I wish I could tell you my new novel came to me out of the sky.
Oh, wait. It did.
But not in the way you’d imagine. There was no quiet reflection beneath the stars. No magical Maui sunrise. No words flying suddenly onto the screen while I read Madeleine L’Engle under a blanket, sipping my oat milk latte.
I got smacked in the face with a pickleball.
Not theoretically. Not metaphorically. Physically whacked with alarming velocity square between my wide eyes.
One second, I was standing at the kitchen line in my athletic dress, feeling relatively young and agile at thirty-eight. The next, a hole-dotted plastic ball was hurtling toward my visage at approximately the speed of a rocket launch.
I remember the sound first. Then the shock. Then the hot tears springing against my will. Then numbness. Then embarrassment.
Then the young guy across the court, hand over mouth, apologizing profusely while my own doubles partner—my husband—stood frozen precariously between deep concern and outright cackling.
And then, as dramatic as it sounds, I knew it. I had it.
Mine.
The inciting incident for my next novel and, suddenly, unequivocally, what that novel would be.
Because I’d been on the fence.
At the time, I was committed to a totally different novel idea featuring multiple Maui sunrises and significantly less facial trauma. But this other concept had been quietly niggling the back of my brain for months — something between It’s a Wonderful Life, 13 Going on 30, and my own growing reckoning with the milestone birthday beaming at me from just beyond.
I couldn’t have planned this if I tried. The pickleball to the face shoved the final puzzle piece into place. I started writing Twenty
Something Else the next day.
In that season, I was standing at a strange emotional crossroads that I think many women reach in their late thirties — perhaps especially millennials lately. Not a crisis exactly, but some kind of reckoning.
By every definition, my life was beautiful. So full and deeply loved. I’d been married nearly two decades to my college sweetheart. We had three daughters. A home and community we adored. A life built together over years of faith, ambition, friendship, carpool lines, sports schedules, sacrifice, church groups and Trader Joe’s runs.
And yet, approaching forty felt disorienting. Not because I feared aging itself, necessarily, but because midlife seemed like a word I could not accept. Halfway done?
It’s not possible.
What if it was?
But if this really was midlife — and I couldn’t laugh it off anymore — what did that mean about all the choices I’d made? Were they the right ones? Were any wrong? Did I have enough fun before becoming a woman obsessed with her facial serums and protein count? I was introducing my daughters to Gilmore Girls, attending the Backstreet Boys reunion tour at the Sphere with glitter on my cheeks and both hands in the air, and shopping for Mahjong tiles with the fervor of my young self once devouring the Delia’s catalog.
Uh-oh.
I think I’m old.
I felt this emotional duality suddenly in being an almost-forty millennial woman. So young at heart. But so not the youngest girl in the room anymore.
Nostalgia started to overwhelm me. I felt immense gratitude and longing for the very life I had built — while simultaneously feeling curious about all the lives I hadn’t. The roads not taken. The versions of myself that might have existed under different circumstances.
As the story kept cooking — this time, yes, flying out of my fingers — pickleball itself became part of the symbolism. There I was: nearly forty, playing the trendiest sport imaginable, trying to stay young and fun and healthy and vibrant and relevant while quietly wondering where all my years had gone.
Then—
Bam.
Straight to the face.
Sometimes you need it that way.
What I’ve always loved so much about George Bailey in It’s a Wonderful Life is the idea that one seemingly ordinary life could alter countless others forever. The impact of tiny decisions. Quiet sacrifices. Small kindnesses. The invisible ripple effect of simply existing. I’ve always been fascinated by that concept — the flapping butterfly wings of our lives.
And now my brain wouldn’t stop spinning.
What if my character got knocked out and woke up to her own sort of angel?
What if one freak moment interrupted her carefully constructed life long enough to force her to reevaluate everything? What if a woman could revisit different versions of herself—and discover who she was underneath all of them?
Those questions became Twenty Something Else.
In the novel, my almost-forty-year-old protagonist Sutton gets hit in the face with a pickleball and begins reliving her twenties out of order. It’s funny and nostalgic and romantic in many ways, but underneath the sparkling magical-realism premise is something much more personal to me.
Questions of identity. Womanhood. Time.
Who were we before life shaped us? Who did we become because of our choices? What indelible parts of us would survive every version?
I think many women carry these questions quietly. The careers we almost pursued. The cities we almost moved to. The relationships we almost chose. The versions of ourselves we so easily could have become.
Writing this book changed my character, Sutton, but it also changed me.
The finished manuscript caught the attention of my dream literary agent and later the favor of an editor at a major publishing house, who offered a four-book deal. That absurd Tuesday-night pickleball mishap ultimately launched not just a novel, but an entirely new trajectory for my life and career.
At almost forty, everything changed. All because of that wayward pickleball, literally out of the sky. But isn’t that how wake-up calls work? Surprise. Disruption.
Minor recreational sports injuries.
I might recommend less aggressive modes of self-discovery.
But I wouldn’t choose something else.
