Patti Callahan Henry explores the ‘idea of love’ in new novel

To Blake, Ella is a wedding dress designer who lost her husband in a tragic sailing accident where he drowned saving her life. And so to Blake, Ella’s story becomes the perfect basis for his next Nicholas Sparks-esque screenplay.

To Ella, Blake is a travel writer who needs her help researching her coastal town South Carolina for a book. In reality, though, Ella’s life story is as fictional as Blake’s.

As they spin tales of who they would prefer to be, internally both are hurting from the scars of recent divorces and a lost belief in lasting love. And so the search for a true “idea of love” under false understandings becomes the hallmark of Mountain Brook resident Patti Callahan Henry’s newest novel. The Idea of Love released June 23.

“A screenwriter desperate for a story and a woman desperate for a new life make the perfect liars,” Henry said. “They lie because they are desperate, and they need and want a change and don’t know how to go about doing so. They are floundering. I wanted to explore how they could possibly come together and get to know each other, while presenting false selves. There is pretense on both sides, but also enough honesty that they come to know each other. Would the lying prevent love from showing up?”

The romantic themes aren’t just traditional either. Henry said both characters are also discovering self-love.

 “Respect for self then leads to respect for others,” she said. “We don’t love ourselves so that others will love us, but so that we can love with pure hearts, giving instead of desperately needing.”

Like many of Henry’s New York Times bestselling novels, the book is set in coastal South Carolina, this time in a fictional town. Henry said Watersend is a mash-up of Bluffton, South Carolina; Savannah, Georgia; and Walterboro, South Carolina, a small town where there is a Slave Relic Museum like in the book.

“I spend a significant amount of time in the Lowcountry, and therefore the scents and sounds and feelings of the area have permeated my life and my writing,” she said. “I hope all readers can feel how mystical and inviting the area is in real life.”

In many ways, reading Henry feels like reading Sparks — man and woman with troubled pasts find each other in an idealistic setting, leaving little doubt about where the quickly building romantic tension will lead. But Henry’s characters are also digging a level deeper, past the pretenses of well-kept appearances of marriage and successful lives. As Blake and Ella find, the true idea of love is as muddled as life itself, but it also comes from a place that is more genuine than they thought possible. Somehow, Henry’s characters find this under an initial sheen of lies, with a feel-good ending that very well could be inspiration for one of Blake’s films.

“Love isn’t so black and white, so right or wrong, so clear-cut,” Henry said. “Life is messy; love is chock-full of contradictions, and we all need to run as far and as fast as we can toward our own dreams and a life fully lived.”

Henry is a New York Times bestselling storyteller of 11 books. To learn more about her books, visit patticallahanhenry.com. She will hold a book signing party on Saturday, June 20 from 5-7 p.m. at Full Circle, 3908 Clairmont Road in Forest Park.