Long before Jeannie Nicholas had published her first novel, she was working in education and visited a school with an autistic student. “I was struck by how tuned in a child like that can be,” Nicholas says, reflecting on how many people would consider such students as not fitting a “normal” structure. “You have to find ways of reaching out, to meet them on their own ground.”

With the publication in 2019 of her first novel, Kalayla, and 2025’s Kalayla Unraveling Triangles, Nicholas has spent years meeting her distinct, sometimes frustrating characters—like the sassy 12-year-old Kalayla—on their own terms. “And that’s not necessarily easy at all.”

Nicholas started writing in her early 20s, but after attending Bennington College and earning master’s degrees in teaching and counseling at Tufts and Harvard Universities, respectively, her life filled up with other things. By the 1980s, Nicholas was working in school administration. “I hated it,” she emphasizes. “I mean, hated it.”

But at the time, it was a big deal for a woman to be working as an assistant principal in a middle school. She even authored an article on the subject for the Harvard Principals’ Center, titled “Becoming a Woman Administrator,” but while she was breaking new ground in her field, it wasn’t enough to keep her satisfied. Nicholas constantly moved jobs, trying to appease her restlessness, taking on roles at multiple schools and consistently looking for the next thing. “I would just get this itch and need to move on to something else,” she says.

These experiences with young people certainly planted early seeds of the tenacious middle schooler she would eventually write about. (Nicholas remembers that the middle schoolers she dealt with taught her the frankness kids crave: “‘Don’t give me all your adult claptrap,’” she says, imitating former students. “‘Just tell me what the facts are.’”) But her path to writing full time about a middle schooler was anything but straightforward and was affected by several turns in her life.

Nicholas is currently married and living in Massachusetts. After having been widowed twice in her lifetime, she counts five stepchildren and eight grandchildren (as well as two cats). While teaching one day, she received word that she needed to go home; in a freak accident, her then-husband had fallen backward off a roof and suffered massive brain damage. It was a death she remembers as a turning point toward a different path. “It was such an out-of-the-blue experience,” she says. “And thank goodness not a huge number of people [go through] that.”

Following the shock, Nicholas delved deeply into Transcendental Meditation, eventually becoming certified in many different forms of energy healing, working with some nationally known energy healers, and starting her own energy-healing business. When she began working on Kalayla nearly 10 years ago, she found that all these experiences had begun to coalesce around the main lesson she’d taken from working on healing others: “You have to know yourself. You are the one you are healing.”

Both Kalayla Unraveling Triangles and Kalayla center on the titular 12-year-old girl living in Cambridge, Massachusetts. Set in a neighborhood the author herself once lived in at the turn of the 21st century, the novels follow the spunky Kalayla, her exhausted widowed mother (Maureen), and their testy landlady, Lena. As family secrets unfurl on all sides, the three women support and challenge each other while confronting past traumas and the menace of Kalayla’s uncle, Clarence, who’s begun to stalk Maureen.

Though each figure’s story centers on past rejections and loss, as Kirkus Reviews notes in its review of Kalayla Unraveling Triangles, Nicholas has crafted something surprisingly energetic with “sharply etched, vibrant, prickly characters who resonate despite their differences.” Kalayla’s distinct voice shines through from early in the novel as she pulls no punches in describing her and her mother’s situation:

Mama started cleaning houses after we got the car. My grandparents lived near Inman Square in Cambridge. After Daddy died, Grandma told everyone that Mama was exhausted and needed to rest, so we stayed with them. That was a bunch of bull. Mama wasn’t exhausted. She had a nervous breakdown. Grandma knew it, I knew it, and so did everybody else.

After publishing her first book, Kalayla, Nicholas couldn’t stop thinking about the characters she’d brought to life. Her brain kept turning sharply back to questions she realized had been left unanswered. “But what happened to Clarence? What about that? What happened with all of this?” Nicholas knew she wanted to return to Kalayla’s world, but instead of crafting a sequel, she rewrote Kalayla, transforming it into Kalayla Unraveling Triangles and getting the answers she needed.

“When I was in graduate school,” Nicholas says, “a man I was dating described the way I think to me, which is totally accurate: ‘Your mind is like a corkscrew.’” Nicholas followed her twisting logic back into Kalayla’s world, feeling more than ever that she was the chronicler of these characters’ lives rather than their creator. They consistently surprised her, pushing her to try to understand them on an even deeper level.

“With Maureen’s mother, at one point, I even thought to myself, Oh my God, lady, please!” Nicholas says. At times, their choices baffled her, especially if motivated by religion. (Nicholas describes her own religious affiliation as “something or other” and says that she herself was at “war” with Catholicism in high school.) But after sitting with these characters twice over, Nicholas found her writing becoming an experience in compassion and forgiveness.

“I think one of the questions I’ve always asked myself is, ‘How do we talk to other people?’” Nicholas says, reflecting on the general state of fractured politics in the United States as well as family members who have bluntly cut ties with her, citing a lack of common ground. “It’s such a hard question. If you watch the news, it’s right there in…your face,” she says. “How do we talk to each other so that we can look at our similarities and not the things that divide us?”

Nicholas’s time in energy healing has shown her that many others who approach the same practice and purport to heal the world are usually actually creating a disservice. Often, they’re simply trying to get other people to see their point of view. “That is exactly the opposite of what should be happening,” she says. “The goal is to have conversations. And that is what I ended up doing with my characters.”

After feeling this deeper connection, compassion, and understanding for Kalayla, Maureen, Lena, and even Clarence, Nicholas says of her brain that it’s now quieted down. “I got all the answers that I needed. Now I don’t need to write about them anymore.”

For her next project, she says her brain is twisting around something fantasy-like, and because it won’t be historically based, it will require less research. “The old corkscrew is delving into this part and that part and another part of that part,” she says.

But she will continue to insist on the importance of coming together, and on the forgiveness and compassion that she learned while writing about Maureen, Kalayla, and Lena. “There are always going to be things that divide us,” she says. “We have to find some things we do agree about.”

Rhett Morgan is a writer and translator based in Paris, France.