Book Nook - Narcissi

Set in rural Texas in the 1980s with characters that are mostly at mid-life, Narcissi (October 15, 2026, Winedale Publishing), by Babette Fraser Hale, is a novel of interwoven stories about loneliness, how people look for relief and meaning in one another, and how we must try to live with the results of those relationships.

The connective thread is Cole Burnett—a charismatic Texas writer, forever on the move, whose relationships with complex women, and a growing threat against his life, force him to confront the consequences of the way he’s lived. We meet the women Cole encounters, each with their own complicated lives, including conflicts with husbands, traumas survived, needs postponed, and the journey that is managing children.

Despite the man at its center, Narcissi is really about women, relationships and what we learn about ourselves when we examine who we are drawn to. It also explores the consequences of reinvention.

I had a chance to learn more in this interview.

What was the inspiration behind the book?
It was more curiosity than inspiration. After my husband’s death people who had known him longer would tell me how much he’d changed when he met me. I got to wondering: how had he changed? What had he been like before? He’d had a complete life or two before he and I got together—and we had a forty year relationship. (He was almost 100 when he died.) I think many widows have a similar curiosity, if they’ve married later in life.

So I began to create a character who had entered the difficult period between marriages, unsure of where he was headed. Or rather, a character, Cole, began to create himself as a man women found hard to resist.

How does a story with a man as the main character really become about the women?
Cole Burnett’s role is propulsive, linking the other characters and providing the narrative shape. I began with wondering how women would react to a man who travels and yearns and can’t settle down, a man clearly in need of something he can’t articulate. Such a man can cause a lot of pain. I know that, and I figured the women probably knew it, too. So why did they connect with him? What was going on in their lives that moved them into this situation? Men write novels about feckless or rootless men, but you don’t normally learn much about the women. I wanted to find out.

What surprised you about the process of writing this book?
One thing was how well the novel-in-linked-story format fulfilled my intention for the book. I aim at a collage effect. I know a story needs to satisfy the reader’s desire for resolution on some level. But I like to create that result organically by exploring how the characters feel and think. Sometimes as readers we look at the setup and our expectations march ahead of us to the conclusion, 1-2-3-4. I’m generally bored by that predictability. I want the characters to reveal their truths, to themselves and thus to us. A person’s truth is not always simple and pure.

What do you hope readers take away from the book?
Maybe that there’s a little “Narcissus” in each of us. We can hurt others without wanting to, sometimes by trying to avoid causing pain, sometimes by wanting to help. Regret is necessary, but love and forgiveness remain possible even later in life.