“I just hope I don’t get shot,” I said wryly to my publisher, Judith Regan. We both laughed. But I was only half-joking. I was referring to my impending book signings in New Hampshire, the flinty state I’d grown up in. I was returning there the next day to promote my book KooKooLand, a true crime memoir.

In writing the book, I’d unearthed some ugly local history involving domestic violence, racism, and injustice, and I was afraid some nut just might want to bury me for it. If he did, I figured he’d get off scot-free. In my book, guys get away with murder, and women pay the price.

The first thing I noticed when I arrived in New Hampshire was a whole bunch of Trump signs. No surprise there. In the February primary, Clinton had gotten her clock cleaned, while 5,000 people braved a blizzard to cheer on Trump. The couple I was staying with could’ve had dueling lawn signs. The wife was Team Clinton, the husband Team Trump. When pressed, the husband conceded Hillary was better qualified. I suddenly had a higher purpose for the trip: flip his vote.

New Hampshire, I often tell people, is like a Southern state dropped down in the North. A reddish state trending blue.

As I unpacked, I was trending blue too. I was homesick for my big blue state of California. But I didn’t have time to mope. I had to head off to my first book event.

When I arrived at Gibson’s in Concord, a bookstore founded in 1898, a good-size crowd had already assembled. A guy whose troubled family figures prominently in the book quickly approached me. I froze. This man had every reason to be pissed. I had portrayed his uncle as a violent bully and his father as ornery and delusional.

“Don’t worry. I’m not mad,” he assured me. He thanked me for writing fairly about his family and even admitted that his father could be pretty ornery.

The trip was not shaping up the way I expected. Maybe I was just projecting my own residual hostilities onto these folks?

My next signing, a few days later, was at the Toadstool Bookshop, in picturesque Peterborough. Unfortunately, it was raining buckets. I apologized to the owner for not bringing my beautiful California weather.

“Oh no, this is great weather for us,” he said. People can’t be outside, so they’ll be here.” I felt like I had wandered into a literary field of dreams. If you build it, they will come.

And come they did; it was a huge turnout. I shared my tale of surviving a hardscrabble New Hampshire housing project, a place my California and New York audiences couldn’t even imagine. “They have projects in New Hampshire?” someone there would invariably ask me. Here, no one asked.

My story reflected real life for these people—a reality they didn’t often see depicted in movies, TV shows, and glossy magazines. A lot of people brought up the prescription-drug epidemic. Drugs had decimated these families of New England. People were desperate for a ray of hope, and I was providing it—in the middle of a downpour.

On the way back from Toadstool, I drove under a vivid rainbow, and when I pulled up to a tollbooth, the operator told me that the previous driver had paid my toll—a random act of kindness. I could never have written that. It was too unbelievable.

My final signing was in my hometown of Manchester. The crowd there was the biggest of all. Even the secretary of state of New Hampshire came. He said he didn’t think I’d portrayed the state in a negative light. In fact, he attributed my success to the toughness I’d acquired from my rocky upbringing in the Granite State.

“You’re a local hero,” one man announced. “You told the story of us.”

Though many people identified with my story, that didn’t necessarily translate into sharing my politics. By week’s end, I hadn’t even managed to flip the vote of my Trump-loving host. But Clinton might not need his vote. She’s ahead of Trump in New Hampshire.

The place I depicted in my book is becoming a thing of the past. And I couldn’t be happier.

Gloria Norris is a screenwriter and film producer whose book KooKooLand was published this year by Regan Arts.