, though, is always on go. So, as a result, here she is at the starting line of a new book-writing career. I am confident that the energizer Barbie will just keep going and going.

See? I knew she was supposed to write books. By the way, that’s plural because I know there’ll be more. Genuine storytellers never run out of stories.