Three areas of interest converge in my work: the function of memory, the particular experiences of women, and Buddhist perspectives on suffering and freedom. Both my first novel and my current one, The Savage Path, invite readers to contemplate issues of sexual freedom and exploitation and societal attitudes toward women’s bodies. They traverse the landscape of repressed memories and the psychological effects of trauma. Ultimately, both novels are interested in what it means to be truly empowered as opposed to superficially reactive to forces of oppression. More deeply, my novels’ questions are Buddhist ones: What is clinging, and what does it mean to let go? What does freedom look like? How do we forgive? My recent essays have also centered on these Buddhist-inspired, universal questions.

The Savage Path is a fabulist novel heavily influenced by Dante Alighieri’s Commedia. In it, a college-aged woman suspects that she has blocked memories from childhood of her father’s molestation. When he dies, she follows him through the underworld to recover her lost memories. The novel adopts a fragmentary style consistent with the workings of memory and reminiscent of Dante’s canto structure. Like the Commedia, it’s broken into three parts: an initial section in the real world and two subsequent ones set in reimagined visions of hell and purgatory. The novel plays with Dante’s ancient Christian poem by exploring Buddhist views of the hell realms and of the suffering to which we bind ourselves on earth.

My approach to any topic is exploratory and contemplative, not didactic or dogmatic. For instance, the father-molester in The Savage Path is a deeply flawed but fully three-dimensional human being. Women are both victims of violence and agents of (their own and others’) change. I hope readers come away from my work less sure of their views and more open to subtlety, complexity, and empathy.

(Photo by Mollye Miller)