Passionate Persistence

The Life of My Mother, Ruth Chew (Author of The Wednesday Witch)

By: Eve Sprunt

Narrated by: Patrice C. Smith

Length: 9 hrs and 21 mins

Publisher's summary

If you enjoyed The Wednesday Witch, you'll be fascinated to learn more about the life of its author. Complete with entries from Ruth Chew's diaries and never-before-seen sketches from her personal notebooks, this book gives you an insight to the author behind The Wednesday Witch.

My mother told me never to read her diaries, and even after she’d been gone for a decade, it felt strange to consider it. But there I was, locked inside as COVID raged, holding a stack of her tattered black-and-white cardboard notebooks in my lap.

I opened the first cover and started reading. It was like meeting my mother for the first time. The frustrated, overwhelmed housewife I’d known and sometimes resented had harbored much bigger dreams than raising five children. She was a genuine romantic who developed overwhelming crushes on men and harbored a deep need to express herself creatively. She longed for fame as an artist and dragged her portfolio around New York indefatigably, in pursuit of work and the financial freedom it would provide her.

Shortly after I left home, my mother’s career as an author and illustrator of children’s books took flight. She found a publisher for The Wednesday Witch, which would go on to sell more than a million copies, and followed it up with twenty-eight more books over thirty years.

As I closed the cover of her final notebook, I realized that the life of Ruth Chew had been more complicated, more poignant, and more impressive than I’d ever dreamed. I determined then and there to describe and share it.

©2024 Eve Silver Sprunt (P)2024 Eve Silver Sprunt