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The Real Deal

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Overview

With her bestselling mix of thrilling twists and characters to cheer for, Fern Michaels delves inside Washington, D.C.'s halls of power -- and into the heart of an independent woman driven by passion and bound by duty.

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Author Information

Bio of Fern Michaels

Webster's Collegiate Dictionary defines a biography this way: A biography is the written history of a person's life. Fern Michaels isn't a person. Fern Michaels is what I DO. Me, Mary Ruth Kuczkir. Growing up in Hastings, Pennsylvania, I was called Ruth. I became Mary when I entered the business world where first names were the order of the day. To this day, family and friends call me Dink, a name my father gave me when I was born because according to him I was `a dinky little thing' weighing in at four and a half pounds. However, I answer to Fern since people are more comfortable with a name they can pronounce. I've been telling stories and scribbling for twenty-five years. I hope I can continue for another twenty-five years. It wasn't easy during some of those years. As I said, I had to persevere. My old Polish grandmother said something to me when I was little that I never forgot. She said when God is good to you, you have to give back. For a while I didn't know how to do that. When I finally figured it out I set up The Fern Michaels Foundation. The foundation allows me to grant four year scholarships to needy, deserving students. I then went a step further and opened pre-school and day care centers with affordable rates for single moms who are having a hard time of it. Doing Fern Michaels allows me to do this and there isn't a day that goes by that I don't thank God for being so good to me. I don't know what I'm the most proud of, the books I write, the scholarships, the pre-schools or the fact that I put my kids through college on my own with no help from anyone. Probably the latter because when all else is said and done, the only thing that matters is family. Is Fern Michaels a great writer. No. She is however, one hell of a story teller. When people ask me what I do, I say, "I scribble and tell stories." It's a great way to make a living. The Dutch have a saying, `If you can't whistle on your way to work, you don't belong in that job.' I whistle all day long.

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Additional Info

Imprint

Pocket

Filesize

603.53 KB

Number of Pages

448

eBook ISBN

9780743493970

Excerpt from: The Real Deal by Fern Michaels

Washington, DC


November 1999


Quinn Star had known she was special the day she was born. No plastic baby bottles with a hard rubber nipple for her. No sirree, she wanted the real thing, much to her tattooed, hippie mother's dismay. The hippie mother who stayed around just long enough to wean her from her breast at six months, then went off to climb the Himalayas in search of Enlightenment, Quinn's tattooed, hippie father in tow. First, though, they dumped her on her aunt Birdie, who was a real flake but nice and almost normal. If you could count writing flowery, sometimes humorous, obituaries and hanging out in funeral parlors normal.

All in all, though, Quinn had no complaints about her upbringing. Birdie had taken care of her. She made sure she did her homework, brushed her teeth, and ate her vegetables. She attended PTA meetings, saw to her social life, and made sure she got into a good Ivy League college, where she'd graduated magna cum laude. But most of all, Birdie had loved her. That love said it all as far as she was concerned.

It was Birdie who insisted she follow her dream of being a Secret Service Agent after she graduated law school. Unfortunately, it hadn't worked out that way. She'd done her stint in Treasury and moved into the FBI when she finally realized the Secret Service and a White House detail were never going to become a reality.

Quinn looked down at the black-and-white photo of her parents standing on a mountaintop in some third-world country. She winced at their flowing garb and turbaned heads. It was the only picture she had of her parents. She always brought the picture to work with her in the morning. At night she put it in her briefcase to take back home. She didn't know why. Maybe it had something to do with the fact that during her almost thirty-two years she'd only seen her parents twice. Once when she was nine, and she'd been so frightened of them she'd hidden out in her room. The second time she almost missed them. They had arrived when she was seventeen and about to board the bus that would take her to Camp Wicheguma, where she was to be a camp counselor for the summer. They'd stood away from the camp bus on the tarmac in the parking lot and waved. She wasn't proud of the fact that she'd pretended not to know them. Birdie herself had stood apart from them and said she understood.