Why Narcissi is a novel-in-stories by Babette Fraser Hale

In Narcissi, ten quite different Texas women fall for a traveling novelist who intends no harm. 

Is that what the novel is about? Not really, but kind of.

In some ways putting the “aboutness” of your novel into one or two coherent sentences can be more difficult for a fiction writer than actually writing the chapters. Or, in the case of Narcissi, writing the stories that comprise the narrative.

I chose the structure of a novel-in-stories because I wanted to balance the kind of narrative often told by male writers—a wounded man seeking comfort in temporary liaisons with the stories of the women who choose to participate. I wanted to probe more deeply into all of the characters as individuals, hoping to understand more about how we confuse sex and love at midlife those twenty-odd years of seminal change, physical and mental change, changes in couplehood, parenthood, work life.

Each character comes to me as a distinct being but I know almost nothing about them at first. That takes time. Sometimes I see the person in a specific place, as I did with Elsa rummaging in a ditch. Sometimes just a sentence about them will arrive in my head.

The character grows from there, interacting with her or his environment and other characters.

I began with the image of Cole. I could see him, a tall, graceful redhead with a weathered face and smiling blue eyes. He was getting nowhere with his second novel, so he began writing a “slow travel” column for a Texas magazine. He would turn his novelist’s capacity for close, detailed observation into monthly reports, and along the way he would meet women. His second marriage had collapsed and he was struggling with a self-destructive loneliness. 

Each woman, also lonely, was at a turning point in her life, often unsure of herself in the ways that midlife seems to stoke, and Cole saw it. Understood it. Really looked at her and listened to what she had to say.

It could have been exploitative, but was it?

This question interested me and I saw that I could show the characters and the situations more completely if I treated them in stories. Stories that link, characters that show up at different times in their lives, all connected through the overarching trajectory of Cole’s evolution.

There’s such freedom in approaching a narrative in this fashion. Backstory can be treated in the way memory treats actual events. In sharply rendered flashes. You enter in the middle of a situation, often, and the story builds around you.

It’s a congenial format for readers today, I believe, because it accumulates a novel’s satisfying meal, rich in theme and content, from tasty, digestible mouthfuls.

Readers expect certain characteristics from a novel, however. For that reason, Cole’s evolution proceeds chronologically. 

So what is Narcissi about? 

It’s about our efforts to fit ourselves into the changing circumstances we encounter in the middle of our lives, as we search for meaning, perspective and happiness, or at least peace.

Do we find any of these? All of them, if we’re lucky?

In our lives as readers, we will have individual answers to those questions. That’s true of the women in Narcissi, too. As time moves through them, or in them, each woman makes the compromises necessary to survive.

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Babette Fraser Hale is the author of Narcissi, This Familiar Heart, and A Wall of Bright Dead Feathers, winner of the debut fiction award from the Texas Institute of Letters. Her stories have won the Meyerson Award from Southwest Review and been included among the “Other Distinguished Stories” of the year in Best American Short Stories, 2015. In addition to writing fiction, she has been a magazine feature writer, columnist, contributing editor, book editor and publisher. She lives in Texas. In 2025 she was elected to membership in the Texas Institute of Letters. Learn more about her work at https://www.winedalebooks.com/babette-fraser-hale.

Her novel, Narcissi is available on Amazon and Bookshop.org.

Q&A with Rebecca Chamian Ribaudo, Crossing Division Street

This book tells the overlooked American story of Italian immigrants, Black American migrants and generations to follow who lived cheek to jowl in Chicago’s mixed-race neighborhood called Little Sicily, Little Hell and later, Cabrini-Green, captured in pop culture on television and film in Good Times, Candyman, Hoop Dreams and the like. What drew you to the neighborhood of Cabrini-Green in Chicago for the setting of this book?

When I first moved to Chicago more than thirty years ago and saw the towers of Cabrini-Green, I wanted to understand the history. What was the story behind this neighborhood defined by massive, sixteen and nineteen-story high-rises with fenced-in hallways where children could be seen looking down upon the world? Who was Cabrini? And Green? When I looked on a map of the area and saw “Little Sicily,” I began to research, and the story came from there. This was all at a time in our nation when individual and group identity were becoming increasingly inseparable. I wanted to understand how a neighborhood of Italian immigrants and Black American migrants lived side by side, negotiating their identities in the tumult of a changing America, through segregation, poverty, riots, wars, the civil rights era, and a modern-day project rooted in the hope of a great society.  

What is Cabrini-Green like today and how is it like other similar housing developments in major cities in America? How have residents been displaced, if at all, due to gentrification?

Cabrini-Green is an increasingly gentrified neighborhood with a Target in the middle and Whole Foods nearby. The public housing model of concentrated populations living in towers was ultimately deemed a failure due to many factors, including neglect, de facto segregation, and violence. The towers were taken down between 1995 and 2011. At its peak, Cabrini had 15,000 residents. Today, all that is left of the Cabrini-Green housing projects are 140 of the original Row House units. Two schools remain as well as a couple of churches.

In terms of displacement, the Row Houses were completed in 1942 to house war workers, which displaced the Sicilians who lived there in tenements. Each group displaced the one that came before, before Cabrini was complete in 1962, the neighborhood was predominantly Sicilian, and before that, Swedish and German, and before that, Irish. Historically referred to as the slums, the Row Houses symbolized something greater for Chicago. Today, the neighborhood is mixed income with many newly developed buildings. Those displaced were moved to other neighborhoods with Section 8 housing or to other public housing communities. 

Cabrin’s towers represented an experiment that included the South Side’s Robert Taylor Homes, nearly twice Cabrini’s population, similar high-rise developments along Chicago’s State Street Corridor and the West Side, as well as developments in other cities, including Pruitt-Igoe in St. Louis. Today, policies favor low- and mid-rise, mixed-income developments, housing vouchers, and more integrated neighborhoods. 

Dubbed a modern Atlas Shrugged meets The Human Stain, this book inspires conversations around issues of individual vs. group identity, assimilation vs. multiculturalism and self-determination vs. inherited destiny. How have Philip Roth and Ayn Rand influenced your writings?

Both Roth and Rand tackled moral questions around individual and collective identity through fiction in ways that influenced my work in different ways. Ayn Rand was able to bring millions of readers into her theory of Objectivism and views on individual versus collective identity through her well-known novels, Atlas Shrugged and The Fountainhead, as well as works such as We the Living and Anthem. My novel directly grapples with Rand’s ideas, putting them to the test in areas that she did not take on in her fiction, including motherhood, children, and the smallest collective there is, family. 

By contrast, Roth was less of a philosopher and more of a literary writer; his worldview is not laid out as a comprehensive philosophy like Rand’s Objectivism. Through compelling prose, Roth was able to tackle issues of identity through individual situations that readers could imagine themselves in. During my years of study, Roth was regularly cited as the gold standard, influencing how I think of fiction not only as entertainment but as a means of asking readers to grapple with the complexity of real-life characters in real-world situations. Most relevant to my work, The Human Stain captures the complexity of racial identity and the choices we make to hide or use our heritage for advancement or survival. 

Crossing Division Street, with a strong female protagonist at the heart of a multigenerational story whose core tension is philosophical, sits between the Roth and Rand approaches to literature.

With this story of interracial adoption, how did the issues of race, ethnicity, oppression, religion and privilege come into play?

Not everyone agrees that what is right for our society is right for their own community, family, or home. While in theory most support integration unconditionally on a societal level, when it comes to family formation and transracial adoption, it’s a different matter altogether. Questions arise around a child’s loss of heritage, a parent’s ability to relate to a child of a different background, and whether parents of a different background can prepare a child for issues they may face due to their race, ethnicity, or religion, including discrimination. Underneath these questions are narratives around oppression, privilege, and who has the right to parent children based on the groups to which they belong. Terms such as “cultural genocide” are used to describe the erasure of culture through adoption. In Crossing Division Street, the protagonist, Sidone, becomes entangled in high-profile transracial adoption trial and is accused of cultural incompetence. Her principles, the ones that have guided her life, reject using race as a proxy for worth under any circumstance. Yet, if she agrees in this one instance to compromise her values, she could win the trial. What’s at stake is her career, her family’s deepest secret, a little girl, and the only man she’s ever loved.  

Which part of the book or character was the most difficult and/or moving to write and why? 

There is a scene near the end of the novel in which the main character’s father, Salvatore, relives a painful part of his past. He is recounting a lifetime of struggle that his daughter never knew. He goes back to the Korean War where his unit is attacked and he’s left alone, bleeding to death in the snow, surrounded by the enemy. Going through that horror, the Battle of Chosin Reservoir, was difficult. Just the research alone, how those men—no, those boys—were ambushed and fought devastating battles in the freezing cold yet never surrendered. All for their fellow Marines and for their country. And we have this man recounting what’s called the Forgotten War, and then something he finds out years after the war ends that changes his entire life, something unbearable to discover as a father. To see his daughter, Sidone, to imagine her watching her father, her papa, what she is going through as he reveals truths that become hers to own and carry forward. It’s clear that the burden of knowledge is being shifted onto her. That was a hard scene. A lifetime of secrets, betrayals, and loyalties from father to daughter. Chapter 46. Your readers will understand when the get there. 

Early on in the book, there are two scenes historically connected to the victimization of Black Americans: the 1891 lynching and the 1907 swing scene. Why did you focus on Sicilians here? 

The lynching of eleven Sicilians in 1891, one of the largest mass lynchings in U.S. history, is not well known, but is an important part of America’s history, a time when discrimination against Italians, while not comparable to Black Americans, was prevalent and color lines not distinct. This discrimination carried over into the neighborhoods of northern cities as “dark” Sicilian immigrants replaced groups such as the Irish, Germans, and Swedes. The 1907 swing scene captures the color-based violence against the Sicilians in a changing Chicago neighborhood. The two scenes were included as important to understanding the dynamic of a country, and then a mixed neighborhood, where color lines were not black and white, but relative to one another. And the scenes also help capture why color didn’t matter to Sidone’s great-grandfather, Maurizio, a witness to the 1891 lynchings. Maurizio finds common cause with and supports his black neighbors, while his son, Nico, responds differently. After seeing his baby sister pushed off a swing by Swedish girls, Nico does all he can to separate himself from his Sicilian heritage and black neighbors, determined to define his and family’s place in America as white.

Maurizio and his son Nico Natali experience America in very different ways. Explain the first vs. second generation tension between the two.

Before I answer, a caveat in this novel, as true to life, each individual responds differently to their circumstances, so this answer does not speak to how all first and second generations in America respond—it’s a story of one father and one son in late-1800s / early-1900s America.

In Crossing Division Street, Sidone’s immigrant great-grandparents, Maurizio and Carlotta, are first generation. Maurizio is a migrant worker, and both he and Carlotta work alongside Black Americans on a Louisiana sugarcane plantation. They have escaped poverty and violence in Sicily and come to America with the hope of a better life. When they migrate to Chicago, to Little Sicily, they work long hours in difficult conditions to feed their growing family. Carlotta works in a garment factory while Maurizio is a ragman who ascends to becoming a street sweeper. They are grateful for the opportunity, and sacrifice for the next generation. 

The second generation is Nico Natali, Maurizio’s son. Nico never experienced America’s South, and so instead of having empathy for Black Americans, or feeling any sense of commonality, he becomes resentful. When Nico is discriminated against by Swedish neighbors, he realizes it’s because of his dark skin. He then starts to separate himself from the neighborhood’s black population, including from an older woman who has been like a mother to him. 

Nico also resents America, seeing it as a place inhospitable to Italians and having an economy to which he doesn’t have access. As a result, Nico turns away from America in many ways, romanticizing Italy as his true homeland and refusing to take over his father’s job of street sweeping. Instead, Nico joins the mafia to make “real” money in a white society that doesn’t accept him as an equal. 

And so, we have this tension between the first-generation immigrant who is grateful for America and sees himself as sharing a common bond with Black Americans, and the second generation who resents America, chooses violent and dishonest work, and openly discriminates in an effort separate himself as different and superior. It is survival in many ways, but also the result of not having known the struggle.

In 1965, the network premiere of Judgment at Nuremberg was interrupted by footage from Bloody Sunday. Explain this scene in the book as it relates to America and the overall message of the novel? 

This was something true that happened in 1965, during the ABC network premiere of Judgment at Nuremberg, a film about the trial of German judges who had enforced Nazi race laws. The film is interrupted by scenes from what became known as Bloody Sunday. In Selma, Alabama, six hundred protesters marching against discrimination in voting practices were attacked by state troopers with clubs, bullwhips, and tear gas. An estimated forty-eight million people were watching the Judgment at Nuremberg film when ABC cut to the Selma footage. The juxtaposition was stark, and both viewers and commentators drew parallels immediately.

In the novel, Sidone is a young girl watching the television with her parents. Her father Salvatore wants her to watch Judgment at Nuremberg so that she can start to understand history and the tendencies of man. Her mother Rosa thinks history is a waste of time and believes the family should focus on current civil rights issues. As they sit down, Rosa presses Sidone to tell her father what is going on in Alabama. And then, the film is interrupted. We have this tension between the past and the present, and Sidone is in the middle. This where Sidone sits in the novel, between the past and present, and within the conflicts and tendencies that endure.

The hospital scene is a turning point for all of the characters involved. Explain why what happened in the hospital is so pivotal to the arc of these characters and direction of the book.

Without giving too much away, the hospital scene forces four of the main characters to make decisions that challenge their values and what I would also call their moral identity—the character and essence of who they are and believe themselves to be. That latter part is important, the self-conception of being a morally correct and good person. What happens in this scene changes their lives forever, both as they relate to one another and how they live with themselves. We have these times in our lives when something happens, times we must make a choice that either betrays or stays true to our values and sense of self. It’s a threshold moment that changes all that comes afterward relationships, self-worth, who we choose to become and to love, what we believe, and what we understand to be or justify as moral and true. This scene is that moment for these characters. As readers, we go through their struggles, there is no easy answer, and one person’s commandment may be another’s unforgivable sin.

Religion and God are present throughout the novel without it being an overtly religious or dogmatic book. Can you explain the role of religion in the novel?

We each live by a moral code, whether it’s written in scripture, prescribed by a societal framework, or held quietly within as conscience. The novel, moving throughout America’s history, cannot adequately portray the choices of characters without including the moral frameworks operating around them. As characters navigate choices within and outside God and religion, those who have not earnestly interrogated their beliefs are forced to do so. And this is really the core tension at the heart of the novel. The main character, Sidone, after a life-changing event, decides to put her group identities behind her in favor of pure Randian, rationalistic individualism. She leaves racial, ethnic, and even her religious group behind, seeing herself as independent from not only her heritage, but from anything higher. In the end, she ends up embodying this core tension can pure individualism as a moral code ever comport with a sense of shared humanity, or even the tenet that all men are created equal.

The Korean War scene is powerful on many levels. Explain its purpose and how it relates to the larger themes of the book.

The Korean War was a fight against the spread of communism. One can dispute the true intent of any war, but at the time, there was a battle between communism and the free world, so we have that tension underlying the scene and the novel—the individual and individual freedoms versus total equality via the collective, the group.

In this scene, Sidone’s father Salvatore recounts his time as a Marine in Korea. His fellow Marine, Jemmy, is a Black American from the South in an era of Jim Crow segregation—buses, schools, restaurants, theaters, much of daily life. Living a segregated life without equal treatment at home, Jemmy is integrated into a white unit in a war against the promise of total equality for all. In trying to reconcile all of this, there’s a part of the scene where Jemmy says, “We got liberty without equality. Blacks ain’t yet equal in America, but at least we got a chance at it. Now equality without liberty, there ain’t no hope for any of us with that.” 

So, this one scene raises questions around liberty and equality that also show up throughout the novel. We also have idealism and narratives around the war, what each side represents, in tension with the reality on the ground. That is a theme not only in war, but in our lives and throughout the novel.

Will your next book focus on more of America’s little-known stories that aren’t told in our history books?

I am drawn to the messy stories of individuals and how they navigate a country that’s still very much an experiment, 250 years in. So yes, my next book will explore similar themes through America’s little-known stories, but through a story that starts in another country. In Crossing Division Street, the characters are here, navigating America. I’m working on a novel that pulls that tension outside the U.S., to a history that begins in the Mideast and crosses into America. I am drawn to stories that reveal truths about the human condition, and stories that cross boundaries, so this next story will ask some difficult questions about the borders we erect in our narratives, not only about our fellow Americans, but about those beyond our shores. Crossing Division Street is one novel, but it is also a theme for my writings. I have some other ideas in this spirit that I am working on as well, but the one that crosses national boundaries is probably the novel I will finish next.

Where can readers find you and learn more about your book?

Crossing Division Street is available at Amazon, Barnes & Noble, Bookshop.org, and wherever books are sold! For more information, readers can visit crossingdivisionstreet.com and follow on Instagram @crossingdivisionstreet

Rebecca Chamian Ribaudo is a Chicago-based author, nonprofit leader, free-speech advocate and mother. After a career as a marketing executive and consultant, she is authoring novels for independent thinkers. She was recently elected by and served all Harvard alumni as an Elected Director and continues to serve on select committees. She also leads and advises organizations committed to free speech, civil rights and women’s freedoms globally. She lives in downtown Chicago with her husband and two daughters – one in college and one in the U.S. Navy.

The Love Story Was Me by Regina Louise

Whenever someone asks me what my book is about, I have to resist giving them the clean answer.

I could say Unladylike: A Mythopoetic Reclamation of Love is a collection of poetry and prose about love, abandonment, motherhood, foster care, desire, heartbreak, race, womanhood, and reclamation.

All of that would be true.

And none of it would answer the question.

Because this book is about me.

More precisely, it is about the long journey of becoming someone I could remain with.

I have spent much of my life writing about what happens when a child does not have the ordinary coordinates that tell her who she is. I grew up in foster care, moving through more than 30 placements, learning very early that home could disappear, people could disappear, and love was something you could be given and then have taken away.

Children make meaning from those experiences.

I certainly did.

And then we grow up.

Except the meanings sometimes grow up with us.

We carry them into friendships and marriages, into sex and ambition, into motherhood, into our work, into the people we choose and the things we tolerate. We carry them so faithfully that eventually we stop recognizing them as stories.

They simply become who we believe ourselves to be.

Unladylike is my interruption of that.

The book moves through the places where I went looking for love and the places where I confused something else for it.

Sometimes I found tenderness.

Sometimes I found longing.

Sometimes abandonment dressed up as possibility.

Sometimes I found myself standing outside the locked door of someone else’s emotional life, believing that if I loved hard enough, waited long enough, understood enough, forgave enough, or made myself desirable enough, eventually somebody would let me in.

That is a brutal thing to recognize.

It is also freedom.

Because eventually I had to ask a different question: “What if the love story I had been waiting for was not about somebody finally choosing me?”

What if it was about me becoming unwilling to abandon myself?

That is the journey of this book.

The poems became places where I could tell the truth without requiring the truth to be tidy. Poetry allowed me to say what ordinary language sometimes could not. A nervous system could speak. A wedding magazine could carry the weight of a little girl’s impossible dream. Teeth could become jewelry. Hope could become a rope.

The literal experience could become symbol.

And through symbol, I could find meaning.

That is why I call the book mythopoetic.

I am not trying to turn my life into mythology because my suffering was grander than anyone else’s. I am almost doing the opposite.

I am asking: “What happens when we stop treating our experiences only as evidence of what was done to us and begin asking what those experiences have come to represent inside us?”

• What did I make love mean?

• What did I make abandonment mean?

• What did I make being motherless mean?

• What did I make being chosen mean?

• And, perhaps most importantly: do I still consent to those meanings?

That last question matters to me.

Because reclamation is not pretending the past was different.

My childhood happened.

The people who hurt me, hurt me.

The people I loved were who they were.

I was who I was.

Reclamation does not require me to rewrite any of that. It allows me to decide what I will carry forward.

I think that is why this book may belong to people whose lives look nothing like mine.

You do not have to have been a foster child to know abandonment. You do not have to have been motherless to know what it feels like to hunger for something you cannot name. You do not have to have survived my particular relationships to know the exhausting work of trying to turn crumbs into communion. And you certainly do not have to be a poet to understand the desire to come home to yourself.

I used to believe home was something another person could give me.

Maybe that is the deepest story beneath this book.

I spent years searching for the person, relationship, family, or love that would finally make leaving impossible.

Instead, I became that place.

So, when someone asks me what Unladylike is about, perhaps the simplest answer is this: It is the record of a woman discovering that she can lose the relationship without losing herself.

It is about what remains when she does.

And what remains is me.

Her book, Unladylike: A Mythopoetic Reclamation of Love is available on Amazon and Bookshop.org.

Q&A with Ivan Carl, The Equation

At the heart of the novel is a fascinating premise: what if human contentment could actually be expressed as a formula? What made you want to explore happiness and fulfillment through mathematics?

I've always liked solving big, complicated problems and trying to find the simplest answer. I don't think there is anything more complicated than the human experience and the pursuit of happiness. My engineering brain has been working on this for decades. When I finally settled on the math equation that is in the book, I got really excited and wanted to share it with everyone I could.

Nathan Brooks has optimized nearly every part of his life - his career, his routine, his productivity - yet he still feels that something is missing. Why was Nathan the right person to discover this particular secret?

There are a couple of reasons why Nathan was right for this. I wanted the main character to be relatable and also struggling in life. Nathan is a man who could measure everything except the thing that mattered. He'd optimized his whole life and still felt empty, so he's the perfect person to receive a discovery about contentment — because he's living proof of the problem it solves.

Nathan is a mathematician, but the mystery he uncovers ultimately becomes much bigger than mathematics. Did you see the book as a story about numbers, or was mathematics really a doorway into a much larger philosophical question?

Math was always the doorway to the bigger philosophical question. The math formula is the hook — but the real question is philosophical: what actually makes a life worth living? I landed on a math equation that can be used as a diagnostic to consider your own life. By design, the equation does not give you the answer; it simply gives you a framework to think about your life. I really want people to be entertained by The Equation, but my biggest hope is that people find cause to be self-reflective at the end of the book.

Nathan begins the story by finding his mentor murdered in a locked office, with “THE EQUATION” written in blood. What did you want readers to feel in that moment?

That the stakes are big from the first pages. That this idea is dangerous enough to kill for. I want the reader to be horrified and also curious about why someone was murdered and what made his idea so dangerous.

Nathan's mentor leaves behind very little, except a brass key and a mystery. Why was it important to make Nathan work from fragments rather than simply hand him the answers?

I have always liked thrillers that had a trail of breadcrumbs, a path of discovery. If Nathan's mentor just explained it, the reader stays passive. Making him assemble it from fragments brings the reader alongside him to solve the puzzle — and hopefully discover something meaningful.

The Continuum has spent two centuries suppressing research into human contentment. What makes an organization like that more frightening than a conventional villain?

I love the great good-versus-evil stories. A conventional villain is too singular and small for this story. The Continuum feels like something much bigger and more powerful to battle against. They are frightening because of the magnitude of their hidden global connections, and because they might believe they're right. The fact that they are so secretly woven into the powerful forces that control the world makes them the perfect big scale villain for this story.

The novel suggests that seventeen societies have already been silenced for getting too close to the truth. Did you create The Continuum primarily as a fictional conspiracy, or were you interested in exploring how real institutions can protect systems that benefit them?

The conspiracy is invented. There is no smoke-filled room of people controlling all of society. But I wanted readers to reflect on the bigger life pressures that seem beyond the individual. Naming those big pressures as The Continuum gives the story a powerful antagonist, and hopefully gives readers a way to categorize the big external pressures they think about in life.

Nathan's investigation takes him through monasteries, tide archives, and communities that have apparently been living according to principles the modern world has forgotten. How did you decide where to take readers physically and historically?

I wanted places that embody the book's argument, and I wanted to take the reader on a journey around the world. Monasteries, forgotten communities, places that measured life differently. The settings aren't just backdrops; each one is evidence that the alternative Nathan is chasing is real and has always been here. I also really wanted the book to feel global. The story is universal, so I tried to take the reader to places all over the world as part of the discovery path.

Was there a particular piece of research that made you stop and think, “This belongs in the book”?

It wasn't so much a piece of research, but rather destinations that I felt belonged in the book. I spent a lot of time in Colorado, so it felt right to base Arcadia in those mountains. I live near the ocean and have always been awed by the power of the tides, so I wanted to share that with readers. I have been fortunate to travel quite a bit around the world for work, and that inspired me to weave so many global destinations into the book.

How did you balance the intellectual and philosophical material with the pace and suspense readers expect from a conspiracy thriller?

Great question! The rule I kept was: the philosophical idea can never stop the chase and momentum of the thriller. Every philosophical beat had to be earned by tension in the chase — a revelation while running, not a lecture in a quiet room. If a passage got too heady, I asked whether a reader on a plane would keep turning pages. The thriller is the delivery system. The idea is the payload.

The book has been described as being in the tradition of The Da Vinci Code and The Alchemist. What do you think readers of those books will recognize in The Equation, and where does your novel take the idea somewhere different?

I hope the thriller engine of the book feels like a The Da Vinci Code kind of story: a centuries-old secret, a trail, an organization protecting it. From The Alchemist, I see the soul of the book: a journey toward what makes a content and meaningful life. 

I think I diverge in two ways. First, I'm trying to combine these two very different styles of books, which honestly was not easy!. Second, the equation doesn't try to answer the life question for the reader; instead it gives the reader a diagnostic tool from which to examine their own life. What they see is up to them.

Did you set out to write a conspiracy thriller with philosophical questions, or did the philosophical questions come first and the thriller grow around them?

The philosophy came first, by decades. I'd been carrying the question — what makes a life content — long before I had a thriller storyline. This philosophical question has been on my mind since we lived in Peru twenty-five years ago. The thriller grew around it when the final formula landed in my mind. I have always loved ambitious large scale stories, and felt like a thriller was the best way to deliver my message to the world.

How much of The Equation did you have mapped out before you began writing? Did you know the answer to the mystery from the beginning?

I have always worked outward from the core structure of a project first, and then added the detail in the next phases. I had the core story pretty well mapped before I started writing. That said, once I got deeper into the character development and world-building, the story took some really fun turns.

Was there a scene or revelation that changed the direction of the book while you were writing it?

Elias, the Continuum's operative. I sat down to write him as the opposing force Nathan runs into, the face of the dark side in the book. But as I worked through his story, I realized he needed to believe that what he was doing was the right thing for the world. I think it makes for a more powerful story, especially in the back half, when he begins to contemplate his own life without abandoning The Continuum.

What was the most challenging part of writing The Equation: creating the mystery, developing Nathan, constructing The Continuum, or making the underlying ideas believable?

Making the ideas believable, without question. A conspiracy is fun to construct; a character grows as you write. But convincing a reader that a formula for contentment could be real enough to kill for — that it isn't just self-help dressed up — that was the tightrope. I needed both the philosophical idea and the chase of the thriller to feel true for the book to work.

Without giving us a spoiler, what moment in The Equation are you most excited for readers to reach?

Paris. This is the crux of the story, where everything in the world begins a subtle shift. It's a no-going-back kind of moment.

Your novel asks what may be the ultimate question: what if someone solved the secret to a meaningful life and powerful people were willing to kill to keep it buried? After writing this story, do you think knowing the secret to a meaningful life would actually make people happier?

Yes! But I don't think the answer lies in anything someone else defines. You have to do it yourself. I believe the hard work — asking yourself the honest questions about what makes your life meaningful — is what we should all be doing. The asking is where the work is. I hope this book gives people a way to think about how to ask those questions.

Finally, when readers close The Equation, what do you hope they start questioning about their own lives?

I hope they close the book and quietly run their own equation: what's actually working, what's just noise, what they might already have, what they are grateful for. Not the life path they've been told is correct, but rather their own perspective on their life. If a reader takes a long walk a week later, still thinking about the equation, then the book has done its job.

Learn more about The Equation, available on Amazon and Bookshop.org.

Q&A with Jen Ruiz, All You Need is Flights

Your previous memoir chronicled a transformative year of travel. How did writing this book differ emotionally and creatively from your earlier work?

My first book, 12 Trips in 12 Months, was about facing a big milestone birthday and jumping into a career switch. This book picks up 5 years later, grappling with a lot of the same questions of self-worth and discovery through travel, but with the added gravity of health concerns and feeling like I’d been wasting crucial time. 

The book begins after a deeply personal breakup. At what point did you realize this painful chapter could become a story of healing instead of heartbreak?

I knew almost right away that I was living my next story. Besides it being so ludicrous (at one point I was dancing in a drum circle next to a guy in a banana suit with a dog balancing on his shoulders), I was going to some pretty epic places and indulging my inner child. This are universal balms that can soothe whatever ails us at the moment, and I wanted to share that experience with others looking for their next move.

Solo travel often looks glamorous on social media, but your memoir also explores vulnerability. Why was it important for you to show both the joyful and challenging sides of traveling alone?

I love solo travel, it’s fantastic! You go where you want, when you want, and see what you want. But just because something is good overall doesn’t mean it’s all good, all the time. The tendency to gloss over hardships makes people feel more isolated than seen. It makes us want to put forth a perfect image on social media, and that’s not relatable. People resonate with honest content because they want to know it’s OK to be human. 

You've visited some incredible destinations throughout the book. Which place surprised you the most, and why did it leave such a lasting impression?

I loved my trip to Rapa Nui, aka Easter Island. It’s one of the most remote places I’ve ever visited and I enjoyed learning about the Moai, giant statues I’d only seen in magazines before. I felt relaxed during my time there, and my faith in people was renewed when they let me leave without paying for the hotel when the WiFi went down, trusting I’d send the money via Western Union when I got home. I appreciated the reminder that not everyone is moving a million miles a minute or on a screen for hours a day, and that life can feel better that way. 

One of the fascinating moments in the book involves making a wish on an Egyptian statue. Looking back now, do you believe that moment truly shifted your mindset, or was it the beginning of something you were already ready to embrace?

As a child of the 90’s, I’m a strict rule follower when it comes to wishes. You can’t wish for more wishes. You have to focus on your one wish. You can’t wish for someone to love you. When it came to the wish I was going to make, I felt I had no choice. As much as I didn’t like the breakup, I couldn’t magically wish my way out of it. My ex had to want me of his own volition, without the intervention of a centuries-old scarab statue. And if that never came to pass, well then at least the scarab could help me minimize the damage from that day. 

You've built a career inspiring others to travel. Has writing this memoir changed the advice you now give aspiring solo travelers?

I still say book the flight and figure out the rest later, maybe even more so now given the title of the book, All You Need is Flights! Sometimes the best thing you can do is give yourself space, perspective, and a break from overanalyzing. Travel helps you just be, and I don’t think we do that enough, especially women. 

If you could revisit one moment from this journey with the wisdom you have today, would you change anything—or was every detour necessary?

I would have released any hope of reconciling with my ex sooner. I knew it was over instinctively, but grief is weird and sometimes you have to go through the stages in a haphazard order until you come out of the other side and go, “what was I thinking?” 

What's one place you're still dreaming of visiting?

So many! I’d love to go to Vietnam and have a custom wardrobe made. I want to walk on clouds at the Uyuni Salt Flats in Bolivia during the rainy season, the world’s largest mirror. I want to do a cruise to Alaska and to see the Fjords of Norway. I don’t think I’ll ever be tired of seeing the world! Traveling there is another story…

For readers who want to travel alone but are hesitant, what's the biggest misconception about solo travel that you'd like to dispel?

A lot of people think solo travel is dangerous but the truth is, especially as women, we have heightened awareness, precautions we take, and street smarts that we exercise every day. If you can navigate through life solo generally, you’re already well equipped to take a solo trip. When you’re nervous before a big trip, a little research and connecting with a local female on the ground through Facebook groups or dedicated travel communities can go a long way towards putting you at ease.

After closing the final chapter of All You Need Is Flights, what do you hope readers remember long after they've unpacked the book?

I hope readers remember that the book title is a play on All You Need is Love, because while you can’t control what others feel towards you, you can always book a flight and choose yourself. 

Get a copy of her latest book, All You Need is Flights on Amazon, Audible or Bookshop.org.

JEN RUIZ, the author of 12 Trips in 12 Months, is a lawyer turned full-time travel writer and entrepreneur. She is a seven-time national award-winning travel journalist, three-time TEDx speaker, and has been featured by The Washington Post, New York Post, Forbes, and the Daily Mail. A travel guidebook writer for Fodor’s Travel and Lonely Planet, Jen is the solo female traveler behind Jen on a Jet Plane and has been to 50+ countries.

Forgiveness by Lena Fein

The journey to wholeness is priceless. It’s rarely instantaneous, and the path is often long and filled with obstacles. I was well into my adult years when I discovered that the key to unlock the door to wholeness is forgiveness.

I was raised in a madhouse, with my mother obsessively cleaning – polishing her porcelain dolls with vigor, vacuuming our house up and down the hallways, underneath the beds and furniture at least once a day and sometimes twice, dusting relentlessly taking care not to miss a speck. Our mother did all this cleaning while leaving her four young daughters alone to play. It’s no surprise that my sisters and I had frequent accidents. I still remember my visceral terror at age two-and-a-half when I was hurled toward a window by my four-year-old sister because I didn’t give her my wooden block. My nose was severed by the shattered glass and reattached in the emergency room. 

What hurt me more than the pain of a severed nose was my mother’s cruel words. In first grade, I felt despair when she told me dance lessons would be wasted on me because I was such a klutz. And that my singing was awful and out of tune. Worst of all, when I was in second grade, my mother discovered my diary hidden under my bed. In front of my father and three sisters she read my first entry out loud. She shamed me for my tender words about my crush on a boy in my class. I ran to my room, tears flooding my pillow as I cried in pain and shame. I didn’t realize it then, but that is when I created an armor around my heart, locking away my diary, my words, my true feelings.

I swallowed the key. 

I puffed myself up by being smart in school. Getting straight A’s. Not just achieving but over-achieving. Completing a master’s degree in engineering at a top college. Having a successful career. Two marriages. Two children. Checking items off my task list. Done. Done. Done. A+. More money in the bank.

Then, the day that changed everything. 

I had just turned 51 years-old, and my father called me with the news that my mother had been diagnosed with stage-4 lung cancer. She started chemo immediately. 

She didn’t make it through the second week. Mom was weak and intubated in the hospital. As I stood at her dying bedside, I lightly touched her hand. My mother opened her eyes and stared right at me, a smile on her cracked lips. Instead of their normal dark brown, her eyes glowed with light. Instead of running, I allowed myself to stare into her eyes. I felt my heart soften; years of hard shell started to crack and melt away.

Forgiveness gently seeped into my tender, yearning heart. 

My mother died the next day with my father and me and my sisters at her side.

Slowly, feelings that I had long buried started creeping in. I noticed blooming flowers as if for the first time. I caught myself enraptured by the grace of moving clouds. The brilliance of sunsets. Crying at movies. Smiling at strangers. Having deep conversations with close friends. Taking deeper breaths

It wasn’t all at once, but the armor around my heart was melting away.

Forgiveness. It was the key to my heart. I hadn’t realized I had swallowed that key as a young child. I had run ahead of my heart, not trusting love. Not trusting myself. Chasing success to compensate.

Suddenly, my thirty-plus years as an engineer at a successful technology company didn’t fill the deepest yearnings of my heart. I left my job and steady paycheck.

I started hosting events in my home that embraced the arts – writing, painting, dancing, singing.  I formed a non-profit that supported education and health projects for at-risk communities around the world.  

I practiced leading with my heart, instead of my head. Slowly I learned to connect authentically with others. With myself.  Staying In the moment with full presence. Learning to be a blessing in each moment, instead of a curse.

It was a relief to let go of all those math equations running in my head. Instead, with a courage I didn’t know I had, I put my story on the page, reclaiming my buried diary of so many years ago. 

I am so grateful I found the key to my heart. It’s never too late.

Forgiveness. Wholeness.

I am here.

About the Author

Lena Fein is an author, retired engineer, and philanthropist based in San Francisco. A graduate of Engineering at UC Berkeley, Lena spent decades as Vice President of Sales and Marketing at a successful high tech company. When Lena was fifty-one, her mother died which propelled Lena on a path of healing from childhood abuse and trauma. Her debut memoir, Shattering the Mirror, explores her transformative journey to wholeness. Lena believes it is never too late to reclaim your freedom and truth. Now in her late sixties, Lena can often be found taking long walks by the San Francisco Bay and hugging her grandchildren.