Motherhood, Mayhem, and Murder: Christine Gunderson’s Friends With Secrets

On a weekday morning, author Christine Gunderson welcomes me into her home — and her most sacred space, her office and writing room. Sunlight is streaming in through the window panes, landing on the walls, painted a tranquil blue. Her pup Star is never far behind her heels as Christine sits at her desk with a nervous excitement echoing in her voice. It’s finally happened, she’s a published author. “It only took me ten years,” she says with a little laugh and I feel both the weight of that statement and the relief. Because for some, it never happens. 

Her debut novel, Friends With Secrets will be available August 1, a release date that was pushed for good reason. “It was like lightning striking,” she says of hearing her book had been chosen for Amazon’s First Reads program this July. “They only pick six or eight titles across all genres every month.” If you have Prime, you can download it for free the month of July (you still have a few days). 

The Amazon editors who selected it said: “Sex, lies, and minivans. Friends with Secrets, a novel of unlikely allies, takes the reader into the secret lives of moms, showing that you never know what’s really going on beneath the surface...and that even the most perfect facade can have a cracked foundation.”

Other early reviews call it, “Timeless, BEAUTIFUL, relevant, laugh-out-loud FUNNY.”

Christine is humble and shares she has six unpublished novels in a drawer, and has been riddled by rejections over the years. It was a writer friend who enjoyed Christine’s annual Christmas letters about the family and their travels who suggested she try women’s fiction. “I had an idea rattling in my head for decades…and it was friends with secrets.” 

After her first son was born, she stopped working. “I felt like I was going to lose my mind. He had colic and wouldn’t sleep. I had no idea what I was doing. I was writing to preserve my sanity. Things that I wrote 18 years ago made their way into this novel. I was working for the government, traveling all the time, and my husband was also traveling all the time for his job, too. When I got pregnant, I thought ‘someone is going to have to stay home.’” Christine did. 

“I became a mother later in life, at 37 and found it difficult. I had my third child at 41. It was a jarring transition from what I was accustomed to…having had my own life and my own time.” 

She grew up on a fourth generation family farm in rural North Dakota. “It’s where my dad grew up and my grandfather…it was where my great grandfather settled the family after coming from Norway. There were ten people in my high school class, and it was an hour to the nearest McDonald’s.”

After college, I got a job as a reporter and television anchor in Sioux Falls, South Dakota. “Working in broadcast journalism, you have a minute and 20 seconds to write your own story when you’re coming in from the field. There’s suddenly a tornado and they have to cut 30 seconds of it. It teaches you to make every word count.” 

Christine later moved to Washington, D.C. and has been here ever since. “I worked on the Hill for several years.” She and her husband moved to Alexandria after they were married, living first in Shirlington, then Old Town and settling in Fort Hunt. Her biggest transition though was from career mom to mom. “I started writing a novel about a character similar to myself during the transition to keep sane and find my footing…and I loved to write. But I was too close to it, it’s too hard to write about something while you’re in the trenches. I had three children, four and under.”

She started with YA (young adult) novels about ten years ago. “When I got serious I said, ‘I’m going to try and get an agent and get these published. And then I reached a point about two years ago when I hit a wall. It was after my dad passed away. I couldn’t handle one more rejection. I thought it's time to throw in the towel.” Three weeks later, she received an email: “We have interest from a publisher.” 

The novel was far from finished. “I had the first 60 pages and my agent assured me she could sell it on proposal. I thought she was crazy, but she was right. Although the publisher was a bit wary of taking on a first time author and asked for more to look at. “I thought I had another 100 pages, but it was more like 40, so I sat down and wrote like a mad woman, 14 hours a day for two weeks straight.” 

This publishing experience gave her a great appreciation for copyediting. “It’s a skill that’s discreet and different from writing. A level of detail I hadn’t appreciated until someone was catching every little error. Process has shown me how many people it takes to write a book. The author is one person, and I had an army of people behind me, encouraging me every step of the way. They were also telling me things I didn't want to hear – and how to make it better. It was so humbling. There had been a point when I stopped talking about the book, because I was embarrassed it was taking me so long to get published. I’m now in awe of the marketing team at Lake Union.”

She’s also incredibly grateful to her family. “I’m so lucky, I have the most supportive husband on the planet and really fantastic kids who have eaten so much frozen pizza, just so I can write my books. They’ve been phenomenal. When I get a rejection, I tell them about it – about not giving up. They’ve seen that when you want something you have to keep going even though it’s hard.”

She also gives credit to The Washington Romance Writers. “They are the most supportive, talented group of women I have ever had the pleasure to know. They taught me how to write and took me to workshops. We’re really lucky we live in an area where there are a lot of writers.”

With the book available on First Reads, she’s been afraid to look at the reviews (over 4,000 currently!). “My daughter Kari reads the nice reviews to me in the morning…and she’s always checking my Amazon ranking.” As of this writing, her book is listed as a Bestseller and #1 in Friendship Fiction, #1 in Family Fiction and #1 in Political Fiction.

As for Christine, she’s not slowing down. “We take breathers when we’re dead. It’s full speed ahead. I have one heading off to college, one who’s going to be a junior and one in eighth grade. And I’m trying to write my next book. Plus, I’m exhausted from enjoying every precious moment of motherhood,” she says with a smile. 

The waiting, the rejection, the reward, it all taught her resilience. “We come to what we’re supposed to come to when we come to it. And you’re the best mother you can be with your child at the time when you’re a mother. We all have different circumstances.” 

In her next wook, she wants to tackle the pressure and anxiety of raising kids in today’s environment, the culture of busyness and the pressure to have our children in every activity, every day, all the time. “Being a modern mother is really hard, and women want to feel seen, acknowledged and recognized. It’s okay as a mom to have the things you love. To have hobbies, to have interests, to write books…”

And she does, getting up at 5:30am. “If I can get two hours of writing in before anyone else gets up, it doesn’t impact my writing time. I am a better mother, wife and person if I have written that day. Writing keeps me sane and that’s a wonderful thing to know about myself.”

As for focusing on the positive, she saves nice emails from her readers and prints them out, referring to them whenever she needs a boost. Her book is officially available August 1; you can preorder on Amazon.  

You’ll love the local references – just as much as I do. I’m not giving away anything else!