PHOTO: Lucille Guarino, award-winning author and passionate storyteller, brings authenticity and heartfelt emotion to every page of her literary work.
Award-Winning Author on Resilience Love and Life’s Turning Points
Lucille Guarino discusses writing emotionally resonant fiction, weaving dual timelines, and portraying strong female characters in her acclaimed novels Elizabeth’s Mountain and Lunch Tales: Suellen.
Lucille Guarino writes with the heart of someone who has lived her stories. Her prose is shaped by experience, her characters drawn not from the pages of fiction, but from life’s most vulnerable corners—grief, joy, resilience, and the messy middle that connects them. Whether she’s mapping the echoes between generations in Elizabeth’s Mountain or offering an intimate lens into a woman’s reckoning with a life-altering diagnosis in Lunch Tales: Suellen, Guarino’s voice is never less than authentic. Her fiction reaches deep, carried by emotional candour and a quiet, persistent hope.
It is no surprise that readers find her work so transporting. She handles dual timelines and multi-perspective narratives with such grace that both past and present breathe with equal vitality. Her women—be they young professionals, grandmothers, or mothers navigating the delicate edges of heartbreak and healing—feel not like constructs, but like confidantes. They endure. They laugh. They doubt. They love.
Guarino’s characters remind us that strength often emerges in the softest forms—friendship over lunch, humour in the face of fear, and love that endures across generations. Her storytelling invites us to witness the quiet revolutions of women whose everyday lives harbour extraordinary courage. These are stories to be felt as much as read.
Your storytelling often explores dual timelines, as in Elizabeth’s Mountain – how do you balance historical and contemporary narratives to ensure both feel equally compelling?
The balance of Elizabeth’s (grandmother) and Amanda’s (granddaughter) stories was of utmost importance to me in obtaining my objective for Elizabeth’s Mountain. Their stories were to be of equal interest, as I didn’t want one woman’s story to outshine the other’s. They each have their own allure and challenges. My goal was to show a parallel to these two related women in two different timelines. While Elizabeth’s memories evoke glamour and nostalgia of historical literature, Amanda’s life contains the sparkle of contemporary romance. The way I achieved this was to write both women’s stories separately initially, like novellas, before blending them together in an alternating timeline. I knew it would be risky, but it was that theme I most wanted to convey. That tradition and times may change, but love never changes.
In Lunch Tales: Suellen, the protagonist confronts a medical diagnosis – how did your own experiences shape the emotional depth of Suellen’s journey?
Suellen’s story is personal for me as I went through a similar medical crisis at the same age and know firsthand all the feelings and emotions she had to go through. I didn’t want it to be a depressing novel, but I wanted it to be honest, so I integrated raw emotion with wry humor. From the opening scene of a roller coaster ride to the vulnerability of a breast cancer diagnosis, wit and introspection marks Suellen’s inner dialogue that will hopefully have readers rooting for a flawed, yet fiercely relatable heroine until the very end. At its core, Lunch Tales: Suellen is a story about survival—emotional, physical, and relational. Her lunch friends play a pivotal role in her healing journey, as the characters engage in lunch intervals. But at the end of the day, Suellen’s story is a love story. Whatever the obstacle, true love finds a way, even if we sometimes have to let go or give it space.
You spun Lunch Tales from multiple viewpoints into standalone novels – what narrative benefits did focusing on individual characters like Suellen bring to your process?
Originally, I wrote Lunch Tales with four women’s point of view. When I finished drafting it, I realized that two of the women in the story were the most interesting and needed to have their own book. Their stories definitely warranted more space. As I write mostly by the seat of my pants, it was startling to see how each of their stories evolved. Suellen, the youngest attorney in a major law firm, receives a shock medical diagnosis that turns her life upside down just as she’s falling in love. Her proclivity for self-sabotage goes into overdrive, and her lunch friends at the firm become a lifeline in the storm. Suellen’s best friend, Teagan, is an accountant at the same firm. Her book comes out in January 2026. Teagan is a contented mom of an adopted boy she longed for, but suddenly finds herself a single parent, and leans heavily on her friends and lively Irish family for support. Both women feature in each other’s stories, but each story stands alone.
Having won awards like the Hawthorne Prize and Millennium Book Award, how do these accolades influence your confidence or expectations for future projects?
Winning awards is a form of validation, especially from prestigious organizations like the American Writing Awards’ Hawthorne Prize and Millennium Book Award. The awards increased my confidence and spurred me to persevere. These awards also enhanced my books’ visibility and credibility. Awards also make for a wonderful promotional tool, although I appreciate reviews from my readers just as much.
I wrote two stand-alone sequels, prompted by the interest and success of Elizabeth’s Mountain and Lunch Tales: Suellen. These will be published in 2026—Smoky Blue Sunrise, a return to Elizabeth’s Mountain; and Lunch Tales: Teagan. I am so excited about their release.
Your novels feature resilient female characters across different life stages – what draws you to portray women navigating such emotional and life-changing challenges?
Simply put, I write what I like to read. I gravitate toward books emphasizing emotional depth, prioritizing internal character development over external plot. That includes women’s fiction, memoirs and autobiographies. It is stories that are true or profoundly realistic that stay with me the longest and are the most inspirational. To date, the youngest protagonist I have created is a twenty-three-year-old woman; my oldest is ninety, and brings about a different perspective on life.
