What kinds of threads make up the fabric of a family? What are the stories we tell ourselves about them? And how do they intertwine with the time and place of our birth, the trials and triumphs of our ancestors, the vicissitudes of our larger human family? Was Leo Tolstoy’s narrator of Anna Karenina right? Are happy families really all alike? And what is a happy family, anyway?

Most families are a complex weave of bloodlines, fault lines, ancient and recent history, shared values and beliefs, secret grudges and betrayals, unspoken longings, guilt and envy, dashed and realized dreams.

A Novel Born from Personal Experience and Cultural Roots

My new novel Invisible Threads explores these themes and more. The story first emerged twenty-five years ago, when I was recovering from breast cancer treatment, and it reflects the larger questions that arose within me during that time. In writing what came to feel like my most personal work of fiction, I found myself drawing extensively on my own history, on the generational suffering and resilience of my Jewish lineage, on how the complex weave of cruelty and kindness in the human spirit has marked and shaped me—and how the dichotomy between dark and light continues to live inside us all to this day.

Invisible Threads — a family love story

In 1923, a young Russian-Jewish boy arrives in America penniless and suffering from rickets, only to rise over the years to prominence as a politically radical Hollywood screenwriter. In the year 2000, the disease that killed his beloved first wife now threatens his oldest daughter. Forty-year-old Elvie Kerr has been a caretaker all her life. Cooking nightly for her less-than-grateful father Michael. Serving as a mother figure to her firecracker of a younger sister Miriam and her sensitive teenage nephew Ben. Ministering to the ailing seniors at the care home she manages.

Evvie has lived under a cloud of guilt and worry ever since her mother’s achingly long illness, and she probes at her long ago rejection by her first love like an eternally loose tooth. While her salty-tongued best friend partners with a world class photojournalist to document the impact of war on children, Evvie’s heart is stolen by an endearing little girl who, like her, is undergoing treatment at Cedars-Sinai Medical Center.

A Story of Redemption, Connection, and Second Chances

Invisible Threads feels its way along the warp and woof of the Kerr family, but no family exists in a vacuum. The Kerrs find communion and commiseration, laughter and joy in an extended tribe that includes Michael’s closest friend and hopelessly romantic writing partner Dick Shea; Michael’s second wife, the flamboyant weaver Moira O’Shaughnessy; and the girls’ next door neighbor while growing up, the gorgeous Beady Blanchette, a brilliant documentary filmmaker who is also mother to Tony, Ben’s best friend and co-conspirator in adolescent rebellion.

As fate presents Evvie with profound loss, the possibility of a new love, and exposure to the devastation of global conflict, she is challenged to weave her way through familiar patterns of self-doubt and sacrifice to submit to the mystery of being birthed anew.

Where to Buy Invisible Threads

Invisible Threads is my sixth book to be released by my publisher, Melinda Clayton of Thomas-Jacob Publishing, LLC, and is available in print and e-book formats. My books are available at the C.G. Jung Bookstore of Los Angeles and at all major bookstores, including Apple, Amazon, Barnes and Noble, and Kobo.

Invisible Threads is ready to weave its way into your reading life…and hopefully into your heart!