For as long as she can remember, Samantha Schoech’s world has been surrounded by books.

“Bookstores are in my blood,” she said. “Writers have always been like my movie stars. Since I was little, I always thought being a writer was the most amazing thing you could be, or somehow connected to books. I really think books are one of the most important human inventions and they have been central to my whole life.”

For years, she’s immersed herself in the literary world, from bookselling to producing author events to editing anthologies to founding Independent Bookstore Day in 2014. Last month, she made one of her lifelong dreams a reality: publishing her own book.

Called “My Mother’s Boyfriends,” the book is a collection of 14 fictional stories she’s written over the years — the earliest from the late 1990s. In it, she tackles family dynamics and relationships, reflecting on growing up, raising children and aging.

While none of the stories are autobiographical, and the characters aren’t real, her experiences subtly find their way onto the pages.

“A lot of it just happens organically because this is the stuff that’s going on in your life, or what has formed you throughout your life is what comes out, unintentionally or intentionally,” she said.

“Like, I was raised by a single mom and there’s a lot of single moms in the book and I was an only child and there’s only children in the book, and there’s a lot of mother-daughter relationships in the book. The stories were written over such a long timeframe that I went from being a daughter to being a mother as well. The first story in the book is narrated by a teenage girl, and she’s talking about her mom, and the last story of the book is narrated by a mom, and she’s talking in part about her teenage daughter. That has been a big part of my life on both ends of it.”

Making her mark

Schoech, who grew up in San Anselmo and went to Tamalpais High School, jokes she has a narrator stuck in her brain.

“Some people see the world very visually. Some people see the world very mathematically. My world is narrated, and it always has been,” said Schoech, who now lives in San Francisco with her husband, the owner of Green Apple Books in San Francisco, and their twin teens.

While she was always an avid reader, it wasn’t until Schoech took a creative writing class at Lewis and Clark College at 19 years old that she had an aha moment: anyone who wanted to was allowed to write.

“I was always a huge reader, but I don’t think I understood that if you wanted to write books, you could just pick up a pen and do it. There was no specific permission or no specific training even that you needed. I was really nervous to take a creative writing class, but it just opened up my whole world,” said Schoech, who would go on to get her master’s in English and creative writing at the University of California at Davis, where she’d later teach writing.

But, the road to publishing this book was full of twists and turns. In fact, her publisher, 7.13 Books, first rejected it, but reached out again around a year later.

“The editor came back to me and said, ‘I can’t stop thinking about this book. Is it still available?’” she said. “I had quit writing fiction for a while after a novel that almost got published then didn’t get published, and it was just this big heartbreak. I still wrote nonfiction. I got a lot of essays published. As I got older, I became less focused on commercial success and outside praise and more into pleasing myself and writing stuff that I felt proud of. And, of course, everything got better after that.”

The book, then called “A Reason for Everything” after one of its stories, would end up being a runner-up in the Flannery O’Connor Award for Short Fiction in 2019 and a finalist for the 2020 International Beverly Prize for Literature.

“There’s been 25 years of a lot of ups and downs when it comes to publishing and a lot of wrong turns and a lot of near misses, but I’m very happy to have ended up in this place at this moment. And I’m enjoying every single moment of it,” she said.