The Pat Conroy Literary Center will host an evening with Susan Beckham Zurenda on Thursday, September 10 from 5-6:30 pm. Susan will be in conversation with Cassandra King, and books will be available for purchase and signing. Seating is limited, do please call to reserve your spot: 843-379-7025.
After a long career teaching English to high school teens and community college adults from all backgrounds, along with her own accumulated years and a lifetime of reading literature, Susan Beckham Zurenda thought she was aware of most human circumstances. She was wrong.
Until she met and interviewed the woman who inspired her third novel, No Way Out but Through, she was ignorant of the prevalence and potentially devastating consequences of child marriage in the United States. The woman who motivated this novel was coerced by her mother into marriage at age 15 to a man her mother likely knew had sexually assaulted her daughter at age 13. She was old enough to be married with parental consent, but she wasn’t old enough to initiate legal help in the form of a protective order or even file for divorce. Her husband possessed full legal custody, essentially a form of child trafficking. After a decade of anguish, through her immense determination and with outside support, she managed to escape with herchildren.
Unchained At Last, a survivor-led nonprofit dedicated to ending forced and child marriage in the United States, reports
Susan Beckham Zurenda, photo by Carroll Foster
approximately 315,000 minors, some as young as age 10, were legally married in the United States between 2000-2021. Approximately 86 percent of underage marriages involve girls and 14 percent involve boys. Most of the girls are wed to adult men.
Susan is honored to present No Way Out but Through and hopes that readers will be captivated by this emotional novel of two women from different generations—one the victim of an abusive teen marriage and the other damaged from her former marriage to an alcoholic husband—who meet under odd circumstances.
The story begins when author Shannon Irwin meets protagonist Grace Ferrall and agrees to write the younger woman’s shocking truth. Told as a frame story with dual narration set in present-day Pawley’s Island, South Carolina, and 1990s rural Oklahoma, No Way Out but Through portrays Grace’s ordeal that begins with an alcoholic father and a mother with intolerable mood swings. When Grace is barely 15, her mother manipulates her into marrying Rafe, a scurrilous, older man. After years of abuse, multiple pregnancies and miscarriages, with the help of an unlikely ally, Grace escapes. But her newfound freedom is fragile, and she is forced to make impossible choices to protect herself and her two daughters.
As Grace and Shannon’s unusual relationship develops, both women are impelled to grapple with their inner demons by confronting their untold stories. Through their willingness to be open and vulnerable with each other, both women begin to trust and heal—to believe in themselves—in this novel of the resilience of the human spirit.
Cassandra King
Susan Beckham Zurenda taught English for 33 years on the college level and at the high school level to AP students. She is the author of the Southern literary novel, Bells for Eli, that received several awards including first place for Best First Book—Fiction in the 2021 Independent Publisher Book Awards. Her novel The Girl From the Red Rose Motel was the recipient of the 2024 Patricia Winn Award in Southern Fiction and first place winner for Southeast Fiction in the 2024 Independent Book Publisher Book Awards, among others. Zurenda has published and won awards for her short fiction, including the South Carolina Fiction Prize, twice. Susan lives in Spartanburg, South Carolina. Learn more at www.susanzurenda.com.
Cassandra King is an award-winning author of two books of non-fiction and five novels, Making Waves, The Sunday Wife, The Same Sweet Girls, Queen of Broken Hearts, and Moonrise, as well as numerous short stories and articles.
