Sarah McCoy’s latest novel might never have happened if it weren’t for Turner Classic Movies.
The author’s “Whatever Happened to Lori Lovely?” tells the story of Lu Tibbott, a college student writing her senior thesis about her aunt, Lori, who, as a young woman, gave up her career as an actress to become a Benedictine nun. Lori has refused to tell her story to the press, but agrees to tell Lu the story of what really happened in her youth. It’s a story that might sound unbelievable — but it was inspired by a true story.
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McCoy, known for her novels including “The Time It Snowed In Puerto Rico” and “Mustique Island,” was watching TCM’s “Summer Under the Stars” series one night in 2016 when host Ben Mankiewicz put on a film she had never seen: “Where the Boys Are,” the 1960 movie directed by Henry Levin and starring Connie Francis and Paula Prentiss.
But it was the actress who played the character Merritt Andrews in the film who caught McCoy’s eye. “The moment she came on screen, I could not take my eyes off her,” recalls McCoy via Zoom from her home in Winston-Salem, North Carolina. “At the end of the movie, I was like, ‘Oh my God, who is this actress? How do I not know her?’”
Mankiewicz had the answer: Dolores Hart, who, he told viewers, shocked Hollywood in 1963 by leaving the industry to become a Benedictine nun at an abbey in Connecticut. McCoy began researching Hart, and found the abbey’s address on Google — which turned out to be in a little town called Bethlehem.
“I wrote her a fan letter on notebook paper,” McCoy says. “I wrote, ‘I just saw this movie for the first time, and I just wanted to let you know that you’re brilliant and wonderful, and your art continues to influence people. I want to let you know what an impactful character you played, and that your art is continuing to have an influence on future generations because it’s influenced me to be bolder, to be stronger, to do things.’”
McCoy didn’t expect to hear back from Mother Dolores. “I thought, if she reads it at all, she’ll probably read it and put it away and say, ‘How nice.’ So it shocked me to the point of shaking when I went to the mailbox and there was a handwritten letter back from her. She said, ‘Thank you for writing me. I haven’t heard from fans in a long time, and it means so much that you watched my work.’ And she ended it by saying, ‘Please write me back and tell me what I can pray for you.’”
That was in 2016 — and McCoy and Mother Dolores have been friends ever since.
“We just started writing each other about everything in our lives,” McCoy says. “Nothing was off the table, from the mundane of what I planted in my garden that year, to the deepest things, including the fact that I don’t have children.”
After McCoy published “Mustique Island” in 2022, her friends and fans started asking what she had planned next.
“This was post-Covid, and I was getting the sense from readers and from people from the younger generations that they are looking for something that is inspiring, that says you don’t have to be famous to be worthy,” McCoy says. “For a long time, we’ve been in this culture where if you have a million followers and you get 10,000 likes on every post, then you’re worthy, you’re somebody in this world. And she was the opposite. She chose this life that was not what everyone was doing in the ‘60s and ‘70s. That choice was the spark of my book.”
McCoy’s research for the novel took her to Malibu, New York and Rome. It also took her to Bethlehem, Connecticut, where she finally met her longtime pen pal, Mother Dolores.
“I needed to tell her face-to-face, ‘I’m writing this book, and it’s inspired by you, but it is not you,’” McCoy recalls. “I spilled out my heart, and I said, ‘What do you think?’ And she was so loving. And the woman that people see in ‘Where the Boys Are,’ she’s the same incredible, dynamic woman. She took my hand, and she said to me with this grin on her face, ‘I lived my life, Sarah. Go write your book.’”
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So she did, and Mother Dolores was one of her first readers.
“She read it, and everyone at the abbey read it, too,” McCoy says. “They sent me a typewritten letter back, and they said, ‘We have read the final manuscript, and while we cannot publicly promote it, because we have taken vows of the cloister, we want you to know that we pray for all greatest success for you in this book.’”
Mother Dolores still lives in Connecticut, and McCoy still lives in North Carolina. She now hopes that Lori Lovely will find her own home in the world.
“I’m going to let her do her thing,” she says. “I’m going to let her go out there and influence and impact and be loving and show that there’s so much more, such a bigger, wider net of what we know about the universe. And I think if people lean into that, my prayer is that she will reach as many people as possible and show them that God is so much bigger and so much greater than we try to compress into something that’s so much smaller.”
