Since its publication in 1976, Ordinary People has sold close to ninety thousand hardcover copies and over half a million paperback copies. But Guest is reluctant to talk about her fame, and she is downright sensible about the fairytale success of her first novel.

This August, Slate magazine put her on its list of America’s most prominent novelists. “The story of you is a remarkable event,” Studs Terkel told her during a radio interview almost thirty years ago. Still, her national recognition, especially for someone who is not considered a prolific writer, is impressively enduring. Many Twin Citizens don’t even know that she is a fellow resident, which is odd, considering that she and her husband, Larry, have lived in the same home in the Browndale neighborhood of Edina since 1975. Yet Judith Lavercombe (she publishes under her maiden name) doesn’t throw the weight of her fame around. Judith Guest’s combination of courage, talent, timing, and luck has reaped rewards that are reserved for a very few.

And so I’m somewhat awed to be in Edina, knocking on the door of the author’s stately brick-and-stucco home.

Conrad’s melancholy was achingly familiar, and, like millions of others, I loved him for being frail and angry and strangely brilliant. When the book’s main character-the mortally depressed teenager, Conrad-fends off the world by narrowing his eyes to “blend everything to gray,” he was speaking right to me. I can vividly recall my first reading of Judith Guest’s Ordinary People twenty years ago, in the bleak midwinter of my sophomore year of high school. Talks about “the terror of chance,” taking what you want, and falling in love with your characters.

Judith guest novels