Christy
Landers Tallamy
Christy Landers Tallamy is a writer whose work explores the beauty and
complexity of ordinary lives. Her style has been compared to Italian novelist
Elena Ferrante, and her poetry and essays have appeared in several creative
writing anthologies. She has also worked as a ghostwriter, blogger, and
essayist. Her historical trilogy draws on her Southern roots to examine family
loyalty, faith, and generational legacy. Christy is drawn to stories of people
navigating survival in the grey areas between right and wrong, and to the
seemingly small choices that ripple across generations. An engaging speaker,
she offers author programs on literature, family dynamics, and the power of
storytelling.
IAN: Please tell us about
your latest books.
Christy Landers Tallamy: The Ruth Trilogy traces the generational cost of silence,
faith, and survival in the 20th-century American South. Born in 1912 at the
foot of Stone Mountain, Georgia, Ruth Shurlington grows up steeped in
evangelical tradition and rigid expectations of womanhood. After the death of a
beloved patriarch shatters her family’s stability, Ruth’s longing for love and
certainty leads her into the arms of Leonidas Brantley—a much older man with a
criminal history and whose charm masks a brutal need for control. Their
marriage becomes a crucible of isolation and violence, binding Ruth to a life
she once believed was divinely ordained.
As the years unfold through
Sugarcane Saint and Sipping Mercury, Ruth’s private suffering
ripples outward, shaping the lives of her children and entangling them in a
legacy of buried truths. Sisters, neighbors, and fleeting flashes of courage
offer the possibility of escape, but each attempt carries a cost—and each silence
feeds the darkness growing inside the Brantley home. What begins as one woman’s
private submission slowly hardens into a family inheritance, until the past is
no longer something they remember, but something they are forced to survive.
IAN: Is The Ruth Trilogy published in print,
e-book or both?
Christy Landers Tallamy: The Ruth Trilogy is available in paperback, hardback and
e-book formats. We will be releasing the audio versions in 2027.
IAN: Where can we go to buy
your books?
Christy Landers Tallamy: Christylanderstallamy.com/shop Sugarcane
Saint at Amazon.com and Sipping Mercury at Amazon.com
IAN: What inspired you to write trilogy?
Christy Landers Tallamy: This story had
been pressing on my family for generations. My grandfather was a moonshiner, a
witch doctor, a community leader — and a deeply violent man. My grandmother, by
contrast, embodied the image of the sweet Southern woman. That pairing cast a
long shadow. They had seven sons, and every one of them became abusers. Their
four daughters became, in very different ways, studies in female survival.
For most of my life, the stories of this family were a series of
contradictions and whispers and pieces of unspeakable moments of violence. It
was only after my mother’s last living brother passed away — the final
gatekeeper of those secrets — that a weight lifted. In a moment of grief, over
cocktails and appetizers at Carraba’s, my mother asked a piercing question: Who
was my mother?
I had grown up under the weight of this legacy, carrying questions and wounds
and unspoken truths of my own. Her question became my turning point. I began
digging into my maternal family line, trying to understand who my grandmother
really was and how she came to marry my grandfather. That search — for truth,
for context, for compassion — became the seed of this trilogy.
IAN: Did you use an outline or do you just wing
the first draft?
Christy Landers Tallamy: I did have an outline, though it didn’t
start out looking very official. I began by gathering family stories and lining
them up alongside real historical events, which turned into a document that was
almost 100 pages long. It was basically a big, chronological brain dump of
everything I’d learned about this family. From there, I went deep into research
— visiting cemeteries, spending a full day at the Library of Congress, and
reading years’ worth of historical newspapers to understand the world they were
living in. I layered all of that into the timeline. Once I had that foundation,
I curled up with my laptop and started doing the storytelling work — connecting
the dots with narrative, character arcs, and imagined dialogue.
IAN: How long did it take to write the trilogy?
Christy Landers Tallamy: Between the deep research, the many interviews
with family members, and the emotional weight of uncovering and writing about
family secrets, it took nearly six years just to release the first book.
Originally, the entire story was one very ambitious manuscript — about
1,200 pages — which my editor gently (and wisely) suggested might be… a bit
much for a single novel. Breaking it into a trilogy was absolutely the right
call, but it did stretch the timeline! By the time the final book is released,
the whole journey will have taken about eight years from start to finish.
Christy Landers Tallamy: Part of why I wanted to tell this story is to honor
the ways our ancestry shapes us and to validate the wounds we inherit. Just
about a hundred years ago, my grandmother made a choice — she stayed with a
violent man — and that decision rippled through my mother’s life, my own, and
even my own little family so far removed from my grandmother’s life. But the
story is also a reminder that every choice matters. Even when we feel small or
insignificant, our actions have impact, shaping the lives of those who come
after us.
In some ways, the trilogy is an insistence: You have value. You
matter. The choices you make are important, and they shape not only your life
but the world that unfolds around you.
IAN: How much of the trilogy is realistic?
Christy Landers Tallamy: The trilogy is rooted in real people and real events
from my maternal history. As I pieced together stories, records, and memories,
I built the emotional and historical truth of what happened. I carefully held
truth in any violent scenes, only including them if I had multiple factual or
witness sources to draw from. The truth of that legacy did not call for
embellishment. From there, I shaped a narrative — compressing timelines,
reimagining dialogue, and sometimes blending or altering identifying details to
protect the wounded, if not the innocent. In other words, most of it is true.
IAN: What books have most influenced your life
most?
Christy Landers Tallamy: It may be a cliché, but The Picture of Dorian Gray
by Oscar Wilde has been incredibly influential for me. I still remember the
mental churn the first time I read it — especially the idea that even a sin
that goes “unseen” still causes damage. That concept stayed with me and, in
many ways, planted the earliest seeds for the Ruth Trilogy. At its heart, my
series explores that same truth: “sins” don’t disappear just because they are
hidden — it lingers, shaping lives in ways we may not immediately see.
IAN: What book are you reading now?
Christy Landers Tallamy: As a personal reading challenge for myself this year,
I’m (re)reading all the books that influenced me in my adolescence and early
adulthood– including The Picture of Dorian Gray. I just recently finished The
Witch of Blackbird Pond by Elizabeth Speare and Across Five Aprils
by Irene Hunt. Both were still just as powerful to me in surprisingly new ways.
IAN: Is there anything you find particularly
challenging in your writing?
Christy Landers Tallamy: Fragments. Broken thoughts. Streams of consciousness.
This has always been my style—my way of finding the creative current. I move
through an emotional landscape first and let my words follow the wandering,
which sometimes means the reader feels every stumble and turn along the way.
That is a difficult style to navigate when applied to long form. It can be
confusing. Disruptive. Misinterpreted. The period, the em dash, the comma, the
use of italics, the repetition of a single word. These all come to represent
something much deeper than grammatical accuracy.
Writing this way is a risk, but it’s also the most honest way I know to
translate interior experience onto the page.
IAN: Who designed the covers?
Christy Landers Tallamy: In a world grappling with AI versus human art, I chose
to remain old school. The cover art is a pastel series created by a young
Virginia Commonwealth University art student, Mackenzie Haskell. I’ve been a
fan of her work since I first came across it in a high school gymnasium, and
the original pieces now hang framed in my office.
In our conversations about the covers, we focused heavily on the shadow in the
background and how it moves closer with each book. We talked about evoking a
sense of foreboding and creating images that felt like they were telling the
story on their own. It was an ambitious vision for a first cover series, and
I’m incredibly proud of where she landed.
IAN: Did you learn anything from writing your books
and what was it?
Christy Landers Tallamy: I learned that
the past — and our memories of it — are fractured, elusive things. Laying out
the strands of my research felt like looking at the same image under shifting
angles of light; each perspective revealed something new, sometimes
contradicting what I thought I understood. I went searching for answers and
discovered that was a futile goal. I didn’t find answers. I found compassion —
for the people in my family, for the choices they made, and for myself.
Exploring such a deeply personal history also helped me unravel the hold it had
on my own life. Heading into the final book of the trilogy, I have a clearer
understanding that I am a melting pot of the people who came before me — the
good and the bad. I can’t ignore the place I came from; doing so would leave me
incomplete. Understanding my origin has given me perspective and strength.
At the same time, I’ve come to see that my story is my own. I am not bound by
the ideas or the missteps of my ancestry. I get to define my particular branch
of a very old tree.
IAN: What were the challenges (research, literary,
psychological, and logistical) in bringing your books to life?
Christy Landers Tallamy: Choosing to tangle my art with my childhood traumas
had a profound impact on my life. During the six years of active writing, I
became deeply immersed in the lives of certain individuals. I uncovered family
secrets that had to be processed all over again. At times, I found myself
enraged by what had been done to my mother and her siblings, and I had to learn
how to channel that rage into the work rather than let it consume me.
The greatest challenge came when my editor told me I had permission to write
the antagonist, Leonidas, as a flat embodiment of evil. She said it would be
understandable — even acceptable. But then she challenged me to stay true to my
deeper goal: to understand who my grandparents were and what shaped their
lives.
So I didn’t write him as a caricature of violence. Instead, I researched cult
leaders, violent offenders, and the psychology of abuse. I forced myself to
step into his perspective in certain scenes and try to see the world through
his eyes, even as he harmed his family. That work was truly soul-numbing. I
chose to work with a counselor during this process to help safeguard my
emotional well-being while writing such a dark character.
My hope is that I’ve portrayed Leonidas Brantley as a full human being — not to
excuse his actions, but to explore the conditions that can give rise to such
harm. Writing him with care was emotionally grueling, but it felt necessary. In
many ways, it became a warning set down on paper: violence breeds violence.
IAN: Tell us about your next book or a work
in progress. Is it a sequel or a stand-alone?
Christy Landers Tallamy: The Ruth
Trilogy concludes in What Was Done to Me (releasing September 2026),
where Ruth’s youngest daughter, Carolina, comes of age under her father’s
cultish control. Her fight to break the cycle forces a fatal
reckoning—revealing how one woman’s silence can echo across generations, and
how one survivor’s voice might finally bring it to an end.
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