Fiction lets you hide.
Not in a dishonest way — in a useful way. You can put something true inside a character
and let the character carry it. You can say the difficult thing through someone else's
voice, in someone else's life, at a distance that makes it possible to say at all. It is
one of the things I love most about writing stories: the oblique angle. The way a novel
can be entirely about grief, or desire, or the cost of silence, without ever announcing
itself as such.
But some books don't want that distance.
Conversations You're Avoiding is the fourth book I've published, and the first
nonfiction title under this name in a while. I have written self-help before — I kept
coming back to it in the years between fiction projects, the way you return to a particular
kind of thinking when you need to be direct about something. This book came from the same
place: a feeling I kept noticing in my own life and in conversations with people I trust.
The feeling is familiar, I think, to most of us. It is the weight of something unsaid. Not
a dramatic secret, not a confession — just the ordinary accumulation of things we know we
should say and keep deciding to say later. To a parent. To a partner. To a colleague who
deserves honesty we've been protecting them from. To ourselves, which is often the hardest
place to start.
I didn't want to write a communication manual. There are plenty of those, and most of them
are more useful as anxiety than as action — you read them, you feel briefly equipped, and
then the actual moment arrives and the script is nowhere. What I wanted to understand, and
what I wanted to write about, was the why. Why we go quiet in the first place. What
silence is actually protecting. What it costs over time, in that invisible way costs
accumulate before they become visible.
The book is organized around the specific conversations most of us carry: with a parent,
a partner, a colleague, a friend, and with ourselves. Each one opens with a story — someone
in a situation you'll recognize, holding a conversation they haven't had yet. By the end of
each chapter, the situation looks different. Not because it was resolved, but because it
was understood.
That is, I think, what good nonfiction can do that fiction sometimes can't: it names the
thing directly. It says: here is what is happening, here is why, here is what you might do
about it. No metaphor required.
Conversations You're Avoiding is available now on Amazon.
There is also a Portuguese edition, As Conversas que Você Evita, for those who prefer
to read in Portuguese.
If you've been circling a conversation for a while — if there is someone in your life
who deserves something honest you haven't said yet — I wrote this book with you in mind.
