About Diann

A house by the sea is, to me, just about the best kind of house.

My parents first took me to Nags Head, North Carolina when I was about three years old. Back then, we stayed at a sweet little house on the beach called “Sunrise.” I recall getting a bad sunburn while staying there one summer. My mother coated my back with Noxzema, and I can still call forth that pungent smell, and the way it slowly seeped into the hot skin. Those were the days before sunscreen.

Back home in Newport News, Virginia, every summer revolved around swim team, followed by a week in Nags Head. When we outgrew Sunrise after the birth of my sister, we rented a house owned by a family friend, located between the ocean and the bypass. I made a friend from Pennsylvania one year, and we became regular pen pals. Now we are Facebook friends!

The family friend eventually sold an available lot in Kill Devil Hills to my parents, and they soon began building their own beach house. I was a college student by then, and I couldn’t believe my good fortune. To me, the beach was everything.

My parents wrapped their lives around the house, making the trip from Newport News to Kill Devil Hills almost every weekend. Getting tan and splashing in the sea were not on their agendas, as they poured all of their energies into maintaining a house that is constantly battered by the elements. But theirs were labors of love. The beach was their happy place too.

My sister and I waitressed on the Outer Banks for several summers, and countless friends and dear family came to stay. The beach house became a home, a place for everyone in our lives to relax and reconnect. My husband proposed to me on the porch swing, and we married in 1998, right after Hurricane Bonnie blew through the Outer Banks, at Duck United Methodist Church.

Not long after the birth of our son exactly two years later, my mother grew ill with cancer. Her passing brought tremendous sadness for my family. Mired in grief, I began to reach inward, to tell another story. My writing slowly turned the darkness into something manageable. And as I came to discover, I was writing, rather prominently, about houses by the beach.

As part of my research, I brought my husband and my two children all over the Outer Banks, to sites that I’d read about but had never even known were there. Though my mother was gone, the Outer Banks continued to fill me with wonder.

But the family beach house was never the same again, and after my father became ill with Parkinson’s, my sister and I slowly distanced ourselves, without really knowing it, from the beach house. We eventually found a good buyer and sold it.

Now, a Phoenix, Arizona resident, I harbor a yearning not necessarily for a house, but for the Outer Banks itself, such a special place that countless people have also loved and continue to cherish above all the places in the world. No matter where I go, the Outer Banks will always be home to me, with or without a house by the sea.