You did it! We figured this one out! It is a truth universally acknowledged (by me for certain) that the Bitchery pretty much knows everything, and really, it's true. Scroll down to see the solution for this HaBO - and many thanks!
This HaBO request is from Jeni and she’s after a book from the early 90s:
I read this book probably in the early 90s. It was a mass market format with flowers and a yellow-y background (I think). I remember mostly the mystery elements, but I believe there was a romance between former high school sweethearts.
After the death of a beloved teacher, a group of his former students gather together. They’d all worked on the student newspaper together. After graduation, the heroine went to college for journalism, but realized there that writing wasn’t really her thing, so she went onto things. (Maybe lawyering?)
I don’t remember any of the other characters, except there was a classmate who withdrew from everyone and people were pissed/annoyed/disappointed with him. Also, the heroine was a runner and talked often about her breathing while running.
The part that sticks out the most to me is that this former teacher turned out to be not so great after all. The heroine finds a bunch of her pieces from the high school paper and realizes the teacher rewrote so much of her work, that it might as well have been his work. The classmates also discover what alienated their friend and why he particularly disliked this teacher.
It doesn’t sound exactly like a full-blown romance novel. Maybe more women’s or literary fiction?
Some of the details aren’t exactly the same, but sounds like “Maybe This Time” by Kathleen Gilles Seidel. (One of my least favorite Seidel’s–I thought the solution to the mystery was obvious and devolved into cheap pop psychology in a way she often, but not always, avoided–though I know it has a lot of fans.)
http://www.fictiondb.com/author/kathleen-gilles-seidel~maybe-this-time~31804~b.htm
Sorry, she didn’t realize until years later that he’s rewritten her work? She didn’t notice the differences when they were published? Because she never read the published work? Definitely not like the school paper types I hung out with.
YES! It was Maybe This Time!
Also DonnaMarie–She finds her old notebooks/drafts and realizes he basically re-wrote her stuff in the margins. He made suggestions and she took them. She just didn’t realize HOW MUCH he was doing it until she found them.
Wow, that was a quick solve. 🙂