The next writer in the series: June 1, 2025

Last Bets at the Atlanta airport

How We Spend Our Days is published twice a month—on the 15th with an introduction of the next writer and then on the 1st with the writer’s essay on how they spend their days. We’ve been publishing on Substack since January of 2023, but the first essay in the series was written by Pam Houston and published on August 1, 2009 over at Catching Days where you’ll also find a complete list of the writers who have contributed to the series.

How we spend our days is how we spend our lives.

—Cynthia

~~~

With summer right around the corner, I’m excited to tell you about Mary Carroll Moore’s Last Bets, which takes place on the Caribbean island of Bonaire. I don’t know about you, but these days, I’m looking for books (and shows and movies) with strong female leads. And Last Bets has not just one, but two. I read it over a year ago, and Elly and Rosie are still with me.

Elly didn’t call herself a scuba diver, but she’d loved her first taste of diving on her last visit. She hadn’t imagined how silent it could be, deep in the ocean, just the sound of her own breathing…

Rosie loved to sit on the seawall and watch the line between ocean and sky blur to near invisible. As was their habit after dinner, her dad gathered his marks for the evening games, while she got herself an iced coffee and took her place on the rocky edge.

Elly comes to Bonaire from Washington, DC where her husband has recently died and her finances are nonexistent. She wants to get away but also to finish a painting and get paid for it. Rosie is sixteen and a thief, slipping into guest rooms at the resort where her father plays backgammon. If she doesn’t straighten up, she will be heading to boarding school (death) instead of the art institute (life). Freedom and art are on the line for both of them.

In the excerpt below, notice how Mary uses heat to add tension to the story.

It hadn’t been more than thirty minutes, tops, but the sun was out now, the air steaming. Elly already felt the heat building. She walked back to the apartment, inhaling the now familiar scent of hot pine and strong herbs, hoping she’d remembered to leave the window shutters open.

Throughout the book, Mary activates our senses thereby placing us in scene with the characters—from the scent of hot pine above to the waves pounding the beach below.

Outside the waves pounded the beach. The wind picked up, and it had cleared, as promised, the blue sky glaringly bright. [Elly] heard voices from the the bar, the lunchtime buffet opening; she should go get a sandwich, a salad, before they closed. Instead, she bent to lift the pastel stick from its foam nest. For a half hour, she lost herself in the simple choices of line, shape, and color.

Rosie’s sneaking around also adds tension to the story. Here she is in Elly’s room. “Behind the [bathroom] door hung a red silk kimono, the first hint of unique.” When Rosie finds the art supplies, she opens the boxes of pastels.

She hadn’t planned to do anything, just look. But suddenly her fingers were reaching for a stick of buttery yellow. She broke off a tiny chip. Again, with a carnelian pastel. She arranged the chips in a soft tissue, wrapped them gently, and stowed them in the pocket of her shorts. Then she replaced each broken pastel in its slot and turned the stick so the disfigured edge was hidden.

Elly would know. Eventually. Rosie didn’t know why she wanted that, wanted Elly even to suspect her, but she didn’t think about it. Owning something of Elly’s felt intensely important in that moment. Something they shared, like art.

Yet it wasn’t quite enough…

Backgammon gambling is the evening activity on Bonaire, but risk-taking is not limited to the stone tables. Elly and Rosie ignore the odds stacked against them, refuse to follow the rules, and set traps for each other. When we discover a hurricane is on the way (another layer of tension), it feels as if danger is everywhere, but Elly and Rosie bet on themselves.

Last Bets received a starred Kirkus review and was one of Kirkus Reviews’ Top 100 Best Indie Books of the Year!

Mary is the author of two other novels. A Woman’s Guide to Search & Rescue, which also features strong female characters. Kate and Red are pilots and estranged sisters from opposite sides of a fractured family. They are thrown together in a search and rescue in the Adirondack mountains of New York State when Red is framed for the brutal attack on the manager of her indie rock band. Qualities of Light, a YA queer novel, features sixteen-year-old Molly, who when tragedy strikes, must confront her own qualities of light and darkness. This novel was nominated for the PEN/Faulkner and Lambda Literary awards,

Since 2008, the same year I began Catching Days, Mary has sent Your Weekly Writing Exercises each Friday to subscribers around the world. She has taught at the Loft Literary Center, Grub Street, the Madeline Island School of the Arts, and has YouTube and Spotify channels. In 2011, her writing craft book, Your Book Starts Here, a product of those workshops, won the New Hampshire Literary “Reader’s Choice” award.

Although creatively she began as a painter, Mary’s website now tells you, “When I’m not writing, I paint. Mostly in plein air. I’m fascinated with the way light creates form, color, and luminosity.” Her paintings have been exhibited nationally since 2002, and are in permanent collections, including the Pacific Street Gallery in New London.

Mary is, or has been, a journalist, a songwriter, and a singer in a band. In the 1980s, she went from writing a food column for Sedona Life magazine, to writing cookbooks, to writing a syndicated weekly column for the Los Angeles Times, and then to writing two spirituality-self-help books. A 2007 New York Times article featuring Mary’s painting begins, “Mary Carroll Moore, a resident of Bridgewater, radiates such calm that it is hard to believe the extent of her accomplishments.” Almost twenty years later, I second that.

Come back on JUNE 1st to read how MARY CARROLL MOORE spends her days.