Olive Ann Burns; Author of Best-Seller ‘Cold Sassy Tree’

Olive Ann Burns, a journalist who wrote the best-selling novel “Cold Sassy Tree” as therapy when she contracted cancer, has died. She was 65.

Miss Burns died Wednesday in Piedmont Hospital in Atlanta of the lymphoma she had suffered from since 1975. The same disease killed her husband of 33 years, Andrew H. Sparks, last year.

Her novel, although written for her own pleasure, was a Book-of-the-Month Club alternate selection in 1984 and put on a list of books recommended for teen-agers by the New York Public Library.

In 1989, the book about small-town life in Georgia was made into a cable TV movie for Turner Network Television starring Faye Dunaway and Richard Widmark.

“I was writing the novel as a new challenge, as something to do while I was sick, for my own pleasure,” Miss Burns once explained. “I wanted to see if I could do it, but I didn’t believe that anybody would publish a novel by somebody who didn’t know how to write one.

“I thought that if I ever finished it,” she said, “I would print out a half-dozen copies and pass them out to my family and friends.”

Miss Burns had written nonfiction articles for several years, first for Atlanta Weekly, a former Sunday magazine of the Atlanta Journal-Constitution, and later as a free-lance writer and advice columnist for the Atlanta Constitution.

Many would-be authors never complete books, she observed, because they never make the time to write.

“You must decide what you will give up in order to have the time and energy to do it,” she said. “I had a head start on giving up things; the doctor I went to about arthritis said I shouldn’t vacuum anymore. Then, when I was on chemotherapy, the hematologist told me I couldn’t go anywhere. If you can’t vacuum and you can’t go anywhere, you have more time than you ever knew existed.”

Miss Burns modeled the grandfather character and his May-December romance in her novel on her great-grandfather, who had married a young storekeeper three weeks after his first wife’s death. The town of “Cold Sassy” was modeled on the actual small town of Commerce where her father had grown up.

To create the novel, Miss Burns played journalist, interviewing her parents, aunts and cousins.

“It has been said that growing up in the South and becoming a writer is like spending your life riding in a wagon, seated in a chair that is always facing backwards,” Miss Burns said. “I don’t face life looking backwards, but I have written about past times and past people. . . . What I was after (in interviews) was not just names and dates; I wanted stories and details that would bring the dead to life.”

Miss Burns studied at Mercer University and was graduated from the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill.

She is survived by a son, John Andrew Sparks of Colorado Springs, Colo., and a daughter, Rebecca Marie Sparks of Atlanta, and a brother and two sisters.