Bobbie Lamont
by Zelmer Wilson · February 2014
Dear Reader,
Thank you for spending time with Bobbie Lamont.
This novel is deeply rooted in memory—how we remember the people we loved, the choices we made, and the versions of ourselves we left behind.
By 2010, Bobbie had lived enough life to understand that the past rarely stays as simple as we remember it. Time changes perspective. Old wounds look different. First loves become stories we tell ourselves, sometimes accurately and sometimes not. For Bobbie, looking back means confronting the people and moments that helped shape the woman she became.
At the center of that reckoning is Miller Hoffman. Their history has followed them for twenty years, and Bobbie Lamont gave me the opportunity to explore what happens when two people remember the same relationship differently—and what it means when the past suddenly becomes impossible to ignore.
But this is not only a story about lost love. It is also about friendship, ambition, family, regret, forgiveness, and the complicated process of making peace with your younger self.
One of the things I value most about the Black Springs Universe is that every character carries pieces of other people with them. Bobbie’s story is no different. Billie, Miller, Black Springs Press, and the many people who have crossed her path are all part of the woman she has become.
I hope Bobbie’s journey reminds you that looking backward does not always mean wanting to return. Sometimes we revisit the past simply because we are finally ready to understand it.
Thank you for reading Bobbie’s story.
— Zelmer Wilson
About Bobbie Lamont
Get your copy of Bobbie Lamont!
Twenty years after the summer that changed everything, Bobbie Lamont thought she had finally left the past behind. She was wrong. By 2010, Bobbie had built the successful life she once dreamed of. She has transformed herself from an ambitious young editor at Black Springs Press into an accomplished writer with a story of her own. But beneath that success, her personal life is beginning to unravel. Then she discovers that Miller Hoffman has written a novel inspired by the relationship they shared twenty years earlier. Reading his version of their past forces Bobbie to confront memories she has spent years trying to understand—and feelings she may never have completely buried. The young woman, in the summer of 1990, believed she could separate love from ambition, heartbreak from friendship, and the life she wanted from the people she had to leave behind. Now Bobbie must reconsider the choices that brought her here. As memories of Miller, Billie Carver, Black Springs Press, and the people who shaped her life come rushing back, Bobbie begins to question whether moving forward truly means letting go—or finally making peace with what happened. Bobbie Lamont is a deeply personal story about memory, first love, friendship, ambition, regret, and the complicated distance between who we once were and who we eventually become. Sometimes the past doesn’t return to haunt you. Sometimes it returns because you never really finished with it.
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Zelmer Wilson (1975- ) was born in Fort Collins, Colorado. At the age of three, he moved with his family to Fort Smith, Arkansas. He would live there until he was eleven. In the summer of 1986, he left Arkansas and moved to Phoenix, Arizona, with his father and stepmother. During the summer of 1990, while visiting his mother and two sisters in Birmingham, Alabama, he discovered his calling in life to be a writer. His debut novel, In the Middle, is inspired by his own difficult teenage years in Phoenix, Arizona.
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