Sarah Domet: You Should Always Write for Yourself

Sarah Domet is the author of the novels The Guineveres and the craft book 90 Days to Your Novel. She is a professor and the coordinator of the MFA program in creative writing at the University of North Carolina Wilmington. Follow her on instagram.

In this interview, Sarah discusses discusses the process of sitting with discomfort while writing her new novel, Everything Lost Returns, her advice for other writers, and more.

Name: Sarah Domet
Literary agent: Michelle Brower at Trellis Literary Management
Book title: Everything Lost Returns
Publisher: Flatiron Books
Release date: February 17, 2026
Genre/category: Literary Fiction/Historical Fiction
Previous titles: The Guineveres, 90 Days to Your Novel
Elevator pitch: Everything Lost Returns is set in Cincinnati in 1910 and 1986—the last two times Halley’s Comet was visible—and follows two characters: Opal Doucet, a spiritualist who believes she’s carrying a baby from the Other Side, and Nona Dixon, an actress and the original “Earthshine Girl,” the famous face of Earthshine Soap. In 1986, when a group of Jane Does comes forward alleging that the soap contains harmful ingredients, the lives of these two characters intertwine across the decades.

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So many elements converged as I wrote this book: my obsession with Halley’s Comet and feminist spiritualism and the question of embodiment; my hometown’s roots in the soap manufacturing industry; and my own frustration at the state of the world, particularly for women. I’d been thinking of my grandmothers, both factory workers, and how the sacrifices they made led to the privilege of my own life as a writer. I had so many more choices than they’d ever had—and yet, had anything really changed? I was interested in finding the edges of feminism—its limits and limitations—and I was interested in exploring women’s work in all forms. Two questions propelled me throughout the novel-writing process: What can women do—individually and collectively—with the roles handed to us? And how does real change become possible over time?

Writer’s Digest published a craft book of mine called 90 Days to Your Novel. My first novel, The Guineveres, was, indeed, drafted in 90 days. I think I was trying to prove a point.

However, Everything Lost Returns took longer. Much longer. I’d like to say 900 days—but it was closer to 10 years. The novel asked questions I wasn’t yet prepared to answer in my real life, and I think I needed those years to rise to my material. While the connective tissue of the novel evolved, I remained faithful to the bones of the story: Two protagonists, connected by Halley’s Comet and spiritualism, and the soap marketed to women for decades.

I’m lucky to work with a wise and generous editor at Flatiron books, Caroline Bleeke. I was often surprised by how she could so clearly see aspects of the story hidden to me. In early drafts of my novel, I had a tendency to create problems and then quietly usher them off the page, hoping nobody would notice. Caroline gently pointed this out. The novel is better—and braver—because of her. Writing a novel requires confrontation; I had to sit with discomfort, my character’s and my own. I was lucky to have an editorial team behind me that trusted me to find my way.

Absolutely. We often think of readers being transformed by stories, but we don’t often acknowledge how profoundly writers are changed through the process of writing them. What surprised me most throughout the writing process was how this novel altered my understanding of my own life and worldview. To reckon fully with a character is to brush up against your own choices and contradictions and desires. I suppose that’s why writing, for me, has always felt like a risk.

At the most basic level, I hope readers feel joyfully immersed in the story. Beyond that, I hope readers identify with Nona and Opal and come away with a sense of empowerment—an awareness that small actions matter, that resistance often begins quietly and internally, and that community is an essential part of meaningful change.

I also wouldn’t mind if they organized a group scream session for a culturally collective emotional release.

At the end of the day, you should always write for yourself. Trends will change; the zeitgeist will shift. External validation is great and all, but if it doesn’t feel urgent and honest to you, it’s probably not a story worth telling.