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When Raleigh-based author Heather Frese was a child, her favorite book was Nell Wise Wechter’s Taffy of Torpedo Junction, a 1957 novel published by John F. Blair about a young girl who discovers a Nazi spy operation in the Outer Banks.
“I read that book over and over again,” Frese says.
Wechter’s story took Frese far from her childhood home in Ohio and back to Hatteras Island, where her family spent every summer vacation. The rest of the year, the beach felt distant from Frese, as did most of the world when she was young.
At the age of 10, she contracted a flu-like virus and struggled to recover. Exhaustion and immunodeficiency made it difficult for her to go to school. Reading and writing allowed her to connect with life beyond her limited sphere. When she was a teen, Frese discovered newsletters for kids suffering from chronic illnesses that offered them the opportunity to connect with one another by mail. At 16, Frese began penning an advice column for one of the publications.
“I had a lot of pen pals, so I had a lot of voices coming into my mind,” Frese says. “It really influenced my perception of how voice can communicate personality and character and inform relationships.”
College was an eight-year slog for Frese due to her illness, but she slowly learned how to manage her condition, and she kept writing. She enrolled in an M.A. program in English at Ohio University, but her father died just a few weeks before the semester began.
“I was in the thick of grief and trying to start a new graduate program,” she says, “I wasn’t ready to write about how I felt.”
After earning her first master’s degree, she completed the M.F.A. program at West Virginia University in 2011. There, Frese was finally able to write about her father’s death, and she found the perfect setting in their beloved Hatteras Island. She wrote a novel narrated by a young woman named Charlotte who seeks solace at the Outer Banks following her father’s death. After finishing her first draft, Frese needed some distance from Charlotte’s story before revising the novel, later published as The Saddest Girl on the Beach. But Hatteras Island and these characters kept tugging at her, and Frese found herself writing a novel about Charlotte’s friend Evie, titled The Baddest Girl on the Planet.
illustration by Andrea Cheung
By then, she and her husband had moved to Raleigh after spending a year living on Hatteras Island, where he was a chef at the inn Frese had used as a model for the setting in her novels. As their family grew, they needed a life less tied to seasonal employment.
In 2023, after their three children were born, Frese took a part-time job teaching at Meredith College. Although she took breaks when her children were young, she always returned to writing.
It was around 2018 when the Lee Smith Novel Prize caught Frese’s eye. Frese studied Smith’s fiction and admired her use of setting, humor, and first-person narrators. The contest was sponsored by Blair, the Durham publisher that acquired John F. Blair’s name and titles, including Frese’s childhood favorite.
The Baddest Girl on the Planet won the prize. Blair published the novel in 2021, followed in 2024 by The Saddest Girl on the Beach, the first story that Frese had written in the wake of her father’s death.
The young girl who found hope in a story that transported her to Hatteras Island has now published two novels that will do the same for her readers. In her work, they’ll find comfort in the place that Frese holds most dear.
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photograph by Matt Hulsman
Fleeing the pain of her father’s death, Charlotte McConnell decides against returning to college and instead heads for Hatteras Island, where her best friend, Evie, lives at her family’s inn. Charlotte uses Evie’s newly announced pregnancy as an excuse to visit, but when she arrives, Charlotte learns that her unwed friend has challenges of her own. While Charlotte struggles through her grief, life unfolds all around her in the promise of new love and the power of nature. Heather Frese’s The Saddest Girl on the Beach is a love letter to youth, friendship, and the promise of healing.
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