Wendy Willis Baldwin Features A Different Kind of Heroine in 'The Sisters We Were'

In her debut novel, The Sisters We Were, Wendy Willis Baldwin tells the emotional story of two adult sisters, Ruby and Pearl Crenshaw, and the bond they share as they work to overcome their childhood traumas. While one sister, Ruby, goes through her own major changes, it’s Pearl that has the life-changing transformation, from battling a food addiction that caused her to become morbidly obese to undergoing bariatric surgery to help save her life. Baldwin’s own life with her sister was the inspiration for this fictional story. She explains, “Well The Sisters We Were, of course, is a story about sisterhood. An overarching theme is all about how our more intimate relationships expand and contract pretty much in direct relationship to all the secrets we keep, right? …In my own life, my sister and I, we grew up in the same house, we were exposed to very similar childhood traumas… things we didn’t really know how to grapple with as young girls and kept secret as we were growing up and ultimately the way that, kind of, trauma manifested in my life was one way and the way it manifested for my sister in her life was a completely different way and for me, I was sort of drawn to writing, even at an early age, storytelling… my sister, her coping strategy was a food addiction…her food addiction really spiraled to a level that became increasingly hard to manage and at her heaviest at the age of 40, my sister was weighing 531 pounds…there was just so many things that were limited in her life because of her size and her health and anyway, she decided after 40 years that it was time to save herself and watching her go through that process where she lost 349 pounds over the course of 18 months was nothing short of miraculous… it was really something to watch her go from her previous life to just really taking off. I mean, letting go of the weight, letting go of things and she likes to tell people that [as] she got smaller her life got bigger…she just had access to things and experiences that she could enjoy that she’d never been able to enjoy.”

For Baldwin, writing was not only a cathartic release from her past, it also became her passion. Whether it’s telling stories through magazines, documentary film production, or writing novels, “Writing is something I do… it’s one of those things, not unlike painting… where I can lose all track of time and I just, I find that I love it. I love getting lost in a story and I feel, what’s funny is, even if I haven’t had any measurable success as defined by the outside world or anything like that, everyday I’ve ever spent writing I have felt unbelievably productive at the end of it.” Furthermore, “Part of the beautiful thing about storytelling in general is that it illuminates the plight of humanity… Different circumstances, we’re illuminating the human experience from different points of view.”