Therese Anne Fowler's Blog

It All Comes Down to This by Therese Anne Fowler

My rating: 5 of 5 stars


In early 2020, I released A Good Neighborhood, my modern take on classic tragedy. Many of you embraced it and supported it, and continue to do so. Thank you so much for that.

The novel had the unfortunate timing of hitting shelves on March 10, the same week the country shut down due to the pandemic. The extensive book tour we’d planned fell into the black hole of those first strange and difficult weeks when no one knew yet what to do in place of in-person store events.

Coming out of that experience, and with all the difficulties and uncertainties of pandemic isolation and political drama, I needed to immerse myself as much as possible in things that made me happy. So, I read happy books. I watched happy TV shows and movies. And late that summer, I began writing a wryly funny story that I populated with a cast of sympathetic characters, then aimed them at a joyful ending.

All went well until early 2021, when I developed some troubling and mysterious health issues. From January through May, I was in and out of doctor’s offices and imaging centers in search of answers and solutions. Amid that, I returned to the story whenever I could, distracting myself in this playground I’d made. I can see now that my anxieties and intentions about making the most of life, about making meaning, got distilled into each of my characters’ journeys as well.

I designed It All Comes Down to This to be a big-hearted tale that utilizes dramatic irony, one of my favorite story forms. Everyone’s got a secret, and the reader is in on all of it while the characters are not. The result, I hope, is a smart, entertaining, compelling, even endearing story that in its slightly subversive way also takes on issues of class and feminism and identity. It’s a story about how we can remake ourselves in the face of adversity. It’s about Art. And family. And love.

It's also a story about storytelling: the stories we tell one another, the stories we tell ourselves, and the literal act of writing stories—with a slightly meta twist that I’ll leave for you to discover.

To those of you who’ve been on this writing journey with me since my early days, I thank you for sticking with me. To those of you who are recent or just joining now, welcome! I value you all so much, and I thank you, and I hope you enjoy reading It All Comes Down to This.

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