Eileen Rendahl’s books are perfect for packing into the beach bag for a light read or stashing by the bed for a fun escape before sleep.
Her leading character is usually female, single, slightly zany — and Jewish. Rendahl’s third and latest novel, “Un-Bridaled,” begins with Chloe Sachs and her fiancé, Mark, standing before the rabbi about to be married. But when Mark stomps his foot on the glass, it shoots out sideways, bounces off the wall and rolls a few feet before coming to a rest. Everyone is momentarily shocked.
From there, let’s just say that everything turns 180 degrees, and the reader follows Chloe on an interesting change of course.
It’s chick lit, “absolutely,” says Rendahl, who lives in Davis. “Some people take offense at that, but honestly, my demographic is women 20 to 40.”
Far from denigrating, she finds the literary term kind of empowering. “Maybe we’re reclaiming the term ‘chick,'” she suggests.
The 44-year-old single mother of two admits there’s a lot of herself in her stories.
For one, “my heroines are always Jewish,” says Rendahl, who grew up in a Reform household in Lincoln, Neb., attended Sunday school and Hebrew school and had a bat mitzvah. Her parents were “very active” in their temple, and her grandfather, she notes, attended synagogue.
“In high school, there were 500 in my graduating class. I was one of three or four Jewish kids. We were the ethnic minority,” she says. The Jewish community was a nexus for her and her family: “It was nice to have a place where you felt welcome and not different.”
Family is another constant in her work. Her first two novels, “Do Me, Do My Roots” and “Balancing on High Heels,” dealt with the healing abilities of family.
“Un-Bridaled,” on the other hand, captures a decidedly dysfunctional family. Chloe’s parents are divorced and remarried. She hardly speaks to her mother, who has a drinking problem and a benign but apologetic husband. And her father has long seemed more interested in pleasing his wife than dealing with Chloe and her brother.
Yet Chloe is extremely close to her grandmother, enjoys spending time with her stepsister and her children, and relies on her younger brother, Rafe, as a confidante and co-conspirator.
In real life, says Rendahl, she has two sisters and “we’re obnoxiously close.” One is a professor at U.C. Davis, and is the reason why Rendahl ended up moving there six years ago after a devastating year. During those 12 months “my father was ill, my husband dying, and my mother was recovering from hip surgery.” Rendahl’s two sons, now 12 and 14, were just “little kids” and she was trying to hold it all together. Her husband died in 1999.
In 2004 Rendahl’s father died, but her mother recently celebrated her 80th birthday “with all the grandkids there.” She lives in an assisted living facility less than a mile from Rendahl’s home — a wonderful place, notes Rendahl. (“The joke is that I would move in if they would take people with children.”)
The character of Rafe is based on the author’s fiancé, with whom she went to college and was “always a really good friend.”
“I use a lot of my life, my sister’s life, my friends’ lives” in her novels, but “I try to ask first … My life for some reason has always been kind of crazy.”
She is already at work on her next novel, “Un-Veiled,” which, despite the title, is not a sequel to “Un-Bridaled.” Tentatively due to be published in August 2007, it is about “twin hairdressers who specialize in wedding hair” in a small, central California town. Rendahl’s been watching lots of TV lately to get material. Otherwise, there’s that good ‘ole imagination. “I’ve always been a huge daydreamer,” she says.
“Un-Bridaled,” released earlier this year, “has done well so far,” the author says.
“My huge claim to fame is that I had a sentence and a half in People magazine” under recommended chick-lit reading. She also gives the occasional writers’ workshop and enjoys attending national Romance Writers of America conferences, where “people are shockingly generous with their time and advice.”
But mostly she maintains a low profile — writing, running carpool for her kids and enjoying the community-oriented spirit of Davis.
And unlike some of her writer friends who get pointed inquiries about aspects of their plots, Rendahl says she’s gotten “mostly letters saying ‘I really like the book, when’s your next one coming out?'”
As for the Jewish characters, that’s simply a non-issue. “Nobody even mentions it,” she says.
Her heroines are Jewish because she’s Jewish. “I feel like it’s something that’s pervasive in our house. I feel being raised Jewish defines decisions that I make.”
And the wineglass debacle that opens “Un-Bridaled?” It came straight from Rendahl’s first marriage. And while that could have been an omen — the union didn’t last — it was due to a poor decision on her part, she says, “when you’re foolish enough to grab one of the caterer’s glasses” at the last minute.
“Un-Bridaled” by Eileen Rendahl (269 pages, Downtown Press, $13).