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Our Past and Our Memories
Forgiveness: A Novel centers around a seventy-year-old artist who finds herself revisiting the defining moments of her life—memories shaped by love, loss, and difficult moral choices. What was the inspiration for the setup of your story?
After I wrote What a Trip, the prequel to Forgiveness, I couldn’t stop wondering what happened to Fiona after the book’s ending. I missed her and wanted to learn more. With an abundance of time on my hands during the latter part of the Pandemic, Fiona began speaking to me, telling me her story and how the present and past had shaped her life.
I also wanted to explore and contrast the social and political climates of the 1970s with those of today. What better way to do that than with my favorite protagonist?
Fiona spends much of the novel reconsidering choices she made decades earlier. What interested you about the process of looking back on one’s younger self?
We are nothing without our past and our memories. As important as it is to “live in the moment,” those moments are a product of the infinitesimal choices we make each day.
Fiona achieved success in her life, but at a great personal cost. The fiftieth anniversary of her friend’s death, coupled with the Pandemic and her husband’s injury, helped her come to terms with the finite quality of life.
No one gets to age seventy without regrets, but what’s most important is how we handle them. I’ve come to believe forgiveness is freedom. I’m sure Fiona came to that realization also.
The Vietnam War, the draft, women’s rights, COVID-19, and January 6 all shape Fiona’s life. Why was it important to connect personal experiences with larger historical events?
We are all shaped by the times in which we live. History is more than dates, wars, and public figures. It’s how those events affect every aspect of our lives, from the food we eat to our cultural and personal beliefs.
The Vietnam War and the draft affected all young men of that era and their families. Many lost their lives; others like Fiona’s husband, Reuben, stood up for their anti-war beliefs and emigrated to Canada. Had Fiona not been influenced by the women’s rights movement, she wouldn’t have had the courage to follow him.
COVID-19 changed our culture and our lifestyles more than any event in the last seventy-five years. Life suddenly became more fragile, and the time we spent in isolation gave us time to reflect on our past and current way of living. Fiona spent that time coming to terms with her personal history and forgiving herself for events long gone.
Images from the January 6 Insurrection will stay with us forever. The democracy we’ve taken for granted could disappear if we don’t stand up for our rights and freedom. Fiona and her husband were personally affected by the event.
While writing Forgiveness, I asked myself whether the Vietnam War era or the present was more politically charged, more dangerous. Sadly, I feel we have more to fear today.
If Fiona could offer one lesson to readers about regret and renewal, what would it be?
We can’t change the past; we can only change how we view it. Life is too short to live with regret. Fiona’s art helped her come to terms with forgiving herself and her loved ones. For those of us who don’t have a creative outlet, we can journal, meditate, seek counseling, or share our stories with loved ones.
Renewal can happen at any time, at any age.
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On New Year’s Eve 2020, as political unrest erupts in Washington, D.C., seventy-year-old Fiona Goldberg confronts a reckoning far closer to home.
When her husband, Reuben—a journalist covering the January 6 Insurrection—is injured, Fiona is left alone with the past she has spent decades trying to quiet. The memories return in fragments: the Vietnam War protests that first bound them together, a fatal accident that shaped her youth, an affair that nearly destroyed their marriage, and a secret she has carried in silence for nearly half a century.
As Fiona revisits the choices that defined her life—love, betrayal, ambition, motherhood denied—she begins to question the stories we tell ourselves about loyalty, aging, and redemption. Against a backdrop of American political upheaval, Forgiveness explores the intimate terrain of a long marriage and the fragile architecture of memory.
A continuation of the story begun in What a Trip, this literary novel examines what it means to grow older with someone who knows your deepest failures—and whether true forgiveness is ever complete.
For readers of thoughtful, character-driven literary women’s fiction, Forgiveness is a meditation on regret, resilience, and the courage to confront the truths that shape us.
Forgiveness: A Novel
Susen Edwards’s Forgiveness is a contemporary women’s fiction novel centered on Fiona O’Brien, a seventy-year-old artist whose memories of love, loss, and moral compromise resurface during the first days of 2021. The novel begins fifty years after Fiona survived the New Year’s Eve collision that killed her best friend, Melissa. As she plans a series of paintings about forgiveness, she revisits her decision to follow her anti-war activist boyfriend, Reuben Goldberg, to Canada during the Vietnam War. Their years in Toronto, later separation, eventual marriage, and present-day life in Greenwich Village form an expansive portrait of a relationship shaped by both devotion and secrecy.
Edwards structures the story through frequent movement between the early 1970s and the politically unsettled winter of 2020–21. Fiona’s recollections reveal her estrangement from her parents, her difficulty establishing an identity apart from Reuben, an affair, an abortion she conceals, and the professional ambitions that give her an independent sense of purpose. The historical settings are more than scenery. The Vietnam draft, changing attitudes toward women’s health, the COVID-19 pandemic, and the January 6 attack on the Capitol all reinforce the novel’s interest in how private lives are altered by public events. Fiona’s conviction that “I’m a survivor” captures the resolve that carries her through repeated periods of displacement and reinvention.
The novel’s greatest strength is its sustained attention to an older woman examining her life with unusual candor. Fiona’s art provides a persuasive organizing metaphor, since each planned work requires her to transform an experience rather than simply remember it. Her reflections also give forgiveness a demanding definition. It involves recognizing responsibility, releasing blame for events beyond one’s control, and accepting that love can coexist with serious failures. The therapist’s observation that “We’re all human and fallible” becomes central to Fiona’s gradual willingness to extend compassion to her parents, Reuben, and herself. Edwards’s direct prose and conversational dialogue keep these ideas accessible, while Fiona’s self-questioning gives the narrative emotional continuity across its long time span.
The novel delves deep into Fiona’s feelings and historical circumstances, and its many flashbacks slow the momentum of the present-day plot. Yet the deliberate pace also suits a story about a woman sorting through half a century of experience. The later chapters deepen the marriage by allowing Fiona and Reuben to disclose what each has carried silently, making their reconciliation feel grounded in knowledge rather than sentiment alone. Forgiveness is an emotionally open account of aging, artistic self-examination, and a partnership that survives because its participants finally confront the full complexity of their shared past.
Pages: 378 | ASIN : B0GX2Z38G5
