People

Biography

Richard Paul Evans Hits Cover of Reader’s Digest

Magazine says he “made hope a best-seller.”

People say they can’t put a book by Richard Paul Evans down. They say that tears course down their cheeks as they read the stories and they resolve to love their family better. People magazine called his book, The Christmas Box, a treasure. Newsweek called it the most popular Christmas story since The Christmas Carol. This January, seven years after his first book came out, Reader’s Digest featured Evans on its cover to tell the story behind the story.

What makes Evans’ books a popular phenomenon is that they speak to the truth that people feel and sometimes can’t articulate. His stories are all about the intangible spiritual qualities like love, hope, and forgiveness, the devotion of a parent for a child, that are all too often overlooked in our strident culture. Yet, Evans’ five novels and two children’s books fly off bookstore shelves because somehow people sense that there is more to life than material striving and survival of the fittest-ideas commonly dominating popular culture. His growing audience finds in his books elements of truth to which they resonate, a refreshing, life-giving affirmation that lifts and surprises them and makes life seem less jaded.

If Evans’ books sing with a power of love, it is because they come from that mysterious, wonderful place in the heart where love grows. He simply never intended to be a writer. In November of 1992, he was a weary, emotionally-spent advertising executive who felt like his home life was suffering and wanted to find a way to express his love for his children-six-year-old Jenna and four-year-old Allyson. Because they loved it when he read them stories, he decided to write one for them-a gift that could keep on giving through the years.

“The story did not come in a linear sense, but more like a jigsaw puzzle. I had the pieces here and there and I wasn’t really sure what the story meant until one incredible morning. at 4:00 the story woke me up. I went to the kitchen table, and just a few sentences into it I was overwhelmed with emotion, because I understood for the first time what this story was about– the pain my mother felt over losing a child. I could suddenly feel the presence of someone in the room with me, and I believe that was my little sister Sue who had been delivered stillborn when I was two years old. I felt she was saying, ‘Dedicate this book to me.'” Rick knew his mother had suffered with the loss far more than she had said.

One afternoon when he was four, Rick had found his mother quietly crying in her bedroom. When he asked her why she said, “This would have been Sue’s birthday.” He comforted her the best he could, and the memory had lingered in his heart.

The story had fallen into place. It would be the tale of two kinds of losses. In the novel, a young father, who had been sacrificing his family for the demands at work, moved with them into the home of an elderly widow, who is still grieving the loss of her three-year-old child years before. The widow’s loss had been abrupt, but the young father came to see that he was also experiencing a loss, though slower. He was missing out on his daughter’s childhood through neglect. “The only promise of childhood is that it will end,” Evans quotes at the beginning of one of his books.

As he was intertwining the stories of these two losses together, Rick remembered that a neighbor, who used to play in the cemetery as a child, had told him of a woman who came each day to weep beneath the statue of an angel that marked a child’s grave. The angel, its child’s face looking toward heaven with wings outstretched, was the ideal image to depict the mother’s loss and hope..

As Rick finished the book, he had no intention of publishing it, but he wanted to share it with his extended family-especially since it was dedicated to Sue. When Rick’s wife, Keri, finished the manuscript, she asked through tears, “Rick, where did you get that story?” It could not have been a more appropriate question, Rick admitted, because the story came to him in such an unbidden rush.

Rick went to the nearest Kinkos and made twenty copies of the book. A few days later he gave copies of it to his family. The next day, he received a phone call from one of his brothers. “I want to know your book has changed my life,.” he said. Day after day, similar calls came in from his family, and Rick was amazed that his modest story should receive such response. Still, nothing prepared him for what was coming. One day only about three weeks later, he received a phone call from a woman, a total stranger, who said,. “I want to tell you what your story means to me.”

“Where did you get this book?” he asked, and she named someone else he didn’t know. In the weeks that followed, calls continued to roll in, and Rick started charting them on a yellow pad. From those original 20 copies printed only for family, 160 people had read the book. Then came the next surprise. A local bookstore called him after searching the phone book for R. Evans. We’ve had ten orders for your book, the woman on the end of the phone said, and we can’t find it on the publishers’ list.

“The printer, probably feeling sorry for me, gave me a list of distributors,” Rick said and he made a contact. He read the book and got excited. “We think you are going to do very well with that book and we want to distribute it for you. We think we can sell three thousand copies,” he said. By mid-November of 1993, Evans had sold 3,000 copies of his book and the distributor said with a dash of optimism, “You may have to reprint.”

” I prayed about it,” Rick said, “and I received a definite impression. Print 20,000 more copies. And I thought-bad impression. You don’t sell 20,000 of anything in three weeks in Salt Lake City. You might do that across the entire nation, but not here. By December 10 we sold out the first 9,000, and we delivered 10,000 more copies to the warehouse. A few days later the warehouse called saying that they had sold them already. Bookstores were receiving so many requests that we ran radio advertisements saying that the book was sold out. It only fueled the fire. A report came in that two women got in a fist fight over the last copy on one shelf.”

Yet if the media establishment hadn’t heard of Richard Paul Evans, the people had. The book’s popularity continued to spread by word of mouth. People magazine finally did their story, Katie Couric of the Today Show did an interview with Rick and by Christmas Eve of 1994, the New York Times wrote that The Christmas Box had made history as only the second self-published book to make it to its lofty list, debuting in the second slot.

Over night things changed for Richard Paul Evans. Every day he began receiving inquiries about turning his book into a movie. Top book agent Laurie Liss wanted to read the book. She closed the door to her office, didn’t accept any phone calls and spent the afternoon reading this slim volume from an unknown Utah writer. “As I read, I was crying,” she said. “I didn’t even know that the response I was having was what so many other people were having. The book was about loss, but not about the dark side of loss. I came away from the book with this strange and extraordinary sense of hope. If this is doing this to me, it’s got to be doing it to somebody else.”

Rick flew back to New York and met with the heads of several publishing houses. One editor at Random House asked, “What’s keeping you from signing with us right now.” Rick’s agent quipped, “About 24 other publishers.” Later she said to Rick. “You don’t get it, do you? Your little book may become one of the highest-selling books in publishing history.”

Liss said, “The publishers responded to Rick as much as they did to his book. They could sense that this was a man with a mission.”

The book went to an auction between the nation’s most prestigious publishers-an auction that lasted three days. Simon and Schuster won with a four and a half million dollar bid for only the hard cover rights. Rick maintained the soft-cover rights.

That next Christmas in 1995, they went against conventional wisdom yet again and brought out both the hardcover and paperback versions of the book at the same time and again they made publishing history as that Christmas the book topped both the hardcover and paperback bestseller lists. Today it has sold several million copies in 16 languages and 40 countries.

What is meaningful about this history, however, is not that a book by Latter-day Saint author soared, it is the response of people everywhere who are hungry for the faith and value-centered stories he tells. The nerve that Richard Paul Evan’s books have hit is that yearning for the good and light that is in each person.

Rick told her, and she had a disappointed look on her face. “I guess I need six copies, one for each child,” she said. Tears welled up in her eyes. “I guess I need five copies. I’ve just lost a child. I’m really sorry. I don’t know why I said that. I don’t even know why I’m standing here.” With the strangest expression on her face, she went and bought the books and came back out. As Rick signed the books, she asked, “Can you tell me what’s happening to me? I was leaving this mall. I was backing my car out, and I heard a voice say to go back inside. There is a man who has something for you. What he has you need. You probably think I’m crazy.”.

In Arizona, three weeks later, Rick was at a terrible book signing. No one had come near him. Finally, a woman came up and said, ” I’ll take one of these.” and Rick thought, “Mercy buy.” Her husband said, “Man you’ll buy anything.” Then a few minutes later he came back, “Give me ten more copies of this book. There’s something really weird about your book.”

His wife came around to the other side of the table. Do you believe in spiritual things like promptings and voices? We have no idea what your book is about, but whatever it is, we’re supposed to share it. What is it about?” Rick answered, “God loves his children and he wants to bless and heal us.”

At one book signing, a woman with dark, sad eyes came up in front of the crowded line waiting to talk to Rick. “Mr. Evans,” she said, “I don’t have time to wait in line for you to sign my book. I just want you to know that my little girl was hit by a car last week and killed. I have read your book every day, and it’s the only thing that is keeping me going.”

For Richard Paul Evans, however, as important as the tragedy of the death of a child is the tragedy of losing a child. “We can lose a child by not being a part of their life. One night I came into my dark apartment at 10:30 after a long day at work, looked into my daughter’s bedroom door and had the impression, “You are trading diamonds for stones. You have one childhood with your daughter, and when it is gone, it is gone for all eternity.” Rick said, ” I knelt down by the side of her bed and wept. I crawled in her bed and promised that I would not be an absentee father.”

“To be a writer?” Rick asked.

“To have experienced all this,” she said. “I wanted it to be true. I wanted a place to go to lay a flower at the base of an angel to mourn my lost child.” Rick’s distributor said he received calls expressing the same sentiment all the time. People wanted to know where the angel was so they leave a flower or a note for a lost child.

Rick went to his mother, June, and asked her if she felt the same way, and she began to cry. “Because Sue was stillborn,” she said, “she was never buried. I have no place to go to grieve.” It was like so many of the stories he had heard of quiet loss, of mourning that had never quite healed.

Rick had searched the Salt Lake City cemetery to see if the original angel was still there, but it had been made of sandstone and apparently eroded away with the winds of time. A new idea was born. Since the book’s following had swelled, people wanted to know where the angel was. They wanted an angel and he decided to commission Ortho Fairbanks to sculpt one. Rick wanted a place where people could go to heal.

Dedicating the Statue
On December 6, 1994, more than 400 people braved rain and snow to come to the Salt Lake City Cemetery for the dedication of an angel whose dove-shaped wings had hope etched into them. June Evans laid the first flower at the angel’s base for Sue. Then one by one others filed past laying flowers in its outstretched arms until they overflowed, cascading to the ground. Parents left stuffed animals, toys and other mementos of their children. Some wept. Some stood quietly. All were thinking of someone they loved who was gone.

Since that first angel statue was placed, people have stepped forward saying they want angels, too. Now, there are angels in nine states and thirty more will be placed this year.

Oklahoma City Bombing
One of the most meaningful of these events for Rick was the placing of an angel statue at the memorial to people killed in the Oklahoma City bombing. He toured the remaining skeleton of a building, now off-limits unless given special permission, and realized for the first time the impact of the loss. His tour guide had lost a child in the bombing. “She was 23 years-old, but to me she was still my little girl,” he said. “One minute you are calling your daughter to take her to lunch, the next you can’t see her again.

The survivors of the bombing were invited to the dedication when the angel was placed and Rick said, “They were a divided group. Some had healed. Some were in the process, and others were just bitter. The meeting that night was the first some of them been to. As I spoke, I felt that I had to drag out every word. After the hundreds of times I’ve spoken, it was by far the most difficult experience for me. When I finished, I just wanted to collapse. Yet many said that it was the beginning of their healing.

“What did I talk about? I told them about my journey with The Christmas Box, the assurances I’ve had again and again that those we love are not far from us. I told them about the people who have come to me with their stories. So many people learn that after their loved one has been dead for awhile, their grief is discounted as if they should just be able to go on with living. We don’t do well with death, so we try not to deal with it. I acknowledge that though your loss is something you can never forget, you can heal.

A message of healing and hope will always be needed.

A reporter from USA Today, once asked Rick what he hoped readers would get from his books. He answered, “I hope they get what they need.”