In yesterday’s blog post, https://janetswritingblog.com/2026/03/25/mt-pleasant-literary-festival-cathy-pickens-writers-workshop/) I introduced to you the second annual Mt. Pleasant (North Carolina) Literary Festival.
If you are a writer or you are curious about what makes a writer want to write, please read yesterday’s post and visit Cathy Pickens’ website, https://cathypickens.com/.
For the little village of Mt. Pleasant to attract famous authors is a feat for which the festival’s organizers deserve great praise. It started a couple of years ago as an idea. It has grown beyond their wildest imaginations. I can’t wait to see what the third annual festival holds in store for us in 2027!
This year’s festival attracted 16 authors. I’m still kicking myself that I was too late to register for Kate Quinn’s presentation on Friday night.
After Cathy Pickens’ Writer’s Workshop, I was excited to attend a presentation by New York Times Bestselling Author Meagan Church.
I thoroughly enjoyed hearing Meagan Church and seeing her in person on Thursday evening. I read her first two novels and blogged about them (The Girls We Sent Away in my September 2, 2024 blog post, Books I Read in August 2024 and The Last Carolina Girl in my May 1, 2023 post, Some of the Books I Read in April 2023.)
I have much less time to read now than I did several years ago. I unable to read much of Meagan’s Church New York Times Bestseller, The Mad Wife, before it had to go back to the public library. I’m on the waitlist again so I can finish it.
She mainly talked about The Mad Wife and what led her to do the research and write it. She talked about the history of the term “hysteria” and how it has always been relegated to women.
She talked about how nervous or excitable women and women with such ailments as multiple sclerosis were misdiagnosed through the years as “just being hysterical.”
The most gut-wrenching part of her talk was when she addressed how rampant lobotomies were in the first half of the 20th century and the gruesome ways one particular man used an ice pick through a woman’s eye socket to perform a lobotomy. This led many women in vegetative states which, unfortunately, was the objective.
She talked about how women have traditionally been omitted from medical studies – particularly drug studies – in spite of the fact that women tend to react differently biologically than men from certain drugs. She mentioned how women’s symptoms are often different from a man’s . It was only in the last 30 years that medical science began to acknowledge that and make a few exceptions in research.
It was a fascinating presentation, and the author and audience members were careful to avoid “spoilers” for those of us who have not read or finished reading the novel.
In a nutshell, Lulu is expected to be the perfect housewife in the 1950s in American suburbia. She collects Green Stamps (are you old enough to remember them? I am!) and tries to maintain her home just so for her husband, but cracks begin to appear in her life… and therein lies the story of The Mad Wife.
If you have not read any of Meagan Church’s books, I highly recommend them! Please visit her website, https://www.meaganchurch.com/.
Janet
The government should be afraid of its citizens, not the other way around.
Janet's Writing Blog 
“…studies – particularly drug studies – in spite of the fact that women tend to react differently biologically than men from certain drugs. She mentioned how women’s symptoms are often different from a man’s . ”
Thank you for noting this from her talk, as is it something that really doesn’t get mentioned often enough at all.
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The presentation sounds excellent, albeit upsetting. The Mad Wife sounds excellent as well.
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You’re welcome, Nia. Yes. It rarely gets mentioned and probably the majority of people have no idea the history of drug research and much of current drug research being concerning men. Thanks for your comment.
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Her presentation was quite informative and went beyond a discussion of the book. I have enjoyed Meagan Church’s earlier two novels. The Mad Wife had to go back to the library before I had a chance to get very far into it. Needless to say, I’m back on the waitlist. I’ve heard Meagan describe herself as one of those “overnight successes” who wrote for 20 years before one of her books gained national attention.
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Ah, yes, the storied “overnight sensation.” 🙂
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