A Shift in Perspective: An Exclusive Guest Post from Miranda Cowley Heller, Author of The Paper Palace — Our July Book Club Pick

This past year has been filled with making hard, weighty life decisions. Why are we drawn to these stories — not just now, but always?
The pandemic crashed into our lives like a comet hitting earth and for many I think it’s caused a shift in perspective. For lots of us, spending much more time alone or with our families, away from the fray, has meant a time of deep reflection and caused us to re-examine things we once took for granted. Without a clear picture of what our future will look like, maybe we are able to ask more questions about the present. Am I in the place that I want to be, doing what I love? I personally know a lot of people who have spent the last 12-18 months grappling with these questions for the first time in a long while.
It’s this kind of re-evaluation that the protagonist of my novel, The Paper Palace, is struggling with over the course of her story. Does she want to keep everything exactly as it has been, or allow herself the possibility of radical change? The choice that Elle has to make between Jonas, the man she has loved since childhood, and Peter, her wonderful deeply beloved husband, is not simply a choice between two men, it is a choice between two completely different but equally powerful loves – and lives. She is choosing between one kind of happiness and another kind of happiness. And her choice distills to the questions we have all been struggling with, I think: who do we want to be, who do we want to have been, what parts of ourselves do we want to be true to in the end?  And can we truly accept the paths we don’t take, the lives unlived?  There is no bad choice here for Elle, which also means there is no good choice. But that just makes things more complicated.  How do you weigh your own needs against those of the others around you? If you could untether yourself from the tug-of-war between desire and dignity, from your moral compass, what choice would you make then? Would you blow up your life and take another path? I think we’re all ultimately like Elle, trying to be true to ourselves, trying to have the courage to change. Of course, there’s a beauty and freedom in grappling with these questions in fiction rather than in our own personal lives, but as couples emerge from quarantine and businesses decide whether they will ever return full-time to the office, it does seem to be the season of re-examination and mind-changing.