I write because people rarely make sense in simple ways.
We love people who disappoint us. We stay angry long after we understand why something happened. We inherit stories about our families and sometimes spend decades discovering that the story was incomplete. We lose people and animals we love and keep carrying them anyway. We build new families beside the ones we came from.
Those contradictions are where I tend to look for stories.
I live in Montana with my husband, Matt, in a place where mountains fill the horizon and wild horses wander through our neighborhood. My life is full of family, dogs, horses, books, technology, unfinished ideas, and questions I haven't answered yet.
THE COMPLICATED WAYS WE LOVE
I learned early that love and hurt can occupy the same space.
The stories we carry about our families can change as we get older. Distance, time, and new conversations can complicate what once felt certain, allowing us to see people differently without pretending the past did not happen.
I’m interested in that tension: the possibility that our younger selves were telling the truth as we understood it, while later experience can reveal truths we could not yet see. Sometimes understanding changes the story. Sometimes it simply allows more than one thing to be true.
That realization has made me increasingly interested in the stories families tell about themselves, the roles people are assigned, and how differently two people can remember the same home.
That tension sits underneath much of my fiction.
THE FAMILY WE BUILD
Adulthood has also taught me that family is not only something we inherit.
It is something we build.
My marriage to Matt, my children, and now my grandchildren have changed the way I understand love, responsibility, belonging, and time.
Becoming a parent changes the story you tell yourself about the generation before you. Becoming a grandparent changes it again.
There are things we carry forward deliberately. There are things we try very hard not to. And there are patterns we repeat despite understanding them perfectly well.
That fascinates me.
It is one of the questions underneath The Women They Made: what keeps getting passed down even when everyone involved is trying to do better?
I don't think any of us gets through family life without both giving and receiving wounds. What interests me is what we do with them.
ABOUT CAROLINE
THE ANIMALS WE KEEP LOVING
Animals have always been part of the emotional landscape of my life.
The dogs who live with us now, Mando and Obi-Wan, have wildly different personalities and approaches to the world. The dogs who came before them, Bruno, Cricket, Vader, and Biscuit, still belong to particular eras of my life in a way that is difficult to explain to anyone who has never deeply loved an animal.
You remember them.
Their habits. Their expressions. The ridiculous things they did. The places they slept. The sound they made when they wanted something.
And losing them hurts.
That love of animals is part of why Mondo & Ollie belongs naturally beside my adult fiction. The tone is completely different. The curiosity underneath it isn't.
WHY STORIES
Before writing became the center of my creative life, I spent years teaching, leading schools and districts, and helping organizations navigate learning and change.
That work gave me countless opportunities to watch people trying to do the right thing and producing outcomes they never intended.
It reinforced something I already suspected:
People are complicated. So are families, institutions, motives, and the consequences of what we do.
That is why my stories can move from a multigenerational family living in the aftermath of a violent crime, to people inside a school system, to the secrets people keep, and to two dogs making questionable decisions.
I am interested in what people believe.
What they remember.
What they hide.
What they forgive.
What they cannot forgive.
What they inherit.
What they choose.
And what happens after the choice has been made.
The genres may change.
The question underneath them remains remarkably consistent:
Why do we do what we do?
I don't expect to run out of ways to explore it.
Explore the stories →
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