An 84-year-old widow who may have perpetrated the largest jewelry heist in American history and her 21-year-old caretaker end up on the run from the law in Colleen Oakley’s newest novel, “The Mostly True Story of Tanner & Louise.”
The book, which releases on March 28, was largely inspired by the author’s late grandmother, who was “my very favorite person on earth,” Oakley says.
A master hostess and entertainer who religiously poured herself a vodka martini every night, Marion Oakley had lived an incredible life — graduating from Cornell University at a time when most women rarely went to college, traveling the globe, even meeting Jimmy Stewart.
In her late 80s, she was diagnosed with late-onset Parkinson’s disease and began suffering from vivid hallucinations and delusions.
“She started to say some alarming things in our weekly phone calls, like that she owed tens of thousands of dollars in gambling debts, or that my aunt had gone to jail for committing murder,” says Oakley, a Greer native who now lives in Atlanta.
These were the sort of stories that Oakley’s grandmother would have found hilarious when she was healthy.
“Of course my novelist brain starts turning and I’m thinking, ‘What if any of the crazy things she was saying were actually true? What if she had lived this whole other life that we didn’t know about?'”
And so the character of Louise was born.
Her foil is the reluctant caretaker Tanner, an aimless college dropout in need of a place to live, having worn out her welcome at her parents’ house.
The two start off their living arrangement happily ignoring each other as much as possible, until Louise suddenly appears in Tanner’s room with a packed bag one night, insisting that the two of them skip town and hit the road immediately.
To that end, the novel also pays homage to one of Oakley’s favorite female-empowerment movies of all time: “Thelma & Louise.”
She first watched the film as a young teenager who was furious at the world and didn’t know why.
“I just remember understanding (Thelma and Louise’s) rage and finally feeling validated in my own anger, even though I didn’t really have the words to express how unfair it felt to be a girl in the world at that time,” Oakley says. “It only made sense to me to give a nod to the first and best feminist duo of the big screen.”
“The Mostly True Story of Tanner & Louise” can be purchased at M. Judson Booksellers in downtown Greenville or wherever books are sold.
