On the set of Shameless

When I first started watching the Showtime original series Shameless it was not because I’m a best-selling author who loves creating dysfunctional characters. I became a fan of the popular series (which just finished its seventh season) because it’s filmed at my birth home.

No, I’m not joking.

I lived on the set of the Showtime original series Shameless.

Every week I get to turn on Showtime and watch the saga continue while being flooded with memories of my life as a child living at the “Gallagher” home. Trust me. It was weird at first, seeing my grandparents’ home on television, knowing I had also lived there as an infant with my mother.

They’d bought the Homan house (as we refer to it), with 2119 on the glass above the door, in 1953, and then kept the property for almost thirty years, while raising their own six children. When my grandmother bought another place in the mid-70s, away from the West Side of Chicago, Illinois, her oldest daughter moved back into the Homan house to raise … go figure… six children of her own until the house was eventually sold.

I’ll never forget the summers spent running up and down Homan Avenue with the rest of my cousins, jumping double-dutch, and hanging out at the park at the end of the dead end street, where I had also met a boy, and fell in love for the first time. Those are fond memories that flood to the surface each and every time I tune in to the addictive series.

Shameless is a favorite of mine. I love the writing, and even though my grandmother is probably turning in her grave at all the shenanigans going on in a place the Anderson Family once called home, I continually tune in laughing at William H. Macy, Emmy Rossum, and the engaging series about probably the most dysfunctional family on television. I thought my family was crazy, but I guarantee once you watch the series, you’ll decide your family wasn’t as cray-cray as you had suspected.

The Gallagher home, my birth home, and those memories growing up, will be the backdrop for my upcoming time travel, Timeless Desire, coming this spring. The story is about a young jazz singer who finds an old locket that sends her traveling back to the 1970s, to fill her grandmother’s patent leather shoes.