Books > The Secret Life of Prince Charming > Behind the Book

When I was nineteen, I met a twenty-one-year-old young man who was dark and handsome, mysterious and moody. Three years later, after a long-distance relationship, we would marry, and that’s when he became the abusive husband I would live with for the next thirteen years. This one decision, this decision to have this particular relationship, would result in years upon years of devastation—emotional, physical, financial—complicated layers of pain and damage that would affect me, our kids, our families and friends. The destruction of an abusive relationship is insidious and widespread. The damage, too, doesn’t stop when you finally gather the courage and resources to leave (an abusive man still find ways to abuse, even when—especially when—you’re no longer there). The fallout continues to this day for me and for my kids. In many ways, the cycle of violence, once entered, is one you are a hostage to forever. 

As my kids approached the age when I first met their father, and as I got clearer over the ten years since I left, the need to write about relationship choices and self-protection grew. Grew? Became urgent. This one decision has an impact and weight we can’t even begin to see at nineteen, and yet where is the guidance on how to make it? Where are the high school classes about healthy relationships? Even if a relationship does not evolve into a marriage with children, an unhealthy one can harm or haunt for a good long while. As a young adult author, I was also receiving lots of letters from girls affected by relationship shrapnel, their own or their parents’. I could see the patterns they were already forming and wanted to shout to each of them: Don’t! Think! Listen to yourself! 

The Secret Life of Prince Charming, then, felt like a mission. It’s everything I’ve learned about love set down in one place. It’s every bit of insight I’ve gathered from my own relationships, from endless reading, and from the experiences of others. The book is about the way “love” can go wrong, from violence and demeaning words and jealous acts, to the way real love can go simply and beautifully right. It’s a plea of sorts. Not just to young girls and women and my own children, but to all people: Put yourself in good hands only.