The Secret Life of Sunflowers
The Secret Life of Sunflowers
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Marta Molnar on The Secret Life of Sunflowers
In her own words: quotes and insights from the author.Why she wrote it
A few seconds of screen time, a century of silenceThe book began not with a plan but with a gap: a woman who had reshaped the art world receiving only a passing mention in a documentary before the camera moved on. That gap was enough to stop Molnar cold.
I saw an art documentary briefly mention Johanna Bonger, and I was instantly fascinated by her. I knew that Vincent van Gogh was not a successful artist in his lifetime, but I didn’t know just how bad things were. He only ever sold a single painting, to an artist friend.
The scale of what Johanna actually inherited clarified the injustice. Molnar lays out the arithmetic on her website to show readers exactly what this twenty-eight-year-old widow was left to manage alone, in a foreign country, with no market and no support.
She deserves to have her name known. She gave so much to everybody, to the world, by being a good guardian of Vincent’s legacy. She deserves credit.
That sentence is the moral engine of the whole book: a debt the culture hasn’t paid, and a novel as one attempt at payment.
Choosing to write about Johanna also meant leaving behind the genre Molnar had spent fifteen years in. The shift wasn’t aesthetic restlessness. It came from watching the pandemic’s death toll on television, including the loss of a close friend’s husband.
Then Covid hit, and I watched on TV with the rest of the world as all those bodies were being carried out of houses and the refrigerator trucks for the dead. A close friend lost her husband. So much terrible tragedy. I couldn’t and didn’t want to write any more murder.
How she wrote it
Every first at once, nineteen rejections laterMolnar came to this book without a single relevant credential in the genre she was entering. She said so plainly in a July 2022 interview, and the list of firsts she named tells you how large the learning curve was.
I’ve never written anything dual-timeline. I’ve never written anything historical. I’ve never written anything based on a true story. Writing this book was a huge challenge, but once I learned more about Johanna Bonger, I wanted everyone else to know about her too.
The dual-timeline structure, which weaves Johanna’s 1890s story against a contemporary New York narrative, came from a market problem rather than a purely artistic one. Molnar had surveyed recent historical fiction and found she was pitching squarely against the dominant trends of WWII novels and Regency romance.
My proposition was: ‘Please read my book about this Dutch woman you’ve never heard of who lived a hundred years ago.’ I thought a modern-day heroine could be more relatable. She would draw readers into the story and be their tour guide into the past.
Her research went down to the granular level: which paintings hung on which walls, what Johanna was reading, where she vacationed. Where the historical record had gaps, Molnar invented, and she named those inventions openly on the book’s bonus material page rather than obscuring them.
I’m not an art historian, so I expect I made some mistakes, but my goal was to at least introduce this remarkable woman to readers. Hopefully, people will come to admire Johanna as much as I do and they’ll investigate her tragic yet inspiring life.
Before Molnar could even make those craft choices, she had to survive the submission process. The book accumulated nineteen rejections over nearly two years, and the twentieth editor was still deliberating when Molnar stopped waiting.
In the spirit of complete honesty, nineteen and a half editors rejected *The Secret Life of Sunflowers*. I say half, because the last editor neither rejected it nor accepted it; she was still thinking about it when I finally decided to self-publish.
She published it herself, with her husband formatting the manuscript and her daughter designing the cover. Readers voted on the final design from options posted on Facebook. The book went on to become a bestseller.
The personal thread
If Johanna didn’t quit, neither could sheMolnar had spent thirteen years collecting rejections before selling her first novel under her Dana Marton pen name. When Sunflowers drew nineteen of its own, the historical story she was telling became something she was living at the same time.
I had to keep reminding myself that if Johanna Bonger didn’t quit, I couldn’t quit, either.
The fear nearly won before the rejections even started. Molnar was entering a new genre without an agent, without a publisher, and against explicit warnings that women’s fiction required institutional backing to survive. She almost didn’t send the manuscript out at all.
I very nearly talked myself out of writing Sunflowers. It was a completely new genre to me. I didn’t have an agent. I didn’t have a publisher. While romance is a genre that does well in the indie market, I’ve been warned that for women’s fiction/book club fiction an author needs serious publisher backing and major promo.
The book she almost didn’t write became the one that changed the direction of her career.
What she wants us to sit with
Entertained, then unable to use the word ‘impossible’Molnar is specific about the emotional sequence she wants readers to move through: pleasure first, then something that sticks past the last page. She connects that sequence directly to what Johanna’s story did for her while she was writing it.
You can do anything! Go after your wild ideas. Hold on to your passion. Live your dream, not just for yourself, but because when you do, other people will see that living their dream is also possible.
The book club questions Molnar posts on her own website push readers toward the personal stakes underneath the historical story: what they’ve been putting off, whose effort they’ve never acknowledged. She designed those prompts to close the distance between Johanna’s 1890s and the reader’s present.
I believe that her story is worth knowing.
That conviction is what the book club questions are built on: not trivia about Van Gogh’s paintings, but a reckoning with the unnamed people in readers’ own lives who did the work that made everything else possible.