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