Staci Greason

Former Days of Our Lives star and now author, Staci Greason, visits with us to discuss her fourth novel, All the Girls in Town. In addition to writing novels, Greason also writes essays, short stories, and screenplays. Her newest book tells the story of three women whose lives come together after they are all wronged by the same man. “…I wanted to explore, I just felt like I wanted to explore what unhealed trauma looked like, what it looked like living in daily life and I started thinking about how women so often throw away their talent to help a man and so I thought ‘what would be interesting’ and that’s sort of how I created the first character, Dani, who wrote this song that made her husband, now ex-husband, famous. And he was such a bad guy, and so that’s how I created Dani and then once I started writing Dani, pretty soon into the book, Dani’s OA sponsor tells her to start journaling, to process her feelings instead of stuffing them with powdered sugar donuts, and she starts journaling and immediately kills him in a journal entry and feels so great, but then it moves to a blog where she kills him in all these fun ways and I started thinking, ‘well who’s reading the blog?’ …then the other two characters were born. Red, the on-again, off-again lover…and then Peter’s, Peter is the rock star, Peter’s current wife, Sasha, beautiful, gorgeous, pageant runner-upper, pregnant with his twins, and that’s how the three women were born.”

Initially, Greason’s novel had a different title, one that was taken by someone in her writing community. However, the hurdle turned out to be a blessing in disguise. “I love the title, All the Girls in Town. It’s so much better…I want this book to be a love letter to women, I mean, I wrote it as a love letter to women, right? In a time where women, we really need to be seen and heard and honor our lives, and our bodies, and our choices, and we need to be sisters even if we’re very different, right? We have to overcome our individual differences and unite for something that’s bigger, I feel. So even though that I hope the novel isn’t too message-y, I am writing it for all the girls. So that’s been the best part for me of having this book come out is all the different women who have really been moved by it, and are reaching out to me, talking about how it touched them, and they’re so varied and so that makes me very happy.”

Regarding the influence of literature, Greason remarked, “I, at least, do read things that, I like to read a lot of fiction that introduce me to characters who may not be relatable at first, in worlds that are completely foreign, because that’s what literature does, is that it expands our capacity to care about others, right? Hopefully.”