Second acts was what inspired Jen Michalski to write "All This Can Be True."
What was your inspiration behind your most recent book?
Second acts. I celebrated my 50th birthday a few years ago (around when I started writing this novel). Your 50s are a time when whatever you thought would happen in your life either happened or it didn’t. There’s definitely some reflection on the choices one made that have gotten one to this point, and I think a lot of people, particularly empty nesters, grapple with staying the course, with its known devils and safe returns in their life, or gambling for a new start, possibly living one’s true passions, finding happiness. When I graduated from college in the mid-90s, gay relationships are only just sprouting up among mainstream culture, if at all, and marriage quality was still 20 years away (!), so I think a lot of women of my generation still felt pressured into traditional paths. Now, I see more women who are divorced from opposite-sex partners but are co-parenting with same-sex partners. I think there are a lot more women like Lacie than we think. Whether they decide to explore this part of themselves now that societal and familial restraints are less constricting is another question. So, it definitely seemed worth exploring to me.
What does Reading Rainbow mean to you?
Reading Rainbow to me means being open to reading about the experiences of others, even if they’re different than your own, even if you don’t agree with them. Human beings are complex, imperfect creatures, but we run the spectrum of human experience, and I don’t believe we spend our time wisely here on earth by only interacting with, or learning about, red or blue or yellow. How would we discover purple if we didn’t experience both blue and red? In a time when books are being banned for their diversity or lack of heteronormative conformity, Reading Rainbow to me means championing books that are willing to take risks, that show relationships and discuss ideas that people are activity trying to suppress. It means requesting them at my library, ordering them at my bookstore, leaving reviews on social media, and keeping them visible any way I can as regular publishing channels begin to self-censor.
Why do you feel representation of a variety of people is so important when it comes to writing books?
This is a great question that’s a logical extension of the previous one — experiencing other people’s perspectives, putting yourself in someone else’s shoes, is integral to the development of empathy. We can’t fully actualize ourselves if we only know our own experiences. One of the easiest ways to experience others’ perspectives is to place yourself in their head, hear their thoughts, and writing a book one of the most effective ways in which to do that. It’s also important that everyone is able to see themselves in society, whether it be in books, in movies, on the radio, in sports, on podcasts, in universities, and in government. As someone who grew up in the early '80s and rarely, if ever, saw herself reflected in YA and mass market fiction, it’s an isolating experience to think you’re an anomaly.
Tell us a little more about the book and why you decided to write it.
I kept seeing this image, of a woman being woken up by her phone, and when she answers it, it’s the hospital telling her that her husband has awoken from his coma. But when you pan out a little bit, in the scene, there’s another woman lying in bed next to the woman on the phone. I worked backward from that image, wondering what had happened that found these women entangled in such a messy and delicate situation. I also began work on this novel during the pandemic, so the husband’s coma originally was a mysterious viral illness that was changed during subsequent revisions (and we moved further out of the COVID-19 pandemic). All this is to stay is that I’m interested in difficult situations — how we manage to get ourselves into them, and how we get ourselves out. Humans are messy people who mostly want to do no harm, but we can never seem to avoid it — to ourselves or other people. And sometimes our best intentions wind up creating the greatest literary tension.
What can fans expect from your book?
Although there are second chances, second chances by definition grow out of dissatisfaction or failure, so there’s a lot of grief in these characters, people picking up pieces of lives that didn’t turn out quite the way they’d been expecting. But there’s still time. Even though there’s sadness here, there’s also hope. People have told me that the book ends in a way they weren’t expecting, but I always remind them that we’re leaving the characters at this particular place in their lives and relationships, but it’s just the end of the novel, not the end of their story. As long as you’re alive, there’s still time for second acts.
What's up next for you in the bookish world?
I’m working on a novel in which a family visits a 3-day music festival in the California desert (but not Coachella). Secrets are revealed, relationships are strained, a surprise weather event tests everyone’s resolve.
Buy the book on Amazon.
