It’s the birthday of novelist and screenwriter Judith Guest, whose 1976 novel Ordinary People was made into a movie that won four Academy awards in 1981.

Guest was born in Detroit, Michigan, in 1936, grew up there, and got her B.A. in Education from the University of Michigan in 1958. After college she got married, had a baby, started teaching first grade, had another baby, taught some more, had another baby, and produced lots of unfinished stories. (I’ll pause as you take in the stunning narrative richness of that last sentence.) Then she submitted a short story to a competition and won 60th place. (Not making this up. Evidently some panel of judges out there actually placed the stories in order all the way down to 60th, and perhaps beyond. Plus they gave her a 60th place prize: One Way to Write Your Novel by Richard Perry. One would have thought 60th place would be lucky to get a coupon for an ice cream cone.)

Guest then stopped teaching to focus on writing, and the result was Ordinary People. She says she wrote the novel to “explore the anatomy of depression”: a teenager whose brother has died experiences grief and survivor guilt (and Mommy doesn’t help) and tries to kill himself. The movie based on the novel won Best Picture, Best Actor in a Supporting Role (Timothy Hutton), Best Director (Robert Redford), and Best Writing, Screenplay Based on Material from Another Medium (Alvin Sargent). Mary Tyler Moore and Judd Hirsch were also nominated for Oscars for their roles. While the movie has perhaps overshadowed the novel, the novel still sells and is also taught as a text in many high schools; pull the book up on Amazon and you will note that a number of recent reviews are written by students who read the book as an assignment.

Guest has written four more novels: Second Heaven (1982, about a child growing up in an abusive environment); Killing Time in St. Cloud (1988, a mystery co-authored with Rebecca Hill); Errands (1997, again about a family coping with death); and The Tarnished Eye (2004, based on the true story of a family of six murdered in their summer home).

While Guest’s novels focus on dark topics, her life has been one of long, warm relationships with people and places. She was married to her college sweetheart for nearly 50 years before his death and is very close to her three sons and their children; she spends summers at the same cabin her father built years ago.

Extra fun bonus fact: Guest is the great-niece of Edgar A. Guest (1881-1959), once Poet Laureate of Michigan, who wrote a poem a day for the Detroit Free Press for forty years—that’s 11,000 poems. (Yes, I did the math, and yes, I realize it doesn’t work out. No idea why. Maybe he took sick days. Maybe the paper didn’t publish on weekends.) Having taken a quick peek at just a couple of the poems, I would say that they read like poems that were written by someone writing a poem a day for forty years.

Have a heartwarming Thursday and stay scrupulously honest to the data.