Caterina by Moonlight follows a five-year-old girl who is abandoned at a convent, forced to marry at fourteen, and learns to navigate power, love, and loss to claim a life that finally feels like her own. What was the inspiration for the setup of your story?

I visited Florence for the first time in Oct 2019, and fell deeply in love with their city, the Medici, and Botticelli. When I got home, the characters dictated the book to me, and I spent the entire pandemic in the later 15th century with them.

Caterina’s voice evolves from innocence to sharp awareness. Why was it important to keep the narrative grounded in Caterina’s perceptions rather than broader historical commentary?

I think a reader learns more when they have a direct, first-hand experience through a character’s eyes. By immersion in Caterina’s experiences, one will hopefully be drawn into her emotions and her evolution, and absorb the actual history of the times by osmosis. Her transition from the medieval mindset (all is God’s will, and we must accept our lot and suffer in silence, and hope for reward in heaven after death) to the Renaissance expansion of mankind’s possibilities, the growth of humanism and secular accomplishment, and the ability to reinvent oneself, while enjoying creativity, beauty, music, and art. It is a struggle we still see today, between fundamentalism and progressive humanism.

The novel repeatedly asks what kind of life a woman can build within imposed limits. How did you explore that tension between restriction and self-determination?

Caterina is only exposed to church doctrine for the first decade of her life but finds it frustrating that the answer to all her questions is “Because it’s God’s will.” It is her friend, Lucretia, who first leads her to taste the outside world, who struggles against the restrictions of the time, and who helps expand her world. Lucretia is very clever when it comes to navigating the rules and living a full life. Even Botticelli, who paints Caterina as a muse, questions his own desire to paint other than religious-themed work, wondering if he will be damned for it. Caterina grows throughout the book and learns how to protect and assert herself, despite the imposed limitations of the era.

What do you hope readers take away about resilience, joy, and self-creation?

That we have the unlimited capacity for re-invention – to make the most of our lives, and that ultimately, love is the fabric of the universe that binds us together.

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