The emotional and creative journey behind In the Context of Love—a novel inspired by unspoken truths.
How do we make sense of tragedy?
We live every day knowing that bad things happen–on a global and personal level. Fires burn down houses, people are laid off, friends have tragic accidents, loved ones develop addictions and get diseases we’ve never even heard of.
How do we carry on when life seems so unfair? We may not be able to determine what happens to us in life, but we can define the meaning of these events through storytelling. When we put events into a story, we are no longer passive. The act of writing itself takes the events from someplace inside us to the outside. Writing gets them out of our heads. We rework events to better understand them. Writing and reading is empowering and transformative.
The inspiration for my novel, In the Context of Love, was inspired by real-life tragic events that affected me deeply.
Glamour Magazine, 1999
The article, “My Father Was a Rapist,” featured interviews with several women whose lives were shattered when they learned they’d been conceived in rape. Each woman’s story was different, but each one was devastated to learn they were the child of a rapist, and that their mother had experienced such violence.
Julie learned she had been adopted at age 17; when she married, she searched for her birth mother and learned her story. Pam was 13 when she heard from someone at an adoption agency that her mother had been raped by a stranger when she was 15. Dina was told by her mother that her rapist father was the pastor at the parish where she once lived. Mary’s mother had been date-raped, and Mary grew up thinking that her mother’s husband was her biological father. . . These are a handful of the stories in Jennifer Braunschweiger’s article, “My Father Was a Rapist,” Glamour, August 1999.
Knowing the trauma of their origin changed these women in profound ways. Their struggles, their strength and their courage impressed me. As a victim of date rape, I never forgot them or their stories.
They stayed with me for a reason: A novel
I created a young woman, Angelica, whose world is upended at age 17 when she learns she was conceived in a rape. She is forced to rethink her life, her mother’s obsessions, and her relationship with the man she believed was her natural father. I first titled the novel The Real Story because Angelica’s mother, having been raped in the mid-fifties, is forced to lie about her pregnancy to hide her family’s shame. She even lies to the man she married—the man who adopts Angelica when she was three—over fears of rejection. When the truth surfaces, the entire family is traumatized. Angelica runs away, her grandmother has a heart attack, her mother slips into depression, and her parents split.
I understood such a gripping story had to offer moments of joy, laughter and hope as well. But most of all, I wanted Angelica to learn how telling her own story is as important as allowing her mother to tell her story, much like the women in the Glamour article. Angelica gains hard-won and bittersweet insights that enable her to move forward. She is transformed by the end of the novel.
In the Context of Love
The story opens with Angelica visiting her husband in prison, their two young children in tow. At night, she lies awake, asking herself the question she can no longer avoid: How did my life get so far off track?
She once saw herself as smart, confident, and destined for something bigger. At seventeen, she had dreams, but her mother smothered her, and her father gave her little physical affection. So, when she falls in love with a boy from the wrong side of town, she falls hard. But when the lies unravel, everything changes. Numb and adrift, she learns she isn’t as resilient as she believes.
Many years later, Angelica feels the weight of the secret she’s carried: the truth about her conception that she can no longer keep buried. She needs to tell her story, and there’s only one person who can truly understand it without judgment: that first love, Joe.
Told in Angelica’s voice as she reaches back through the years, it is her story as told to Joe: raw, honest, and deeply personal.
“This is what happened after you left without a word.” In the Context of Love is written as a one-sided conversation with Angelica’s first love, who, fifteen years later, had become “the scapegoat for everything that had gone wrong in the last fifteen years.” ~ Author Tracy Lawson
At its heart, this is a love story. A love story about first romance, and the chance for something new.
A love story between mothers and daughters. A love story between an adoptive father and the daughter he claimed as his own. And a story of love gone wrong and how we find our way back to ourselves.
We all need to tell our stories
Family secrets are destructive. Silence is oppressive, especially when it comes to what society considers “distasteful” subject matter.
“Maya Angelou says there is no greater agony than bearing an untold story inside you. Such a story informs the life of Angelica, the main character in this great read. In today’s charged climate of the ‘Me, too’ women, this novel is really relevant… and important story for our current days of reckoning. For all the women on their journeys to truth, this is a book for you.” ~Barbara J. Rebbeck, author of NOLA Gals
We need to tell the hard truths. Some stories can’t stay buried. Through writing, we can triumph over adversity, explore a world different from our own, to back in time, and challenge ourselves. We can fail and then get back up.
In the Context of Love is available through Bookshop.org, Amazon and on Kindle.
Thank you for visiting.
Linda K. Sienkiewicz is a wrangler of words and big messy feelings in fiction and poetry.
In the Context of Love | Gordy and the Ghost Crab | Sleepwalker
Love and Other Incurable Ailments, coming 10/27/2026 from Regal House Publishing
Connect with Linda on social media: LinkTree