Why I Came Back to Fiction at Midlife
How the stories I loved as a girl came back to guide me.
When I was a kid, I read under the bushes in our front yard like it was a holy place.
Usually Boxcar Children—but really, anything with a secret world. Anything where a girl had to figure things out on her own. My mother says I taught myself to read at three, but what I remember most is the feeling of getting lost. A flashlight under the covers. A book balanced on my knees. The soft hush of a house that thought I was asleep.
That was the first kind of freedom I knew: the kind you find in fiction.
For most of my adult life, I didn’t write fiction. I wrote press releases and speeches and web copy. I wrote policy language and keynotes. Later, I wrote essays, newsletters, and finally, a book. All of it was meaningful. Some of it changed lives. But I never forgot the girl under the bushes.
I just didn’t think she had anything important to say.
Until this year—at 49—when something shifted.
I had just published my nonfiction book, Mission, Tribe & Grace. I’d poured years of thinking and lived experience into it. And after it launched, I found myself in an unexpected place: not relieved or content, but… restless. Spinning. I kept asking myself, “What now?”
And the only answer that came was: go back to where you started.
For me, that meant fiction.
Not just because I’d been dabbling in a novel for the past 20 years (I had). Not just because I wanted to check “write a novel” off some creative bucket list (I didn’t). But because I missed the freedom of it. I missed the curiosity. The play. The characters who surprised me. The sentences that made me feel more like myself.
There’s a quote I keep in my bathroom, given to me by my friend and former business partner, Carol:
“Life is not about finding yourself; it’s about creating yourself.”
I think fiction is how I do that.
It’s also how I come to terms with what I still don’t understand—about identity, about loss, about becoming. My characters are often a little broken, a little wild. Women who disappear into the woods, into silence, into a version of themselves no one else can quite name. And when they return, they’re changed. Not prettier. Not shinier. Just… truer.
This is the kind of story I want to write now. Not because it’s marketable. But because it’s mine.
Maybe that’s the gift of midlife. You stop asking what the world needs you to say. And you start asking what’s been waiting to be said all along.
So here I am. Writing the novel I started twenty years ago. Listening for the voice beneath the voice. Following it into the trees.
Not to be found.
But to be made.