Marblehead native, author comes home to speak

MARBLEHEAD – Local political figure Mark Barry still remembers the morning he finally broke down and read the 400-page manuscript of his sister’s novel, "The Lace Reader.""I started reading and I didn’t get up from the kitchen table," he said Tuesday night. "I read the whole book at the table."Marblehead High student Hilary Franklin felt the same way when she read Sandra Brunonia Barry’s novel earlier this year. "I absolutely loved it," she said. "I started reading it and I didn’t get off the couch. I think I just sat there in my PJs."Put aside where people read it and what they were wearing. Barry, a Marblehead High graduate who leveraged her self-published book into a reported seven-figure novel and motion picture deal with Harper Collins – she is not allowed to name the amount – has managed to write what reviewers call a literary novel about Salem that doubles as a suspenseful page-turner. The book is coming out July 29.A mostly-female audience of about 80 students and adults crowded into the Marblehead High theater Tuesday evening to see Barry interviewed by senior English teacher Patrice Clough. Kay Scheidler, curriculum director for English and language arts, gave a brief description of Barry’s career, including 10 years as a screenwriter in Hollywood.Barry told her spellbound audience her novel began with a dream. In the dream a family heirloom from her grandmother, a piece of lace made during the Great Depression by nuns at St. Trinian’s, enabled her to look through a wall at her new home and see a beautiful field with horses. In the morning a workman tasked with knocking that wall down complained to her about the extra work it took to smash through the horsehair plaster that wall was made of.The dream became a short story. After five years of writing and rewriting every morning six days a week and pasting up index cards on the walls with piece after piece of her plot, the story became a novel.Now the contract Barry signed last fall requires her to write a second novel this year. She is 100 pages into a 400-page book about the House of Seven Gables, Nathaniel Hawthorne, reincarnation and the shipping trade. When that is finished she has 200 pages she cut from "The Lace Reader" that she would like to turn into a sequel to that book.If the new novel is like "The Lace Reader," it will be character-driven. "Your characters always tell you who they are," Barry said last night. "I didn’t want the ending I got (to "The Lace Reader"). I was very upset. But they told me the story."There are plans to make a motion picture. Denise DiNovi, former partner of Tim Burton who produced "Sisterhood of the Traveling Pants," is scheduled to produce and Rachel McAdams of "Mean Girls" is interested in starring.Other parts are up for grabs but current plans are to film in Salem, so some of the people who attended Tuesday’s talk may show up in the movie as extras. "I’ll let you know," Barry told her audience, chuckling.