Again

I think many of us have had the experience of looking back at a relationship, friendship, or period in our lives and realising there were things we knew long before we admitted them to ourselves. Feelings we rationalized, dynamics we explained away and versions of ourselves we abandoned in order to maintain connection, hope, or because we held onto a belief that things might eventually become what we wanted or needed them to be.

What has always interested me, is the contradictions within all of that. The reality that self-awareness doesn’t necessarily prevent repetition of choice and patterns. People can be emotionally intelligent, perceptive and fully aware of their patterns, and still find themselves returning to dynamics that hurt them. And not because people are irrational, but because human behaviour is rarely “clean”.

We’re often driven by attachment, memory, longing, identity, fear, desire, history, projection and hope, often all at once. And relationships, perhaps more than anything else, expose those contradictions within us.

Those questions sit at the centre of my novel, Again.

At its core, it’s a psychologically intimate novel about love, self-deception, identity and the uneasy recognition of the roles we play in our own lives. It follows Tess Harding as she travels through South America following the breakdown of a relationship, only to find that distance does not necessarily free us from ourselves.

More than anything, I wanted to explore the complexity of human behaviour honestly. The tension between what we know, what we want, and the choices we continue to make despite ourselves.

Today, I’m very proud to finally share that Again is out in the world.

Again is now available digitally via Orphaleia Press.

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