32 Candles

A Letter From Ernessa T. Carter

Dear Members,

I still remember seeing Sixteen Candles for the first time when I was a little girl and thinking that high school life would be like that. I would meet my Jake Ryan. I would have a best friend who also had a cute boyfriend. We would double-date. Then I would marry my Jake Ryan and live happily ever after.

Ah, not so much.

Not only was I unpopular in high school, but I was a bit of a late bloomer as an adult. And even though I’ve managed to stumble my way into my own kind of happy ending, I’m still not cool, I’m still not glamorous, I’m still just me.

However, before I decided to write 32 CANDLES, it seemed that every piece of romantic fiction I was reading was populated with beautiful women with high-flying careers who didn’t have an awkward bone in their perfect bodies. In other words, different versions of Jake Ryan’s popular girlfriend.

Where were the underdogs in romantic fiction? I asked. Where were the imperfect women who were still trying to figure stuff out?

And that’s when my main character, Davie Jones, started whispering her story in my ear. So I wrote it as best and as honestly as I could. 32 CANDLES is the story of an unpopular girl who fails miserably at getting her own black Jake Ryan … only to have him show up at her door fifteen years later. It is a book meant to be read on a rainy day, while recovering from a cold, or on a nice sunny beach.

I wrote it with us imperfect women in mind, and I really do hope you enjoy it.

100% Love,

Ernessa T. Carter

32 Candles



So you’ve probably heard of this thing by now. It’s called life. And it’s hard. Even when it looks easy, it’s hard. That’s pretty much everybody’s situation, and it was mine, too.

And on top of the usual business of life, I was ugly. I knew this because I lived in Glass, a little town in western Mississippi, where people aren’t ever afraid to tell you how they feel-especially if they’re women. In fact, it’s impossible for a Southern black woman not to state a thing as she sees it. So they would often come up and say what they were thinking on the subject of my looks, while I was out with Cora, whose beauty offended them.

Cora had caramel-tinted skinÑnot light enough to be called yellow, not dark enough to be called plain. She was just right, with a heart-shaped face and large brown eyes that kept the title of ugly far from her door.

And there was another thing about Cora that offended the women in our town. She had a lot of friends. A lot of male friends, but not one female friend. That’s really why folks hated her.

She was the kind of woman that men met at Westons, the one bar in Glass. She went there near about every night, and some of the time she didn’t come home. But a lot of the time she came stumbling in the door, reeking of alcohol, with a guy right behind her.

These were the guys she called her friends if she called them anything at all. And she didn’t care if they had a wife or a girlfriend, she’d still bring them home to the one-bedroom shack that she inherited from her mother. She wouldn’t even shush them as they walked past her daughter (me), sleeping on the couch in the front room. And she’d show them a good time. From what I could hear, sex with Cora was fun and exciting and real loud.

Cora’s men were often appreciative of her friendship. I always waited till they had left to get up and use the toilet. And when I walked past her bedroom, sometimes the lights would still be on and I’d see wrinkled money on the nightstand. Or sometimes there’d be a bill that needed paying and Cora would ask one of her friends real pretty if he could take care of it. And I’d watch as he stuck it in his pocket.

I’d guess about seventy percent of the friends that Cora brought home from the bar came back for more. I’d also guess that by the time this story begins in the spring of 1984, she had slept with at least half of the husbands and boyfriends in town.

And that’s why black Southern ladies, who wouldn’t deign to walk on the same side of the street as her most days, would go out of their way to come over to us in Greeley’s Mini-Mart and say things like, “Oh dear, when you planning on putting a comb through this child’s head?”

Or, “She sure is dark, ain’t she? You’d lose that child in too much night.”

Or, “Why, she didn’t inherit none of your looks, did she? Maybe she got that face from her daddy.” A beat. “Whoever that is.”

From 32 CANDLES by Ernessa T. Carter

Copyright © 2010 by Ernessa T. Carter. Used by permission of HarperCollins Publishers.