I Wrote a Novel About Women Who Refuse Marriage; It Changed My Life

Six years ago, I started writing a novel about four women in Brooklyn who make a pact to never get married. At the time, I worked at Goldman Sachs and fully expected to be married by 30.

(Moving Back to Michigan During the Pandemic and Landing an Agent.)

The women in the book were rebellious, edgy, and defiant of everything society had told them they were supposed to want. At the time, I was none of those things.

I had been the good girl for as long as I could remember: the straight-A student from a public high school in Michigan who overachieved her way into an Ivy League school. After college, I moved to New York and landed what felt like the ultimate prize: a coveted Wall Street job.

On paper, my life looked like success. But I had a secret. I knew I was meant for a different life.

In the Goldman Sachs bathroom stall, I wrote poems on my phone. During meetings, I scribbled lines of dialogue for my novels in the margins of my notebook. I woke up before 5 a.m. every day to work on my fiction manuscripts. I even had a poetry Instagram account where I blocked my colleagues, terrified they would discover it and realize I wasn’t taking my Very Serious Career seriously enough.

I was what I now call “a closeted creative.”

I believed the rules that had quietly been handed to me: Work hard. Be responsible. Build a stable career. Meet the right man. Get married by 30. Move to the suburbs and have kids.

Even when I started writing fiction, those expectations lived inside me, which is why the characters in my novel surprised me. The book follows a group of friends who call themselves the Redstockings, a nod to the radical feminist group from the 1960s. Led by their magnetic friend EJ, they make a pact to never get married…not because they hate love, but because they refuse to let marriage define the trajectory of their lives.

They date. They experiment. They prioritize friendship, creative expression, and personal freedom. They refuse to organize their futures around the assumption that a husband will eventually anchor them.

At first, I thought I was inventing these characters. But the longer I wrote, the more I realized something unsettling: I couldn’t create characters who were that liberated without confronting the ways I wasn’t.

As a fiction writer, every character is some version of yourself. You can’t write emotional truths you haven’t touched somewhere in your own psyche. So the women in my novel started becoming my teachers and my mirrors.

Writing them forced me to look at the parts of myself I had quietly buried: the artsy parts, the edgy parts, the rebellious parts. The parts that didn’t quite fit the polished, palatable version of success I had built on Wall Street. Through these characters, I began to excavate those hidden selves. And once they surfaced, I couldn’t pretend they weren’t there.

Over the next few years, my life started shifting in ways that felt both terrifying and inevitable. I began breaking out of the boxes I had shrunk myself to fit. I moved abroad by myself, prioritizing my dreams over my fears. At 28, I left my corporate job entirely, just months after becoming a VP at Goldman Sachs, and became a full-time creative.

Just months before my 30th birthday, I ended a relationship that had seemed headed toward marriage—exactly the milestone I had spent years assuming would define my success. According to the timeline I’d always imagined for myself, this was supposed to be the moment when everything settled into place. Instead, I walked away and chose the unknown.

I published book after book. I stepped onto stages for TEDx talks and keynotes, talking about creativity and imagination and unleashing the power of your voice. And most of all, I (mostly!) let go of needing to be understood or liked by everybody.

Even my wardrobe changed. The suits and structured blazers I had worn to the office gave way to thrifted denim and loose, bohemian clothes that felt more like me. It felt less like an identity overhaul and more like an identity expansion. I wasn’t tossing out the old me…I was just allowing more parts of me to breathe and be seen. 

And the strangest part was realizing that so much of this more fully expressed me had begun with a fictional story.

The novel that sparked this identity shift, The Anti-Marriage Pact, is finally being published this June, six years after I first started writing it. For a while, I wondered if the delays meant something had gone wrong. Early on, I received feedback that the main character was too polarizing, that the book was too edgy, that maybe I should stay in a safer romantic-comedy lane.

But looking back, I think the book needed those years. I had to grow into it. The story demanded that I embody the freedom it explored. Only then could I really hold the energy of it.

Now when I look at EJ and the Redstockings, I don’t see fictional women anymore. I see reflections of parts of myself that were waiting to be claimed.

That’s the strange magic of writing fiction. It isn’t really fiction at all. It’s a process of discovering who you’re becoming.

Sometimes I wonder what would have happened if I had never written that book. If I’d never answered the call and allowed such liberated lifeforce energy to flow through me. Maybe I would still be a “closeted creative” in a corporate office, writing poems in secret and telling myself that someday—next year, maybe!—I would go after the life I actually wanted.

Instead, those characters helped me bridge the gap between the life I thought I should be living and the life I knew I was capable of living.

Six years ago, I thought I was writing a story about four rebellious women who refused to follow society’s rules.

What I didn’t realize was that they were writing me back.

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