One woman’s promises to the man she loves and the boys they’re raising.
Breach by Kelly Sokol. Koehler Books pp. 312. $29.95
Konstantin Rega: Breach takes place in the Hampton Roads area. How long have you been based there?
Kelly Sokol: I moved here in 2003 after working on Capitol Hill, deciding it was not the job of a lifetime. I lived in Norfolk for the bulk of the time, and have now been in Virginia Beach for three years. It’s very much home now.
After my 2nd daughter was born and I saw a flier for an “Intro to Fiction” class, and it was the gateway drug into my professional writing life. I got an MFA in Vermont from Goddard College, and my first book came out in 2017. It was a seismic shift, really, from writing occupying the corners and cracks of my life to very much the front.
And how did the book come about?
Breach is a story of a woman who bets it all on love and tries to keep the promises she’s made. Marleigh Mulcahy, the protagonist, grew up in Norfolk and she meets an EOD specialist, Jace Holt. And I don’t think I could have written a book about the area without some sort of connection to the military. The places are very much characters in the book.
I can remember the night the story started to take shape. I was at a writing group, writing on a prompt about describing home, and the image of a woman taking this last sip of water, leaning on the trunk of a car with an “I love my sailors” sticker came into my mind. A young woman in a very desperate position taking care of her child.
Marleigh’s dreams are realistic yet hard for her to attain. I believe in fighting for what you believe in, for your space, and for the people you love. That’s what she does. And I think that’s a pretty admirable quality.
The hardest part for me on Breach, initially, was getting the male character right. And it took me a long time to get a hold of Jace. But I was awarded a National Park Artist’s residency in 2018. It was at Agate Fossil Bed, in Mitchell, Nebraska (the opposite end of where I grew up In Omaha). It’s this fascinating scientific place for fossils without a ton of foot traffic.
The Hampton Roads area and this park became the two main settings for the novel. Being in a space out west in a national park really helped me and was an amazing experience. Up until then, it took me 18 months to get a grasp on the story. Then it was just keeping up as it unfolded.
And what do you want the reader to get out of this book?
I was one of those kids who would try to write to make sense of the world. Obsessed with books, hiding a little fuzzy diary with a lock sort of thing. A secret private world.
Writing difficult women is my favorite thing in the world. I think so often we are expected to package and pretty up the base human instincts. So when a woman has to own it and let it fly, those are my favorite moments in books and my favorite experience about bringing Marleigh to the page. I wish I was as tough and gutsy as Marleigh.
Fiction for me is my best lesson in empathy, an opportunity to step into a life that is not my own. For everyone you meet, there’s a different experience. I find that people who resist normal societal packaging are very interesting. Writing for me is the most fun and deviling part of my day, meeting someone new every time I stare at a blank page is always exciting for me. I just want people to be carried away with Marleigh’s perspective and her world.
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