At 78, Stanley Siegel lives with the scar that bisects his chest, the mark of open-heart surgery that left him frail, weak, and uncertain whether his body would allow him to return.
Recovery meant relearning the smallest gestures of life: sitting upright without fainting, crossing the room without collapsing, bathing without help.
“Tasks that once required no thought became rituals of return,” Siegel said.
But in that precarious season, he did what he had always done. He wrote.
“I wrote to anchor myself,” he explained. “To feel less helpless. To create coherence in a world that no longer made sense.”
The act of writing was more than medicine. It was resistance. For Siegel, the election of Donald Trump in 2016 was not just a political defeat but a moral rupture, the unraveling of a country he had marched for, believed in, and fought to change.
A lifelong liberal activist who had joined civil rights marches, spoken out against wars, and built a reputation for pushing boundaries in psychotherapy, Siegel understood the damage of silence.
The book that emerged, “Love and Mayhem,” did not begin with a plan or even a plot. “There was no outline, no thesis,” Siegel said. “I began with only this sense — that love needed a voice, that resistance could take the shape of tenderness.”
The novel centers on Marco and Jake, two men drawn together in a world coming apart. Marco, an Italian milliner burdened by the legacy of a family that survived the Holocaust. Jake, a disillusioned American model carrying the deep wounds of childhood trauma.
Together, they discover not only intimacy but also insurgency.
“They mend what history fractured, not just within themselves but in the broken world around them,” Siegel said. “They become not just lovers, but co-conspirators in resistance. Their bond is a radical act of defiance in a regime that seeks to erase them.”
The cover of “Love and Mayhem” reflects that vision: a young couple, beautiful but fragile, embodying the refusal to disappear.
The novel is Siegel’s fifth book and his second work of fiction. His career as a writer has long reflected his ability to combine intellect with defiance.
In 2011, he published “Your Brain on Sex,” a provocative exploration of sexuality that challenged conventional thinking. Earlier, as Director of Education at the Ackerman Institute for Family Therapy in New York, he helped shape a generation of clinicians, known for his innovative methods and refusal to follow tradition.
But now, the urgency is different. The body has its limits. So does democracy. “Democracy, like my body, had been dealt a serious blow,” Siegel said.
In the novel, Trump and his MAGA movement appear, but they are not the story. The real narrative is the counterweight: friends, family, lovers who refuse to surrender their connections in the face of hostility and fear. They create intimacy not because it is safe or easy, but because it is essential.
“They choose love over fear,” Siegel said. “Not blindly. Not naively. But deliberately. As a strategy. As survival.”
“Love and Mayhem” is available on Amazon ($7.99 Kindle, $16.99 Hardcover).
