When Paris Whispers centers around a young woman from Virginia who leaves grief, a controlling mother, and a cramped sense of self behind for a fresh start in Paris in 1981. What was the inspiration for the setup of your story?

The seed of the story was planted long before I ever wrote a word of it. At twenty-two, I spent a year in France when a Rotary scholarship sent me to the Loire Valley. For the first time, I discovered what it felt like to exist outside the shape my family and my hometown had drawn around me. There’s a particular kind of freedom that comes from settling somewhere no one has known you since childhood, where you get to decide, moment by moment, who you actually are rather than who you’ve always been. I never forgot that feeling, and I wanted to give it to a character who needed it even more urgently than I did.

Catrine grew out of a question I kept turning over after observing a complicated mother-daughter relationship: What happens when a young woman’s grief and her mother’s control become so intertwined that she can no longer tell which one is actually holding her in place? I wanted her escape to Paris to be about more than geography. I wanted the city itself, and the literary ghosts she encounters there, to give her permission to grieve and celebrate honestly and to hear her own voice again after years of hearing everyone else’s.

And 1981, around the time I lived in France, felt right almost instinctively. It’s close enough to the present to feel intimate, but distant enough that Catrine has to be genuinely alone with herself. She can’t simply reach back into her old life with a call or text home whenever she wavers. She has to navigate the city, make mistakes, and sit with her loneliness. That isolation, that forced self-reliance, is essential to who she becomes.

Many stories about Paris focus on beauty and escape, but your novel also explores loneliness, confusion, and personal growth. Why was it important to show both sides of the city? 

Paris has been mythologized so thoroughly across the years, as the city of love, of light and instant transformation, that I think we forget the myth can be its own kind of pressure. If you arrive expecting magic and instead find yourself lost, overwhelmed, and unbearably alone, that gap between expectation and reality can make the loneliness sting even more. I wanted to be honest about that gap, because it’s the truer story, and I think it’s the more universal one. Almost no one’s life changes in a straight line toward good fortune. It usually changes through confusion first.

For Catrine, Paris can’t simply hand her a new self. She has to earn it—get lost in unfamiliar streets, misread situations, feel the particular ache of eating alone in a café where everyone else seems to belong. Those moments of disorientation aren’t obstacles to her transformation; they are the transformation. The city’s beauty means something to her only because she’s also felt its indifference. I didn’t want to write a postcard. I wanted to write what it actually feels like to rebuild yourself somewhere far from home, the exhilaration and the terror of it, often in the same afternoon.

There’s also something particular about the literary ghosts she hears, Flaubert, Chanel, Proust and the other voices from the past that inhabit the city for her. They don’t offer her comfort so much as company and suggestion in her confusion. They remind her that beauty and difficulty have always coexisted in this place, that she’s not the first person to feel undone by Paris even while falling in love with it.

Catrine and Freddie’s relationship reflects how some friendships can shape us while also keeping us from growing. Why was that complexity important to include?

I’ve always been drawn to the friendships that aren’t simply good or bad for us, because those are the ones that feel most true to life. Freddie offers Catrine something real: companionship, introductions to other friends, an entry into Parisian life as an expat, someone who is also young and far from home. But comfort and growth don’t always point in the same direction, and I wanted to explore what happens when a person who makes you feel safest is also, whether on purpose or not, the person who keeps you staying small.

Freddie knows an earlier version of Catrine, and there’s something easy about being with someone who doesn’t ask or expect you to change. It’s a relief, at first, not to have to explain yourself or justify who you are. But that same familiarity can quietly become a kind of ceiling or box. I wanted to show how easy it is to mistake the comfort of being known for the comfort of being seen for who you are and how those are actually two very different things. Catrine has to recognize the difference before she can decide what she’s willing to put up with and what she’s outgrown.

I think most of us have had a friendship like that at some point, one we needed exactly when we needed it, and then, eventually, needed to leave behind and grow beyond.

What do you hope readers who have experienced their own transitions—leaving home, starting over, or redefining themselves—take away from Catrine’s journey? 

I hope readers who’ve stood at their own threshold of leaving, whatever that looked like for them, see something of their own courage reflected back in Catrine. Starting over rarely feels brave while you’re inside it. Mostly it feels like fumbling, like being unsure whether you’re running toward something or just running away. I want readers to know that both can be true at once, and that it doesn’t disqualify the journey. Or the break.

More than anything, I hope they take away permission, permission to grieve what they left, even if leaving was the right choice; permission to be lonely without treating loneliness as proof of failure; permission to let a new place, or a new season of life, change them slowly rather than all at once. Catrine doesn’t arrive in Paris and become a different person overnight. She becomes herself in pieces, through small ordinary moments as much as through revelation. I think that’s closer to how real transformation works than the version we sometimes get in stories.

And I hope readers walk away trusting that the versions of us shaped by our hometowns, by grief, by the people who raised us, aren’t obstacles to becoming someone new, or better, or stronger. They’re the foundation we build the new self on, even if we reject some of it. Catrine doesn’t leave Virginia completely behind so much as she learns to carry it differently. That felt important to me, that Catrine’s story not be one of escape, but of integration.

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