At 55, Debut Author Angeline Boulley Finds Stardom With ‘Firekeeper’s Daughter’

This content has been archived. It may no longer be accurate or relevant.

From The Wall Street Journal:

ast century: Angeline Boulley was a young mother of three.

Last decade: She was a bureaucrat wondering if she might also be a writer.

Last year: She was a novice finishing a title that had sold in a seven-figure two-book deal.

And last week, she was a debut author with the arrival of “Firekeeper’s Daughter,” her splashy young-adult thriller. Michelle and Barack Obama’s production company optioned the title for a Netflix series and Reese Witherspoon picked it for her book club. “Dear Aspiring Writer: My great idea came at 18,” Ms. Boulley recently tweeted. “I’m 55. #NeverGiveUp.”

It’s the kind of first-time stardom that is unlikely for most writers in midlife. “There is this idea that you have to publish when you’re in your 20s or 30s and beyond that, if it hasn’t happened for you, then it’s never going to,” said Tiffany Liao, Ms. Boulley’s editor at Henry Holt Books for Young Readers, an imprint of Macmillan Children’s Publishing Group.

“I did not consider myself a writer,” said Ms. Boulley, whose book follows an 18-year-old Native American woman swept up in an investigation of a dangerous new drug threatening her community. “I would go through times where I wasn’t writing for a few months or even a year, but the story would keep coming back to me.”

. . . .

Now Ms. Boulley joins a small club of later-in-life literary ingénues.

Sue Monk Kidd was 53 when she launched her first novel “The Secret Life of Bees,” a bestseller and later a movie starring Queen Latifah and Dakota Fanning. Cynthia D’Aprix Sweeney was 55 for her hit debut “The Nest,” about grown siblings in a dysfunctional family. “Good Company,” her new novel about an upended marriage, comes out next month.

Nancy Pearl was 72 for the arrival of “George and Lizzie,” which includes a teenage character who sleeps with the whole high-school football team. Anne Youngson was 70 for “Meet Me at the Museum,” an epistolary love story between elderly strangers—and a left turn after her career running new vehicle development projects at Land Rover.

“My first book came out when I was a couple of months short of being able to enroll in Medicare,” said Ellen Meeropol, 75, describing her 2011 debut novel “House Arrest.”

Ms. Boulley, who is a member of the Sault Ste. Marie Tribe of Chippewa Indians, wanted to write an “indigenous Nancy Drew.” She found her fictional sleuth in the book’s heroine, Daunis Fontaine, a high-school valedictorian turned government informant searching for drug dealers plaguing her Ojibwe tribe—another term for the Chippewa—in Michigan’s Upper Peninsula. Enter Jamie, a young Native American undercover agent posing as a new recruit on an elite junior league hockey team. The two pretend to be a couple, then fall for each other for real as Daunis helps Jamie connect to his lost indigenous identity.

Link to the rest at The Wall Street Journal (PG apologizes for the paywall, but hasn’t figured out a way around it.)