Author Spotlight: Patricia Leavy

It’s Never Too Late to Pursue Your Dreams – Patricia Leavy

I’ve loved creative writing since I was a little girl. Recently, my mother found one of my earliest “books.” It was a story I wrote, illustrated, and then bound with old wallpaper and glue to make it look like a real book. On the back, it says I was six years old.

In 1984 the movie Romancing the Stone came out. I was nine at the time. The movie was about a romance novelist who gets caught up in a real-life adventure. In the opening scene, Joan Wilder, played by Kathleen Turner, is sitting at her typewriter finishing a novel. As she types the final words, she bawls her eyes out, whispering how good it is. When my parents would go out on Saturday nights, my father would walk me down to our local video store where I could select a VHS tape. I rented Romancing the Stone nearly every weekend. My favorite part of the movie was always the first few minutes when the novelist is fishing her manuscript. I would rewind it over and over again.

I was also obsessed with love stories. Yup, I’ve always been in love with love. A novel, a film, and sometimes even a Hallmark television movie can bring me to happy tears.

thinking it’s pretty clear I was destined to be a romance novelist. There’s no doubt this was always my heart’s calling. Being an artist takes courage. There’s so much rejection and critique. Unfortunately, my younger self wasn’t brave. I didn’t think I could handle it.

So, I pushed my dream down deeply and chose another career path, earning my doctorate degree in sociology and becoming a professor. There was a lot I loved about working in academia, but I always knew I wasn’t following my bliss. As an academic, I had the opportunity to publish my work—articles and nonfiction books. Eventually, during a sabbatical, I secretly wrote a novel without telling a soul other than my then-boyfriend (who is now my husband). I loved every minute of it. For better or worse, I knew that’s what I should be doing with my life. In 2012, to the shock of many friends and colleagues, I quit my tenured job as a professor to be a full-time author. I have never looked back.

Pursuing your dreams takes bravery. It’s scary. It can hurt. You can fail, or so you think. With age comes the wisdom that the only real failure is in not trying. I’m not suggesting you need to quit your job and change your entire life, although I’m not opposed to it, but I am suggesting as we age we each do an honest gut check and ask ourselves: am I pursuing my dream?

As I approach the age of fifty, I do so knowing that this is the best time in my life. The saying really is true. It’s never too late. Now, I get up each day and race to my computer to enter my love-filled story worlds. Much like Joan Wilder, on most days you can find me wearing sweatpants and sitting at my computer bawling my eyes out whispering things like, “That’s so good.”