What’s the Best Thing About Being an Author?

by Joyce DiPastena

In the course of various interviews for my current book blog tour, I’ve had a number of blog reviewers ask me some variation of the question, “What’s the best part about being an author?”

Needless to say, there are many “good things” about being a published author. But this weekend, my answer to this question would have to be a resounding: “Reconnecting with my favorite roommate and best friend from college after losing track of each other for 30 years!”

I was stunned to find an email from my long-lost-roommate, Laurie, in my email box this weekend. Fate threw us together as dorm partners for two years. Neither of us knew the other before that. She was beautiful and vivacious, I was mousy and painfully shy. We should never have clicked. But we did. Outside of the dorm, we mostly went our separate ways with the separate friendships we developed. But inside that dorm room, we shared a unique bond that I have treasured all my life. If fate threw us together, it was surely because fate knew how much I needed a friend like Laurie in my life!

We never had a single fight. Something I cannot, alas, say about any of my subsequent roommate experiences after Laurie abandoned me to marry the man she loved. (How could she have been so selfish?) Laurie was simply too funny to ever fight with. Observing her life was like watching a comedy, and I was the laugh track. Her off-the-wall personality kept me too much in stitches even to feel annoyed. But it wasn’t “all about her”. She cared about me, wanted to know what was going on in my life. It was like coming home at the end of the day to “family”. The adjustment to new roommates in an apartment after her marriage was difficult. Instead of “family”, my new roommates and I were more like “ships that passed in the night”.

Laurie and I tried to keep in touch, but you know how such things go. It was before the age of email, and letters gradually faded until neither of knew what had become of the other.

Until this weekend. Laurie and her husband wandered into a Deseret Bookstore and saw a copy of one of my books. “How many Joyce DiPastena’s can there be?” they apparently wondered. My editor had included my email address in the bio at the end of my book, so Laurie shot off an email to me. Sure enough, I was me and she was her! And now I’ve got to post this blog, so I can shoot an email back to her.

Yes, as of today, one of the best things about being an author is finding my long-lost roomie.