I’ve been thinking about how people will receive Eve.  An artist always contemplates these things, I guess, before their art’s actual debut.  [In my case, it’s not until January.]

Certainly, not everyone will like the novel, and that’s to be expected.  If you read yesterday’s post, you’ll remember how I explained that everyone has different reading tastes, which accounts for the seven years I spent trying to get published.

I did not intend Eve to be a “religious” book.  I never wrote it for the “religious” market (in fact, a major Christian publication has just rejected excerpting Eve because it’s “revisionist literature”).  It will be categorized as many things, I suppose.  Jewish literature.  Christian fiction.  Mainstream women’s fiction.  But whatever it’s labeled as, I know how I wrote Eve, and I know the journey I had to take with her, in order to write her story and her family’s story.  It was a journey of doubt, amazement, and hardship.  It was a journey of love, hate, and jealousy.  It was a story of a family struggling to live.  It was a story of women trying to find their place in the scheme of things.

One thing I could always count on while writing the novel was that human beings are the same anywhere; their core emotions and longings are all simmering just beneath the surface.  They only appear differently when put in a tangible state on paper.

I write to know that I’m not alone.  I write to make sense of things.  Especially those things I’ve been told since I was a child.  I’m sure you’ve felt the same at times.  Why do I believe this?

Referring back to my post called The God Question, I must say that all those things told to you by your parents or others need to be analyzed and reviewed, so that you can make up your own mind.  We all have lived vastly disparate lives, so to evaluate and contemplate is a good thing.  It may lead us in different directions, but then it’s our path, no one else’s.  I like how C.S. Lewis explained it in Mere Christianity.  [I’ve often gone back to skim the book to see where this particular explanation is, and I’ve failed every time.  If anyone knows, add a comment at the bottom of this post.]  He says if we can imagine a long hallway with rooms off the corridor, with people mingling in the various rooms, we might understand, a little, what it means to be in a different place than another.  We’re in the same corridor but at different stations in life.

I like that vision.  There’s a charity about it–a freedom to breathe and a space to move about in.

So, I guess what I’m trying to say is that I’m honoring your unique journey to God or away from God.  As Eve found out, and I’m continually learning, you can’t tell another person what to believe.  It’s a very personal thing between you and God, or if you don’t believe in God, you alone.

[Post image: Eve by Auguste Rodin, Rodin Museum, Paris]