Featured Author: Arlene Lomazoff-Marron

Beneath the Surface of a Perfect Life

Sometimes a story waits for us for decades before we realise it was there all along.

For Arlene Lomazoff-Marron, the idea of writing a novel had been somewhere in the background since adolescence. She had once considered studying and pursuing a career in writing, but instead chose nursing school and went on to build a healthcare career spanning more than 40 years.

It wasn't until 2019, just one week before her retirement, that a simple comment from a coworker brought that forgotten possibility back into focus.

When her colleague suggested she begin something from her bucket list, Arlene immediately knew what she wanted to do: write a novel.

She hadn't been planning it. She hadn't been preparing for it. But the answer came instantly.

That unexpected decision became Beneath A Blanket Of Snow, a contemporary women's fiction novel about the secrets that can exist beneath the most polished of lives.

A Life That Made Room for Writing

Arlene lives with her husband near Philadelphia, Pennsylvania. Alongside writing, her interests include bicycling, yoga, Mah Jongg, reading, playing piano, and word puzzles. She also volunteers her time evaluating patients at a clinic for the uninsured.

Her first novel was not intended to become the beginning of a writing career. But the positive response to Beneath A Blanket Of Snow encouraged her to continue. She went on to write two more standalone novels, while joining a local writers' group opened another door: short stories.

What began as an unexpected item on a retirement bucket list gradually became a creative life of its own.

Beneath A Blanket Of Snow

Genre: Contemporary Women's Fiction

At the heart of Beneath A Blanket Of Snow is a question that is both simple and unsettling: how well do we really know the lives of the people around us?

The novel explores friendship, marriage, hardship, betrayal, redemption, and forgiveness through a family whose seemingly perfect life is abruptly shattered.

About the Book

An engaging and realistic story of secrets, friendship, marriage, hardship, betrayal, redemption, and forgiveness.

Do your neighbors really have it all? What's beneath the pristine blanket of snow?

Meredith and Jonathan were on top of the world, living in luxury. Jonathan's crime shocked his family and friends and threatened to destroy everything. With her husband in prison, Meredith looks for help from her friends, but can they support her while dealing with their own secrets?

The contrast between outward appearances and private realities sits at the centre of the story. Meredith and Jonathan appear to have everything: a beautiful home, financial security, international holidays, a beach house, and a comfortable family life.

But beneath that carefully constructed picture, something is about to break.

When the Perfect Picture Falls Apart

Arlene opens the novel by establishing that world of privilege in meticulous detail.

The Perkins home is spacious and elegant. Their bedroom is filled with expensive furnishings and imported linens. Their lifestyle is one of affluence and accomplishment, the kind of life others might look at and assume is enviable.

And then, without warning, everything changes.

An Excerpt from Beneath A Blanket Of Snow

Catastrophe had not yet entered the home of Meredith and Jonathan Perkins. The sun was just starting to rise, and the beginnings of daylight crept across the periphery of the bedroom picture window’s scarlet Damask silk drapes. Beneath the matching coverlet that adorned the king-sized bed in their suite, one of five bedrooms in the stately 3500 square-foot brick house, Meredith and Jonathan had not yet stirred. The couple reclined on 1000-thread count linens, shipped from a company in Italy. They were the most luxurious bed sheets and pillowcases they had rested upon. The house was unremarkable for the suburban neighborhood; it was the stone wall surrounding the property that grabbed one’s attention. They transported the beige and ecru stones from a quarry in England they had discovered during a vacation six years prior...

Meredith and Jonathan lived a quintessential lifestyle of affluence and accomplishment. Situated amidst an enclave of other distinguished residences in a tony community just outside of Philadelphia, the house was a testament to their wonderful fortune and Jonathan’s hard work and business acumen.

Savoring a lifestyle supported by their affluence, often vacationing in international destinations, they spent winters skiing in fancy resorts and summers sunning at their Cape Cod beach home. Meredith and Jonathan Perkins and their son and daughter- “A rich man’s family,” said their friends—relished a carefree, untroubled lifestyle, free from the financial worry affecting so many others of their generation.

The sudden pummeling on the front door by federal agents from the U.S. Department of Justice destroyed all that.

That final moment changes the entire atmosphere of the opening. The carefully described world of comfort and certainty is suddenly confronted by something none of its inhabitants can control.

And perhaps that is what makes the premise so compelling: the snow may look pristine from the outside, but we already know something lies underneath it.

Discovering the Writer Within

There is something particularly interesting about Arlene's writing journey because it wasn't a childhood ambition she spent decades pursuing. It was an idea she had once considered, set aside, and then unexpectedly rediscovered at the end of a long professional career.

Her decision to write a novel in 2019 was spontaneous, but the response to that first book gave the decision momentum. One novel became three, and a local writers' group has since encouraged her to explore short fiction as well.

Sometimes retirement isn't an ending to a working life so much as an opportunity to finally hear the quieter ideas that were waiting underneath it.

For Arlene, one of those ideas was writing.

And what began with a casual conversation about a bucket list became a new chapter.

Where to Find Arlene

Readers can find Beneath A Blanket Of Snow on Amazon.

You can also learn more about Arlene and her writing through her website or Linktree.

A Final Thought

Arlene Lomazoff-Marron's journey is a reminder that the creative life doesn't always begin when we expect it to.

Sometimes an idea from adolescence gets buried beneath education, work, family, responsibility, and the ordinary demands of life. And sometimes, decades later, someone asks a simple question, and suddenly the answer is still there.

For Arlene, that answer was a novel.

And beneath a blanket of snow, a story was waiting.