THE BEST
OF YOUR LIFE
INSPIRING PEOPLE
She’s Write On
How one woman overcame vision loss and
discrimination to become a top romance author
She went blind in her 50s, but Eva Rutland kept writing. She was good at it, and
it sustained her. Even now, at 93, Rutland is working on her second memoir.
AARP THE MAGAZINE
young mother in the 1950s, when
racial segregation was the norm, she
gained surprise success: One of her
articles was published in Redbook.
The topic? Rutland’s belief that her
four children were
the same as their
white counterparts,
“just as precious
and just as fragile.”
As she recalls, “I
COMMITTED TO
HER CRAFT
During her heyday
Rutland averaged
two novels a year.
was just telling white people to please
be nice to my children.” In subsequent
articles she explored other common
ground, writing of her love for her
family. These early pieces formed the
basis of her first memoir, When We
Were Colored: A Mother’s Story, pub-
lished in 1964. Her family recollec-
tions—assailants used switchblades to
cut her brothers, then teens, in a hate
crime; years later a daughter sobbed
when a white neighbor wouldn’t play
with her—resonated with readers.
Princeton scholar Cornel West lauded
the 2007 reissue of the memoir, calling
her story “powerful and poignant.”
But Rutland enjoys life’s lighter side,
too, so she began writing fiction in the
late ’60s. She was already losing her
sight due to retinitis pigmentosa—an
irreversible genetic condition—yet
continued to write professionally,
without learning Braille. She dictated
stories into a recorder, then tran-
scribed them on a typewriter. She
finally sent her books to publishers
in the mid-1980s. Her first Harlequin
novel, To Love Them All, was published
in 1988. By 2001 she’d published more
than 20 novels and sold more than
6 million copies worldwide.
Though her pace has slowed, she
still works at her craft. Besides writing
her next memoir, she’s now plotting a
new, “sweet” novel. —Teresa Wiltz
RENNIE SOLIS
