Sara Goodman Confino, who has been writing for as long as she can remember, says being an author became a lifelong dream after her uncle sent her a typewriter when she was 8.
The Montgomery County Public Schools teacher of 21 years is well on the way to accomplishing that dream with her fourth novel, Behind Every Good Man, expected to published Tuesday by Lake Union Publishing.
The novel is a historical fiction political rom-com set in Montgomery County in the 1960s. It follows Beverly Diamond, a wife and mother who catches her husband having an affair with his secretary. Beverly then realizes she has political savvy and uses it to keep herself afloat. With her husband running the re-election campaign of a Maryland senator, she becomes the campaign manager for his opponent.
Confino, with her fourth book about to be released and a fifth in the works, is taking leave of up to three years this upcoming school year from her job as an English, creative writing and journalism teacher at Watkins Mill High School in Gaithersburg to pursue writing full time.
“This is a big, scary change for me,” Confino told MoCo360.
As a teacher, the 43-year-old Rockville resident said she often spoke to her students about the writing process, sharing an author’s perspective on topics such as symbolism. Once Confino got a publishing deal, she was able to share the publishing experience with her students step by step.
“We did some cool stuff where we had authors Zoom in, where we talked about different genres and the conventions of them, and just giving them an inside look into the world of publishing,” Confino said.
Confino said she built both the journalism and creative writing programs at Watkins Mill–two classes the school didn’t offer prior to her time there as a teacher. While she started off as a journalism major in college before deciding it wasn’t for her, she graduated from the University of Maryland, College Park, in 2002 with a bachelor’s degree in English literature, followed by her master’s degree certification in 2003.
The author never took a creative writing course but was tapped by her former Principal Carol Goddard to build that program after she helped establish the journalism program at the school.
While working as a teacher and an author, she typically wrote at night when her two kids, now ages 4 and 7, went to bed. Now, she’ll be able to write during the day “like a human and not a vampire,” Confino said.
“I’m hoping that it will make all of this a little easier and a little bit less stressful,” she added.
While this is Confino’s fourth traditionally published book, it’s the eighth she’s written. For many authors including herself, Confino said, the first few books they write may not end up getting published.
“My fourth book that I wrote was the one that got me my first agent,” Confino said. “We shopped that book for about four years, and I rewrote it probably 25 times in those four years.”
After parting ways amicably with her first agent, Confino said her second-and current-agent shopped that book for another year before recommending that she put it aside and work on her next project. That project became Confino’s debut novel, For the Love of Friends, published in 2021 by Lake Union Publishing.
Since then, she’s also published She’s Up to No Good in 2022 and Don’t Forget to Write in 2023.
Confino said writing books has been a self-taught process, especially since she’s never taken any creative writing courses. But over the years, and with signing book contracts, she said she has refined her process.
“Basically, I used to cherry-pick the scenes that I wanted to write and go back and write connecting scenes,” Confino said. “But I read somewhere that if you don’t want to write a scene, don’t write it because your readers won’t want to read it either.”
Now, after writing several books, Confino said she wrote Behind Every Good Man straight through from beginning to end.
“That one flowed very easily,” she said.
Confino said she’s always drawn from her life when writing her novels, which is why some of her books, including Behind Every Good Man, are based in Montgomery County. Confino has lived in the area her entire life, except for the time she spent in College Park.
For her latest novel, Confino said she relied heavily on her aunt and uncle, who are in their 90s and live in Potomac, for historical information on the area. Some of their suggestions, based on their knowledge of living in the area at the time in which the novel is set, made it into the book, including the Colonial Manor Motel, where Confino’s uncle said people would go to cheat on their spouses in the 1960s.
“It’s fun that it’s set here, in an earlier time period … I had a lot of fun playing with a familiar setting but an unfamiliar time period,” Confino said. “I think that older readers, in particular, are going to have a lot of fun with some of those references.”
According to a press release about the book, Jean Meltzer, author of The Matzah Ball, described Behind Every Good Man as a “fierce tale about women reclaiming their power in the halls of power.”
Confino will host a book launch event at Park Books in Severna Park at 7 p.m. Aug. 6. Tickets can be found at https://parkbooksmd.com/events/37986.