I was surprised recently to learn that Joy Fielding has a new book that came out this month (August 2025), Jenny Cooper Has a Secret. About 30 years ago I read and enjoyed several of Fielding’s novels:
- See Jane Run (1991; read in Sept. 1992)
- Kiss Mommy Goodbye (1981; read in Oct. 1992)
- The Deep End (1986; read in Nov.1992)
- Good Intentions (1989; read in Dec. 1993)
That was before my book-blogging days. Then life got busier, and I lost track of Joy Fielding—another case of “so many books, so little time . . .” But I remember that what I especially liked about her books was the way they feature well-developed women characters taking charge of their own lives.
I was therefore not surprised to find this on her website:
I have to create a history for the characters, figure out who they are, what their backgrounds are, why they act the way they do. This often necessitates creating a family tree. Once I do that, everything tends to fall into place, because behavior is motivated by character, and the characters have a sense of history, as opposed to having been born into a vacuum as adults.
—Joy Fielding’s website
(All subsequent quotations by Fielding are from this source.)
Long before focusing on what my reading tells me about my writing and my life, I found Fielding’s books as forerunners of the genre that is now known as domestic suspense, along with the books of other writers such as Mary Stewart, Phyllis A. Whitney, and Mary Higgins Clark.
Joy Fielding is a Canadian who lives with her attorney husband in Toronto. They also have a home in Florida, and Joy lived in Los Angeles for three years. She has more readers in the U.S. than in Canada. Many of her books are set in America cities such as Los Angeles, Chicago, and Boston: “The American landscape seems best for my themes of urban alienation and loss of identity. At the risk of sounding pretentious, I am much more interested in the landscape of the soul.” Many of her books have been translated into other languages, giving her an international literary reputation.
According to Wikipedia, Joy Fielding was born on March 18, 1945, which means she is now 80 years old. I’m glad to have rediscovered her, and I have the audiobook of Jenny Cooper Has a Secret queued as my next listen. I’m also glad to learn that she has been publishing regularly even though she was off my reading radar for years, because she writes the kind of fiction I like to read: “I firmly believe that if you want facts, you read non-fiction; you read fiction to discover the truth.”
© 2025 by Mary Daniels Brown
