Elizabeth Gould On Finding Our Mythical Selves in Modern Times

by ELIZABETH GOULD

Ever since I was a young girl, I’ve been captivated by the power of a good story. Once I learned to read, I happily immersed myself in fairytales, myths, and legends from around the world. As a devoted journal keeper who filled notebooks with poems, dreams, and fanciful musings, I discovered that writing was a magical act that used the ingredients of daily life to create a new world where wonder and beauty could coexist alongside trouble and heartbreak.

Throughout my school years, I was fascinated by the ancient cultures of Egypt, Greece, and Rome. Drawn to stories that featured goddesses and female divinities, I went on to study Art History at university, fusing my love for myth and history with visual storytelling.

In my twenties, I had the good fortune of spending a year traveling through Asia and the Indian subcontinent, immersing myself in the spiritual traditions of these lands. During my travels, I read Women Who Run With Wolves by Dr. Clarissa Pinkola Estes, Goddesses in Everywoman by Dr. Jean Shinoda Bolen, and She by Dr. Robert A. Johnson. These books set me on a path of exploring how feminine archetypes can provide a portal to access more profound levels of self-knowledge.

We all hold masculine and feminine energies within us. But our modern society, with its emphasis on power, control, and speed, is completely out of balance. I’ve often wondered what the world would look like if we called forth values and traits traditionally associated with the feminine - such as empathy, inclusion, and nurturance. How can I, as a modern woman living in a fast-paced world, resource myself from my inner knowing and from the dynamic rhythms of the natural world?

I thought a lot about this question as I wrote The Well of Truth , which was a creative project I set for myself while I was busy raising my family. Over several years, I slowly crafted these stories, embroidering on themes that were close to my heart. The book was completed during the pandemic, at a time when many of us have re-evaluated what it means to live an authentic, meaningful life.

The magical realism tales in The Well of Truth follow a female heroine named Grace through powerful moments in her adult life: getting married and divorced, raising children, going through menopause, losing loved ones, and ultimately making an independent life for herself. Through the trials and tribulations she faces, Grace receives guidance and mentoring from a diverse array of mythic figures. The Hindu goddess Kali, Yoruba orisha Yemanja, Egyptian priestess Nephthys, Tibetan deity Green Tara, and even the Celtic Green Man make cameo appearances in the stories. Although there’s a fantastical element to the mystical interactions, the stories are ultimately grounded in the exploration of a woman figuring out who she is and what she wants throughout her life.

Something special happens when transformational stories are shared. A space for healing is created which lifts us out of our mundane experiences and reminds us that we are not alone. My deepest hope is that the reflective waters of The Well of Truth will provide readers with a shimmering glimpse into a world of imaginative possibility in addition to offering refreshment for people of all ages, backgrounds, and creeds. More than ever, we need stories to help us remember our mythic selves so that we can meaningfully meet the challenges of our times.

ELIZABETH GOULD has long been fascinated with feminine archetypes, mythology, and rites of passage. She has taught and mentored girls at puberty and is the former director of a non-profit dedicated to positive menstrual/menopausal education and awareness. She holds a BA in Art History from Stanford University and an MS in Education from the State University of New York.

The themes in The Well of Truth grew organically out of her two decades of experience as a mother, teacher, and menstrual advocate. The stories incorporate her love of art, travel, mythology, goddess traditions, trees, storytelling, and the moon. The Well of Truth is her first book. For more information, please visit

On The Novel Spectrum

by Mark Zvonkovic

I think of novels on a spectrum, one end of which is Pop Entertainment and the other end being Art. The categories are not intended as criticism. They are only meant to help me choose what kind of book I want to read. And that will generally reflect how I’m feeling: pensive, distracted, studious, energetic, ­you get the picture. And, of course, an important consideration will be whether I am going to read or listen to the book.

Character development is what really interests me in a novel. Some readers may not find characters as engaging as fast and exciting plots, where the background of a protagonist is not as interesting as the action taking place. These novels would include thrillers and romance, generally, although there are plenty of genre blended novels with very well developed characters. Readers who want to make deep personal connections with a story often enjoy novels with mixed genres and complex characters. In E.M. Forester’s words, one must “only connect” to find meaning in relationships, and how wonderful can it be for a reader to make a strong connection with a protagonist. In my writing I work hard to put myself into the heart and soul of the characters and then create a plot around them to make an observation about life.

In my third novel, Belinda, I took a lot of time putting myself in the place of the protagonist Lyn Larkin. Of course, this was particularly difficult for me for no other reason than that Lyn was a woman and I a man. But I had the advantage of working for almost forty years in a law firm, where a lot of the novel’s action occurs, and I was very lucky to have mentored a number of young women associates during those years. It made a tremendous impression on me that these women in a professional setting always had to overcome the fact that the prevailing ethos around them was so male slanted. It wasn’t the blatant misogynistic attitudes, like the ones displayed so prominently in my novel by the antagonist, Patrick Brashner. The more difficult obstacles grew out of subtle attitudes and proclivities of many men, which often made the women feel as if their bodies were being evaluated as much as their brains, if not more. And for me this is what Belinda is about, how dedicated this woman was to her profession and how elegantly she managed to make herself a success despite the male ethos she encountered daily.

My novel Belinda is written from several points of view, all but Lyn’s being those of men. I know that a good writer shows, doesn’t dictate. It was hard for me to learn this after so many years of drafting contracts, but I’m making progress. It was the men’s points of view that I used to display the male ethos in Belinda, particularly the subtle attitudes that some of the men were barely conscious of. It was the character Will Baines, a decent young partner in fact, who displayed how a man’s actions and thoughts can create an uncomfortable environment for women. Through Will’s thoughts the reader sees how his unmanageable, even adolescent, observations about two women colored his attitude toward them. Of course, sexuality can have tremendous power in social settings, particularly those arising in a professional context, where it is combined with competition and ambition. And, as Lyn demonstrated in several of her actions, the repercussions are not all on the male side.

For me, women characters are some of the most enjoyable people in fiction. And some writers are very adept at creating them. One such writer is Erika Robuck, who writes about women in historical settings. She is brilliant at casting an engaging picture of a historical event by creating deep, complex women, as she did in Sisters of Night and Fog, her most recent novel. Would that she’d been my creative writing teacher before I started writing. My novel A Lion In The Grass is a historical novel that includes World War II events and I know how much work it takes to make a character fit into an earlier time and place.

Readers often ask me, What next? I don’t have a ready answer. I’m a recovering lawyer and I have no intention of ever again filling out a time sheet. Whatever the next story, it will of course focus around a complex protagonist. One of my favorite characters is Larry Brown in my novel The Narrows. In that story Larry is a young man who deals with difficult personal circumstances in the early 1970s. A lot has happened in the world since those years. Perhaps it would be interesting to see how Larry has made his way to the present day.

Mark Zvonkovic is a writer who lives in Rosarito Beach, Baja California Mexico with his wife Nancy and their two dogs. Finn and Cooper. He has written three novels, and he also writes book reviews and essays that appear in online publications. Before retiring to Mexico, Mark practiced law for thirty-five years at three multinational law firms in Houston, Texas and New York City. He attended college at Southern Methodist University and Boston University, and his law degree is from SMU School of Law. Mark grew up as an oil company brat and lived in Latin America, Texas and New York.

A Conversation with Lauren McBrayer about LIKE A HOUSE ON FIRE

What would you do if you found the spark that made you feel whole again?

After twelve years of marriage and two kids, Merit has begun to feel like a stranger in her own life. She loves her husband and sons, but she desperately needs something more than sippy cups and monthly sex. So, she returns to her career at Jager + Brandt, where a brilliant and beautiful Danish architect named Jane decides to overlook the “break” in Merit’s résumé and give her a shot.

Jane is a supernova—witty and dazzling and unapologetically herself—and as the two work closely together, their relationship becomes a true friendship. In Jane, Merit sees the possibility of what a woman could be. And Jane sees Merit exactly for who she is. Not the wife and mother dutifully performing the roles expected of her, but a whole person.

Their relationship quickly becomes a cornerstone in Merit’s life. And as Merit starts to open her mind to the idea of more—more of a partner, more of a match, more out of love—she begins to question: What if the love of her life isn’t the man she married. What if it’s Jane?

What inspired you to write LIKE A HOUSE ON FIRE?

The idea for Like a House on Fire came to me like a tropical storm—swiftly, and with an intensity I didn’t expect.  I was on vacation with a group of women of various ages, most of whom I didn’t know very well, celebrating a friend’s fortieth birthday at a beautiful house on the Pacific Coast of Mexico (a house that makes an appearance in Like a House on Fire , when Merit and Jane get away for three nights and everything changes for them).  My own trip was four nights, and by the third, we all felt comfortable enough with each other to bare our souls over margaritas and guac.  I spent the rest of the trip thinking about the nature of female friendships and the ease with which women seem to be able to “go deep” with each other while struggling (and so often failing) to connect emotionally with their male partners.  I remember asking myself the very what-ifs at the center of Like a House on Fire  as I sat on a stone ledge overlooking the ocean and watched the other girls dance unselfconsciously beside the pool:  What if sexual attraction was part of the equation between women?  How far could a female friendship go if there weren’t a limit on what two women could be for one another?  And, over time, these questions would lead to a more personal one for me:  what if the dissatisfaction I’m feeling in my marriage isn’t an obstacle to overcome but a clue?

Like a House on Fire  explores the sensation of friendship as it transforms into romance—something we’ve also seen happen with public figures such as Elizabeth Gilbert and Glennon Doyle. Why do you think this is becoming such a timely and relevant conversation today?  

I don’t think friends-becoming-more is new.  I think the idea of a platonic friendship exploding into a hot, fiery romance has always been appealing because it captures our desire for our romantic partners to be “everything” to us.   The difference, now, is that we’re finally willing to explore what that might look like for friends of the same gender to cross that line.  I think there are a lot of reasons we’re seeing more and more “straight” women coming out and saying that they’ve found romantic love with another woman.  Part of the explanation is the fact that women are finally empowered enough culturally to define for themselves what they want out of life beyond being wives and mothers and helpmates to men.  As society has given women more and more and agency to tell their own stories, to be protagonists instead of just supporting characters, we’re questioning what the heteronormative ideal really offers us.  For women seeking deep, sustained intimacy and true equality, a marriage to a man might not be the answer.  This is ultimately where I ended up.  I stopped lamenting everything my husband wasn’t giving me and allowed myself to wonder whether the woman I was closest to could ever be more than a friend.  Once I let myself go there in my head—aided in large part by Merit and Jane, whose story was making space for my own—the floodgates opened and there was no forcing them shut. 

The novel is a realistic portrayal of what it feels like to be a like to be a parent, particularly a working mother, and captures that loss of self that comes after children and years of marriage. Are you writing from personal experience?

I am absolutely writing from personal experience – and the experience of so many of my mom friends.  For me it wasn’t so much a loss of self as a fracturing of self.  I found myself wearing all these different hats and playing all these different roles, with very little overlap.  It felt like I was constantly toggling between all these different identities, all these separate modes.  Mom mode.  Work mom.  Wife mode.  Nowhere was I integrated into one holistic person.  A mom wasn’t supposed to be sexy.  A wife wasn’t supposed to act like a lady boss.  An ambitious professional wasn’t supposed to get distracted by how much sleep her toddler was getting.  A thriving creative (I was trying to write my first novel right after my first baby was born, much like Merit was trying to mount her first gallery show) wasn’t supposed to be scouring the internet for age-appropriate lingerie.  It was all very confusing and I never felt like myself anywhere.  This is the essence of what I was trying to capture in the early chapters of Like a House on Fire .

Merit and Jane are at two different ages and stages in life, and yet they were able to overcome that, and be so drawn to each other. Why do you think that is?

This is an excellent question, but my answer is to question the question.  Why do we assume that age is such a barrier to intimacy among adults?  We’ve also been sold a lie by the patriarchy that women can only be understood by women who are like them—moms should gravitate toward moms, single women should find single friends, working professionals should “network” with similarly-minded women. The truth is, many women I know feel alienated and lonely in groups of women “just like them.”  I certainly did.  It wasn’t until I went back to work after kids and met a diverse group of women with whom I had few life circumstances in common but shared a similar temperament and sense of humor that I began to question the idea that “my people” were thirty-something women with kids and husbands.  The cynical side of me wonders whether we’ve been programmed to think of ourselves as only the roles that we perform, and that’s why we so often gravitate toward women who are also performing those roles.  I call bullshit on this.  Merit and Jane connect so deeply because neither woman needed the other to be any particular thing other than who they already were.  It didn’t matter that they seemed so different on paper, because they (like all of us) weren’t defined by their life circumstances.

Religion is a topic that comes up throughout the novel in regards to Merit. Was it important to you for that to be included, and why?

Faith has always been an important part of my own identity, and I was interested to explore how being a person of faith would affect Merit’s decision-making as her feelings for Jane changed and deepened.  I think in some sense, it is because Merit has a relationship with God (albeit not the one her parents wish she had) that she is able to recognize the uniqueness of what she and Jane find in one another.  I wanted to explore how faith intersects with the messiness of life for a person who has left organized religion but hasn’t abandoned God.  For Merit, the sense of connection to something deeper that she feels when she and Jane are together is reminiscent of other moments in her life when she has felt connected to the Divine, and while their relationship is certainly complicated and morally fraught, she experiences an inherent goodness in her intimacy with Jane, which in her mind keeps it from being completely black and white.  I love the nuance of this.  While I was working on Like a House on Fire , I heard a sermon at church about the verse in Genesis where God says “it is not good for man to be alone,” and it resonated deeply: it isn’t good for any of us to be alone!  And yet Merit is very alone in her marriage and the opposite of alone when she is with Jane.  With Jane, she belongs.  Though that may be an oversimplification, it really is the heart of why Merit is willing to do what she does.

Like a House on Fire  is a vivid depiction of what many marriages look and feel like. Why do you think so many fall into the same marital unhappiness?  

At the risk of over-generalizing, I think that modern marriages – particularly American marriages – have become unsustainably imbalanced.  Women who are equal or even main breadwinners are so often expected to be the primary parent, the keeper of the house, the organizer of tasks, and the handlers of all manner of emotional and invisible labor.  The lack of partnership so many of us feel is incredibly demoralizing.  It’s not that women are being asked to take on too much (though we absolutely are), it’s that there’s an unspoken expectation that childrearing and domestic tasks are either ours to do or ours to manage.  This may have made sense when there was a division of labor in married households, with the husband working outside the home and the wife working inside the home, but that’s not the typical scenario anymore.  And yet, women are still responsible for the domestic work.  Sure, for affluent working women, this means hiring nannies and housekeepers and gardeners to do what the stay-at-home wife once did by herself, but managing these people and keeping the house running smoothly is no small task (which, I imagine, is why so many men have cleverly opted out of it!)

If you could give Merit one piece of advice, what would it be?

To trust herself.  When we meet her, she’s spent 39 years of her life trying to satisfy everyone else’s ideas of who she’s supposed to be.  And, I think, waiting for someone to believe in her, which her parents never did and ultimately Cory didn’t either.  At the beginning of the novel, this desire is wrapped up in her art career—she feels let down that her husband didn’t truly support her when she quit her job to paint full time.  What she comes to understand is that it wasn’t actually about whether she could make it as a painter, what she wanted was someone who loved her for who she really was.  Not the heteronormative ideal of the competent working-mom-multitasking-wife but a passionate, thoughtful, sexual being with desires and interests outside her role as mother and wife and friend.  I want Merit to trust that who she really is underneath—passionate and complicated and unapologetically queer—is exactly who she is supposed to be.  I’m learning in my own life that dismantling a false identity is a messy, sometimes painful, but ultimately exhilarating process that requires humility, a sense of humor, and lots of grace.

Did you plan on the events in the epilogue unfolding from the start?

I didn’t.  The draft of this book that I was prepared to send to publishers didn’t have an epilogue at all.  The story concluded with Merit ending her relationship with Jane because of her inability to disappoint Cory and her kids and her friends and her mother.  But the Friday before we were planning to go out with the book, I had this nagging feeling in my gut that their story ended a different way, and that I owed them—and, honestly, myself—that ending.  So I sat down to write an epilogue, at first just for myself, and typed without stopping until I wrote the last word.  After I sold the book, my incomparable editor, Gabriella Mongelli helped me make the story better, but not a word of the epilogue has changed since that afternoon I wrote it.

What is next for you?

I’m working on a new novel about a woman who comes to the end of herself and journeys into the darkest depths of her soul to find the truest essence of who she is and what she wants.  I want to explore the nature of colonization, using California as my backdrop, to ask questions about what it means for each of us – collectively but also as individuals - to assimilate to the dominant (white, male, cisgender, straight) culture, and what happens when we internalize someone else’s ideas for what it means to be “good.”  I’m also already dreaming about the TV version of Like a House on Fire  and how I might bring Merit and Jane to life on screen.