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.