Julian, Claire—And Me

I know a note like this is unusual. I’m not offering a confession or an excuse. This is simply the clearest way I can show you where the book came from, because the novel and the mind behind it aren’t separate.

I grew up between identities. My father was Jewish, my mother Protestant, and our house never gave me one story to stand in. At the same time, the world kept trying to tell me what I was. When I was ten, my mother’s father screamed “Jew, Jew, Jew” in a manic rage while we slept in his basement. I didn’t understand the meaning, but I understood the wound. I understood what it meant to be marked by something you didn’t choose. That fracture has shaped how I see everything.

I never had a doctrine to fall back on. No synagogue. No church. No one saying this is who you are. What I had were the questions that rise when nothing holds you.

When I was twelve, I was writing poems to Jesus — not out of devotion, but trying to understand why he had been elevated into a god, why a human voice had been turned into a story that ruled over people’s lives. I didn’t believe what I was told. I didn’t believe in anything except what I could see and feel for myself. That way of looking at the world wasn’t chosen. It’s simply the grain of my mind.

I realized something recently after dozens of revisions in bringing this novel to life. In a sense, I embodied Claire and Julian before I knew who they were. As a child, like Claire, the mythology of an origin story seduced me like everyone else; but like Julian, I interrogated my own seduction from the beginning.

FERADIM grew from my own bifurcated way of seeing the world. In Julian, the part of me that sees the machinery beneath the stories. And in Claire, the part of me that steps beyond it, toward a world that might still be possible, built from the ruins Julian sees so clearly. They aren’t opposites. They’re two currents that have endured throughout my life and my work.

My personal fracture—between what is and what could be—is what ultimately shapes this novel. Julian and Claire aren’t masks. I carried the split they navigate. Claire’s hope comes from refusing to let the wound decide the future of her child, indeed the future of us all. That is where she and Julian, ultimately, take separate paths.

I’m only sharing this because the book didn’t come out of a trend or a theory. It came out of a life shaped by fracture, by questions that never left me, and by a refusal to accept easy explanations that serve someone else’s agenda.

The work demanded more honesty from me than anything I’ve written. Julian is the part of me that can’t let go of the demand for justice. Claire is the part that refuses to give up on hope. Writing the novel meant letting both sides speak, without softening either one. It asked me to follow those questions to their full consequence.

To understand the book is to understand who wrote it. I am inseparable from my characters — Julian the one who doubts; and Claire the one who hopes. We wrote this novel together, a kind of trinity, in the garden where the gravestones grow.

I’m sending this last because you now have everything I can give you about the book — its intent, its architecture, its consequences, and the life that formed it. The rest is the work itself.

Now my attention shifts to the next novel, The Narcissism of the Sacred. FERADIM interrogated our long cultural habit of covering over what we can’t face; the new book lives inside the fractures of modern life that never seem to resolve. It begins when a professor of literature travels to South America for a conference and stumbles onto a buried manuscript — the writings of a reclusive carpenter-philosopher in California whose work was ignored, suppressed, or simply misunderstood. What starts as curiosity forces her to confront the lies that shaped her own life as a daughter of wealth and privilege, and to see that her own inheritance helped bury the philosopher’s work because it was too true, and too dangerous, for the world that produced her.

If FERADIM traced how the wound formed, this book lives in the world that wound left behind — a contemporary story about why our lives feel cracked through, and what it might take to stop lying to ourselves about who we are.