A long-ago hot Savannah summer with no
of Tybee with our infant
daughter in tow, but
the island’s many
charms have
been calling me
back for nearly
four decades.
These days,
Tybee isn’t
just my
family’s
home away
from homewe
own two
fully-restored
vintage
beach houses
here-but the
island always
supplies me with
inspiration for my
books.
What we love most about
of enjoying time in a bottle,
the wide, sandy beaches, the
Technicolor sunrises and sunsets,
the happy, funky little cottages,
even the narrow lanes leading to
glorious beach vistas.
in my novel SAVANNAH BLUES,
about Savannah antiques dealer
Loudermilk. In the sequel to that
novel, SAVANNAH BREEZE, Bebe
called The Breeze Inn. While
writing that novel I stayed in a tiny
guest cottage owned by a friend
of a friend, and became convinced that my
husband and I were destined to own our own
vacation home here.
UPPER, a novel about a woman rehabbing a
crumbling house in a small Georgia town, we
circa 1942 concrete block cottage painted
in circus shades of blue and yellow. We spent
a year gutting the house down to the walls,
wooden walls, a new screened porch and all
new bathrooms.
and estate sale treasures I’d been buying (and
secretly hoarding) for years in anticipation of our
someday beach house. When the project was
done, I named it The Breeze Inn, in honor of the
SAVANNAH BREEZE. Because
our full-time home is in Atlanta, we restored and
furnished the house with the plan of sharing
it with friends and fans as a vacation rental.
Within a year Better Homes & Gardens featured
The Breeze Inn with a multi-page article, and
those beautiful photos continue to show up in
magazines every year.
Readers loved Weezie and Bebe, and the
Savannah-Tybee settings so much they
demanded another book in the series, which
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is how BLUE CHRISTMAS,
the third book in the series
came into being. I wrote
that novella on Tybee, in
August, getting myself in the
holiday spirit by playing my
favorite 1960s-era Christmas
CDs.
A few years later, I wrote
SUMMER RENTAL, a novel
set on the Outer Banks of
North Carolina, about three
old friends from Savannah
who rent a rambling old
beach house for a monthlong
reunion. I called that
Ebbtide, and spent long hours plotting the book
during run-away-from-home sessions at The
Breeze Inn.
my tybee island
by: mary kay andrews
10
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