Author Anastasia Zadeik believes secrets are for spilling
CALIFORNIA: When we first meet Kate Whitier, her beautifully constructed house of cards is about to collapse. And when it does, everything she’s been hiding behind the smooth façade of her privileged suburban-mom life — her deeply troubled childhood, her psychopath of a brother, the assaults she never talks about — comes roaring into view. While it is true that the heroine of Anastasia Zadeik’s first novel, “Blurred Fates,” starts out in a very bad place, it is also true that the author had some very good reasons for puting her there. When the San Diego writer began working on the book 10 years ago, she was remembering a time nearly a decade earlier, when the bright surface of her life did not reflect the complicated reality of what was going on underneath.
She had lost her mother, who died ater a long batle with early-onset Alzheimer’s. Her teenaged stepdaughter had just moved across the country to live with Zadeik and her husband in Rancho Santa Fe because her mother was struggling with mental-health issues. Shortly ater the move, her stepdaughter’s mother died of a drug overdose. On the outside, Zadeik was living an enviable life in an idyllic place. On the inside, she was a mess. But instead of burying the turmoil, she wanted to explore it.
“Rancho Santa Fe is so beautiful, and everyone’s lives seem so perfect. I felt like I was the only one with this barely contained chaos in my head. But when I brought this up with my friends, I realized that they had their issues, too,” said Zadeik, who signed copies of “Blurred Fates” at the Point Loma Barnes & Noble and discussing the book at the
Coronado Public Library on Aug. 23.
“I knew when I started writing that I wanted my character to face challenges that other people didn’t know about. So the book is about an inciting incident that forces Kate to face all of it. It’s a rollercoaster, but when she comes out the other end, she is a much healthier person for having done so.”
For Zadeik, now a Mission Hills resident, the writing journey that eventually resulted in the Aug.2 debut of “Blurred Fates” was an adventure that was a few decades in the making. The fourth of five children, Zadeik grew up in the Chicago suburbs with educator parents who believed in the value of art, creativity and reading. And when Zadeik wasn’t hiding under the covers with a flashlight and a copy of “Litle House on the Prairie” or writing a musical with one of her sisters, she was scribbling away in a diary.
As the pink diaries of her childhood became the puffy fabric journals of a confessional teenager, and then the classic Moleskine journals of her evenful college and post-college years, Zadeik wrote as a way of making sense of life. It wasn’t until her own kids were in high school and she had almost a decade of working in the field of memory research that Zadeik began to realize that she wanted to do more than fill up another journal.
She wanted to write something. All she had to do was figure out what that something was going to be. Courses at UCSD Extension and San Diego Writer’s, Ink led Zadeik to local writing coach Marni Freedman, who introduced her to So Say We All San Diego, a nonprofit literary and performing arts organization whose high-energy VAMP Storytelling
Showcaseeventsfindparticipantsperformingshort, highly personal stories based on real-life events.
The venues are usually bars and the confessional stories oten pair well with beverage. And once Zadeik survived her first VAMP, she was hooked. “I realized that when I shared all of those things that I kept secret in my journal, they became ways to connect to other people in my community,” said Zadeik, who is now a So Say We All mentor and board member, as well as the director of operations for the San Diego Writers Festival.
“It all goes full circle, from hiding my thoughts in thispinkdiarytosharingmystoriesinacrowdedbar.”
With “Blurred Fates,” Zadeik looks at what can happen when too many secrets are hidden for too long. In Kate’s case, a shatering confession from her husband, Jacob, is the blunt instrument that cracks open a dark cache of secrets and a world of hurt. Suddenly, everything Kate thought she knew about the man who was her rock and her refuge appears to be a lie. And everything Kate was hiding from Jacob, his judgmental family, her sheltered kids, and her upscale community is about to hit the fan.