Why I Wrote Carmen
There are some stories you write for escape, and there are others you write because they won’t leave you alone until you tell the truth.
Carmen was that kind of story for me.
She is not a soft woman. She is not easy. She is not the kind of heroine who behaves in ways that make everything simple for the reader. She is messy, sensual, selfish, loving, wounded, jealous, longing, and deeply human. She makes devastating choices. She hurts people. She loves people. She comes back too late for some things and just in time for others.
And still, I wanted to tell her story.
Not to clean her up. Not to excuse her, and definitely not to redeem her into somebody more comfortable. But just to see her fully.
Before Carmen became the wound in everybody else’s story, she was a woman with beauty, hunger, survival instincts, and dreams of being loved right. Then life got hold of her. And sometimes that is where the most painful stories begin, not in evil, but in longing. In damage. In the ways people learn to survive before they ever learn how to be loved.
What interested me most about Carmen was not only what she did. It was why. The emotional architecture behind her choices. The ache underneath her jealousy. The woman beneath the betrayal. I wanted to write a story that sat with those truths long enough to let them become real.
Carmen unfolds slowly. Quietly. Painfully. It builds in layers because that is how Carmen’s life reveals itself. Not in one great explosion, but in a series of wounds, wants, delusions, and consequences that gather weight over time. That was important to me. I wanted readers to sit with her, not just judge her from a distance.
I also wanted to tell the truth about a certain kind of womanhood. The kind that is often misunderstood. A woman who has been hurt and harmful. A woman who knows how to be desired, but not always cherished. A woman who becomes both the wound and the weapon. A mother who loved her children, but not cleanly enough to spare them. A woman who made choices she could not undo, and still found her way back to the truth.
That is Carmen.
If you read this book, I hope you let yourself be patient with her. And with me. I’m telling the hell out of her story, and I wanted to do it in a way that honored her humanity without pretending her choices did not cost people dearly.
Carmen is available now, and if you decide to step into her world, I hope you listen closely.
She has something to say.
