I became friends with Leslie McAdam last year, during release of the bestselling Because Beards anthology, in which we both featured, raising funds for the Movember Foundation.
In 2014, Leslie was diagnosed with clinical depression, and began receiving hospital treatment.
“It’s embarrassing for me to admit,” she comments. “I have an advanced degree and a steady job. I’ve been married, with children, for a long time; I did what was expected and did everything right, but giving to others, without taking care of myself, made me depressed. Part of my depression was from repressing my feelings. I didn’t let myself be angry, or hurt, sad, or upset. I also didn’t let myself feel pleasure. Through help, medication, better diet, exercise, and learning to say no, I recovered, slowly, from depression. But something was missing.”
Leslie read Fifty Shades of Grey and had an epiphany: that it was permissible for women to be sexual, to read erotic fiction, to talk about it, and embrace their arousal. “By reading it, I gave myself permission to be sexual,” Leslie asserts. “I got a whole lot closer to my husband, and through pursuing pleasure, pursuing the feel-good hormones from an orgasm, being in communities that are sex-positive, I’ve really recovered from the depression. I can say that, without a doubt, opening myself up to sex, in a healthy and positive way, made my life so much better.”
She realised also that, to find her bliss, she needed to pursue her dream of writing. Leslie draws on her own experience to write about recovery from mental illness, as well as exploring such topics as addiction, low self-esteem and poor body image. As she explains, “I try to always write about what I know or have experienced.”
Leslie’s stories portray our common pre-occupations, anxieties, and fears, and the universality of our desire to love and be loved.
“My first novel, The Sun and the Moon, is about a depressed lawyer who recovers from sexual repression with the help of a sexy surfer. It won a Watty, which is the world’s largest online writing competition.” In writing the story, she aimed to reach out to others living with depression, or who feel sexually repressed, hoping they find solace.
Leslie is a fan of anything that acknowledges, and celebrates, women’s sexual nature. She laughs, “Magic Mike XXL has the barest whisper of a plot (“we’re getting the band back together!”), but it doesn’t matter. It’s a joy to watch Channing Tatum and the rest of them dance!”
Leslie also has a soft spot for old Fred Astaire films, delighting in the amazing movement of the body (she studied ballet as a child) and often listens to music while she writes. She played Wild Child’s Break Bones repeatedly while creating All the Waters of the Earth. “The strong female voice has a heart-breaking quality,” says Leslie. “However, Beck is my favourite, and has been since I was a radio DJ, in the 1990s, in college. More recently, when I wrote The Ground Beneath Our Feet, I was influenced by the twenty one pilots’ song, Car Radio.”
Leslie often paints, using oils to capture the colours of her home landscape, in California. She names Maynard Dixon (whose Californian landscapes, and portraits, have great realism, and use colour vividly) as an influence on her painting, and on the way she approaches ‘painting’ characters and settings in her fiction.
One of Leslie’s film favourites is The Secret of Roan Inish. As Leslie explains, ‘It’s a fairy tale about a fearless young girl who goes to look for her little brother, who she finds watched over by seals. I saw it in the theatre when it came out in the 1990s and have loved it ever since. I named my daughter Fiona after the heroine. I like her bravery and her fierce desire to take care of her family.”
She also adores the quirkiness of Wes Anderson’s films, and The Darjeeling Limited in particular. She relates, “Three brothers go on a trip across India by train, carrying their deceased father’s baggage, with an itinerary for their spiritual journey. It resonated with me for a long time.”
You can purchase Leslie’s Giving You box set at http://amzn.to/2veo2eQ
Book One: The Sun and the Moon
Book Two: The Stars in the Sky
Book Three: All the Waters of the Earth
Book Four: The Ground Beneath Our Feet
About Leslie McAdam
Leslie McAdam has written four novels (the Giving You series) and co-wrote All About the D with with Lex Martin. Her novella, Lumbersexual, won first place in the Romance category of the Summer Indie Book Awards, while her novel The Sun and the Moon won a prize in the world’s largest online writing competition (the 2015 Watty). Her short story Man Bun Christmas received a Wattpad romance award.
She lives in a drafty old farmhouse on a small orange tree farm in Southern California, with her husband and two small children. Leslie always encourages her kids to be themselves – even if it means letting her daughter wear leopard print from head to toe. She loves camping with her family, and mixing up oil paints to depict her love of outdoors on canvas. An avid reader from a young age, she’ll always trade watching TV for reading a book, unless it’s Top Gear. Or football.
Find Leslie at
www.facebook.com/lesliemcadamauthor
www.instagram.com/mcadam_leslie
Emmanuelle de Maupassant 