A book signing for Shreveport native Suzanne Peyton’s book Virginia’s Diary will take place at 1 p.m. Sunday at Grace Estate.
Peyton penned the book after having a dream in 1999 that she says changed her life forever.
“My deceased grandmother came to me in the dream and gave me a keepsake box and before I could ask her why she was giving it to me, a woman’s voice spoke from behind me and asked, ‘Who died the year you were born?’” she said in the synopsis for the book.
She says the only death in 1958 was her grandmother’s mother, Virginia Avery, of which a legend had been passed down that she abandoned her husband and children in Marshall, Texas in 1904.
“As the dream haunted me, I began to look into this woman’s life. The lies quickly began to surface. So moved by the horror of what I believed had happed, I decided to write a book,” Peyton said. “It was when I decided to tell her story as if she had kept a diary, that my life turned upside down. I would write the diary entries, but the language was not my own, it was clearly from another era of time.”
She says after years that after a 17-year journey and proof from historical documents, she believes she was Virginia in a past life.