Story Behind the Story – Breaking Together

One of my favorite reviews for my first novel Breaking Together was written by a reader named Ruthie. She said, “Sometimes in a book you discover a character you would truly like to have for a friend or live next door to in reality…Maggie is such a character as she is so real…”

Maggie is a no-nonsense woman in her seventies who plays the role of mentor to the novel’s protagonist, Nichole. In the story, Maggie owns a stained-glass shop on Main Street in a town called Rainbow Falls where she makes masterpieces from broken glass.

When I first wrote this novel, my daughters were nine and eleven, and I was a stay-at-home mom. In a brief span of time, three of the moms whose children attended the same neighborhood elementary school as my kids, unexpectedly lost their husbands to car accidents or health issues. I watched these women and their children struggling to survive without their husbands, without their dads, without their primary sources of income, and I wondered if I would have the courage to keep moving through that kind of grief. Could I hold my family together if our world fell apart?  

So, to untangle my fears, I wrote about them.

At the time, we lived on Sunny Meadow Lane in Grand Junction, Colorado, and that street was as idyllic as it sounds and a perfect place to raise kids. A brick house filled with natural light on a quiet cul-de-sac with enormous trees in a grassy yard. It was the kind of neighborhood where people knew and cared for each other.

One neighbor, Jim Dible, loved to make stained-glass art, and he generously offered to teach me his craft. He had some extra supplies, and he gave me everything I needed to make my own creations. I still have those tools, and I think of Jim every time I use them.

Because I was learning this new hobby while writing Breaking Together, my mind often slipped into stained-glass lessons as I wrote. Like glass, people break. We shatter and we heal. We are left with scars, but we gain depth and complexity through our suffering. I wondered about the purpose of suffering even as I intentionally broke perfectly beautiful sheets of glass into smaller pieces.

It made sense from an artist’s perspective. The glass was pretty by itself, but how much more stunning could it be if I nestled a piece of yellow into pink petals and shards of green to make a flower rich with various textures, colors, and opacities? That glass had so much more potential in conjunction with other glass than it did as a monochromatic sheet, but first, I would have to break it. I would have to weaken it by scraping and cutting its protective glaze. I would apply pressure until it cracked and split along those cuts. I would spend hours grinding off the sharp edges with gentle but constant pressure against a hard metal cylinder coated in diamond bits. I would grind each piece until they fit together, each complimenting the next. Grind, fit, grind, fit, until two, three, four pieces of broken glass came together to make something more beautiful than they ever could have been if left intact.

Then, I would take each piece, its sharp edges now smooth and harmless, and wrap those edges in copper foil. This is a gentle, meticulous process. One piece at a time, wrapped in shiny copper tape, framed as a reminder that its individuality mattered even as it became part of a collective. When each piece was wrapped, I would pin them all together again and hold them tight with tacks on a fire-resistant board, and I would use a hot soldering iron to melt silver onto the copper, closing the tiny gaps between the pieces. Finally, the work—the pressure and the heat—would end. I would lovingly polish the glass and the solder scars as I let my tense shoulders relax. I would hang the finished piece in a sunny window, step back, and watch in awe as the solder lines faded into the kaleidoscopic brilliance.

I framed my novel with these lessons, and I needed a character to teach the lessons. Slowly, Maggie stepped into my imagination. I pictured her as a spry woman. No nonsense. Creative but in the most practical sense. Not a free-spirited hippy, but an artist tapping into her creativity to heal her wounds. One who hid her heart beneath a feisty exterior and a barely visible, nearly impenetrable layer of clear glaze. A woman who believes in God, but who doesn’t always understand Him and isn’t afraid to ask questions. A woman who allows her sharp pain to be ground into smooth compassion, though not without some stubborn resistance.

Maggie took on a life of her own. I didn’t have to plot or plan or decide what Maggie would do or say. Maggie told me. When I wrote her scenes, my fingers flew across the keyboard.

To this day, I often hear Maggie’s voice in my head, motivating me with practical, straightforward wisdom.

When my daughters started high school, we built a house closer to their school, and we left Sunny Meadow Lane, but I never stopped missing that house. I’d called it my “forever home,” and our new house never had that same feeling for me.

The girls both graduated from high school and moved out. We made it through their childhood without losing their dad, and for that I am grateful. I try not to take that for granted, because I know well this is not true for all kids. Eventually, the girls moved to Dallas, and our house began to feel too big and too empty. Meanwhile, I’d decided to update Breaking Together and the rest of this series, which made me nostalgic for my Sunny Meadow days.

One weekend, we went to visit the girls, and on a whim, we decided to look at a lake house. We pulled up, and there it was. A brick house filled with natural light at the end of a quiet cul-de-sac with enormous trees in a grassy yard. The kind of neighborhood where people know and care for each other. The kind that instantly felt like home. Of course it did. It was Sunny Meadow Lane on a lake. In Texas.

Everything happened quickly after that, and we moved. One of the first people I met in our new neighborhood is a woman I will call Cecelia. One of the first things she told me about herself is that she makes stained-glass art. The next thing she made clear is that she is a firm believer in God, even when she doesn’t understand Him. She makes no apologies for who she is, and she tells her truth even if it’s not the popular answer. She’s spry and active, sharp and busy, spiritual and gritty. There are sharp edges in her backstory, but that doesn’t keep her from spreading joy to her neighbors. She’s the solder that binds us together. Our street is a neighborhood because of Cecelia.

It’s like Maggie came to life in Cecelia, and I get to “have her for a friend and live next door to her in reality.” I wish I knew my reader, Ruthie, so I could introduce her to Cecelia to make her wish to know Maggie come true in a strange, mysterious way.

I continue to marvel over the fact that a fictional character came to life in my mind in 2011 and in 2024, I felt like I met her in person. I don’t understand all of this, but I believe it is part of a bigger plan. I believe everything fits together like pieces of broken glass. Our mistakes, our failures, our successes, our wins, our losses…all of it might look like individual shards that mean nothing except that they cut us deeply or brought us momentary pleasure, but I am convinced that if we look closely enough, if we pay attention to the details of our lives, we can see how these pieces are deliberately arranged to create one small portion of a vast masterpiece known as the human existence.  

I love that a fragment of my life lies next to a piece of Jim’s, and Ruthie’s, and Cecelia’s and that our pieces are soldered together by a fictional character named Maggie. I love that all people leave behind a legacy of broken, imperfect fragments that are made perfect by the pain and pressure required to soften our edges so that we fit perfectly next to other people whose edges match our own. People entirely different from ourselves but to whom we bond because we share similar experiences and struggles. I believe the human experience is about finding beauty in brokenness, clarity in chaos, and magnificence in minutiae. When we learn to do these things, we will understand how to stop falling apart and begin breaking together.