Amy Daughters: You Cannot Mess This Up

It's 2014 and Amy Daughters is a forty-six-year old stay-at-home mom living in Dayton, Ohio. She returns to her hometown of Houston over the Thanksgiving holiday to discuss her parents’ estate—and finds herself hurled back in time. Suddenly, it’s 1978, and she is forced to spend thirty-six hours in her childhood home with her nuclear family, including her ten-year old self. Over the next day and a half she reconsiders every feeling she’s ever had, discusses current events with dead people, gets overserved at a party with her parents’ friends, and is treated to lunch at the Bonanza Sirloin Pit. Besides noticing that everyone is smoking cigarettes, she’s still jealous of her sister, and there is a serious lack of tampons in the house, Amy also begins to appreciate that memories are malleable, wholly dependent on who is doing the remembering. In viewing her parents as peers and her siblings as detached children, she redefines her difficult relationships with her family members and, ultimately, realizes that her life story matters and is profoundly significant—not so much to everyone else, perhaps, but certainly to her. Amy’s guide said her trip back in time wouldn’t change anything in the future, but by the time her thirty-six hours are up, she’s convinced that she’ll never be the same again.

where I came from 

It all started when Dick and Sue Weinland hooked up at an apartment complex in Houston, Texas. Four years later, after things had gotten quite cozy, I was born just a few short miles from the Eighth Wonder of the World, a.k.a. – the Astrodome. I blossomed into womanhood north of H-Town, in Spring, Texas, where I attended Klein Oak High School. From there, it was on to the Princeton of the Texas Panhandle – THE Texas Tech University – and just five glorious years later, a Bachelor of Business Administration degree. 

That's when it became time for me to not only enter the world of business (I was in the purchasing arena for a decade) but to do my own hooking up and child creating. The plot twist that brings us to the rest of the story was my husband’s job moving us to England for three years. Finding myself temporarily without employment, I did the next obvious thing and became a writer.