Why I Write Women Who Refuse the Lives Chosen for Them

There is a particular kind of woman who interests me as a writer: the woman who has done everything expected of her and discovers, perhaps rather late, that obedience has not made her happy. She may have a respectable marriage, a comfortable home, children she loves, a career she fought hard to build. From the outside, there may be very little wrong with her life. That is precisely what makes her predicament interesting. Leaving an obviously terrible life is one thing. Leaving a life everyone else considers good is quite another.
The question at the center of many of my stories is not simply whether a woman is free. It is whether she is permitted to decide what freedom means for herself.
We are remarkably comfortable with female sacrifice when it is dressed in respectable language. Duty. Loyalty. Marriage. Motherhood. Gratitude. Compromise. These things can be beautiful when freely chosen. They become something else when they are treated as debts a woman must continue paying regardless of what they cost her.
That distinction fascinates me.
I am less interested in heroines who know exactly what they want from the first page than in women who have spent years becoming what other people required. There is something psychologically compelling about the moment such a woman begins to recognize the distance between the person she has become and the person she might have been. Recognition, however, does not make the choice easy.
There are husbands who will be hurt. Children who may not understand. Parents who will judge. Friends who will take sides. There are reputations, finances, memories and promises. There is also the terrible possibility that, having destroyed the life she possessed, she may discover that the life she imagined does not exist.
That is where psychological drama becomes most interesting to me: not in certainty, but in consequence.
I do not want my characters’ decisions to be painless merely because I understand why they make them. Nor do I want the people standing in their way to become convenient villains. Love can imprison without intending to. A decent person can ask too much of another. Two people can love one another and still require incompatible lives. Sometimes there is no choice that leaves everyone unharmed. Those are the stories I want to tell.
Not stories about perfect women making perfect decisions, but about women forced to decide what they are willing to lose in order to possess their own lives.

Clara van Houten

When Recovery Does Not Erase the Past

Although the events and characters in Everything He Never Told Me are fictional, the story was born from events experienced by someone very close to me. What I witnessed stayed with me, and in time became the reason I felt compelled to write this book.
There is something I have come to believe through that experience: bipolar disorder does not prevent a person from living an ordinary, fulfilled and meaningful life. With understanding, appropriate treatment and the right support, a person can begin again.
But beginning again does not mean that the past begins again with them.
Before diagnosis, before a person understands what is happening within them, there may be years in which illness governs choices and actions without being recognised for what it is. The consequences of those actions can be devastating. Trust can be broken. People can be wounded. Families can be torn apart. Words cannot be taken back, nor can acts be undone simply because, years later, there is an explanation for them. And this is where I believe one of the cruelest difficulties begins.
The person who has finally received help may understand themselves differently. They may recognise the harm they caused and desperately wish they could undo it. They may take their medication, follow their treatment, rebuild their life, and become the person they had always hoped to be.
Yet the people they hurt may not be ready to forget. They may not be ready to forgive. They have their own wounds, and their own right to protect themselves from being hurt again.
The person who has changed must then live with something equally painful: the knowledge that becoming well does not necessarily restore what was lost.
Regret and remorse can become their own burden. A person may spend years looking backwards, measuring the life they have against the lives they might have had if someone had recognised their illness sooner, if they had received help earlier, if they had not done the things they cannot undo. Even with treatment, that burden remains.
And when a person begins to believe that they are nothing more than the worst things they did while they were unwell, recovery itself can become terribly difficult. Sometimes impossible. This is not an argument that illness excuses cruelty or erases responsibility. Nor is it an argument that those who have been hurt should be expected to forgive. It is an attempt to look at what happens in the space between those two truths.
Too often, people who most need compassion are reduced to their illness, their worst period, or their worst mistake. Once society has decided what a person is, it can become very difficult for that person to be seen as anything else. The diagnosis becomes the identity. The past becomes the whole story. The real person disappears behind it. That is what I wanted to explore in this novel.
I wanted to write about the distance between illness and identity, between responsibility and condemnation, and between asking for forgiveness and being granted it. Most of all, I wanted to write about what happens to people who desperately need help when the world has already decided that they are beyond understanding.
If Everything He Never Told Me does anything, I hope it encourages a little more understanding of that difficult space. Not forgiveness where forgiveness cannot be given, and not absolution where responsibility remains, but the recognition that a human being can be more complicated than the worst thing they have done.
And that needing help should never mean losing one’s humanity.

Clara van Houten