Former Preston Hollow resident Charlotte Rogan started writing her first published novel, “The Lifeboat,” in 1999. Little did she know that in April 2012, it would reach no. 12 on the New York Times Best Seller list. Currently, her novel stands at no. 28 on the list.
She said “there was some luck involved,” but after going through creative writing workshops and many years of leaving “The Lifeboat” and coming back to it later, she ended up with a best seller.
“I wanted to be taken seriously as a writer,” Rogan said.
Judging by the excellent reviews from The Guardian, LA Times, and The NY Times, it seems that she has certainly reached her goal.
Her inspiration for the novel came from growing up in a family of sailors, along with her husband’s old criminal law texts. The texts contained cases from the 1800s. If a group of people were stranded on a lifeboat, by law, they had permission to kill one person in order to survive. The law stated though that the process by which that person was chosen had to be a fair one. In reality often the weakest victim would be the one to die.
Set in the summer of 1914, “The Lifeboat” follows a woman, Grace Winters, who finds herself on an over-crowded lifeboat after a shipwreck in the Atlantic Ocean. The old law comes into play, and a moral dilemma ensues.
Rogan is not just a writer but also a mother of triplets. All three graduated from The Greenhill School in 2008. They each went on to attend Ivy League universities. Though Charlotte and her husband now call Connecticut home, they lived in Preston Hollow for 17 years.
She doesn’t plan to stop writing anytime soon, though publishing more novels isn’t necessarily her main goal.
“There are lots of letters to write and rejections,” she said of the publishing process. Rogan has always been the kind of woman who would rather write than go get her nails done or go to out to lunch. To aspiring writers, her advice is to “stick with it.”
