Lalita Tademy was born in Berkeley, California, far from her parents’ southern roots. Nonetheless, her parents made sure their household (Louisiana West) maintained a definite non-California edge,
including a steady supply of grits, gumbo, cornbread, and collard greens, and a stream of other transplanted southerners eager to share their “back-home” stories.
Capricorn by birth and temperament, Tademy decided early that independence and self-sufficiency trumped personal amusement, and set out with dogged determination and methodical resolve to fashion a career. She climbed the
corporate ladder rung by rung, entering the business world when computers were as big as Volkswagens and managed by highly specialized experts in refrigerated vaults. By the time she left her position as VP and General Manager
at a Fortune 500 high technology company in Silicon Valley 20 years later, ending that particular chapter of her life, all she had to do was pack up her laptop and run for the nearest exit.
The transition from focused, driven, corporate executive to balanced, fully satisfied, fully realized human being (okay, she hasn’t really made it there yet) was an incredible journey of self discovery and growth,
only impeded by the fact that there was absolutely no money coming in. But her obsession with finding each root, each branch, stripping the bark and turning over every hidden leaf and stem of her family tree consumed her,
until she had accumulated such powerful stories there was no choice but to write about the amazing people with whom she had made acquaintance.
And so, more than 1,000 documents in hand, she wrote a novel based on the lives of four generations of Creole slave women in Louisiana, women from whom she descended. Cane River is a testament to the strength of those who
came before, a blend of fact and fiction, homage—and a good, fast, exciting read.
After everything she learned researching and writing Cane River, Tademy thought writing her second book would be much less difficult. She was wrong. Maybe if not for the time-intensive process of falling in love and
getting married, it would have been, but she will never know. It was almost six years between the publication of Cane River and Red River’s debut in January 2007.
Meanwhile, she looks forward to the succeeding chapters of her own life, eager to know what comes next.
Read more about Lalita in this Q & A!
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