Evelyn in Transit

This novel is about a mother who's been told that her son is the reincarnation of a Tibetan Buddhist lama, and who's been asked to consider sending him far away to live in a monastery, wear robes and be celibate.  That's a parenting question at a very basic level that also brings to bear a related and equally difficult question--namely, what should any and all of us do with our time on planet earth, and why?

I don't have answers, but I really like the questions, and writing this novel was a great way for me to think about them, and I hope it creates a context wherein others can think about them too.

How did I come to write it?  It's at least partly because, from an early age, and in the most innocent way really, I was regularly in the presence of Tibetan Buddhist monastics.

It happened this way.  One night when I was 11, my brother and I went to a gym to play basketball.  An argument I got into there turned into an altercation, and the altercation ended with me on the gym floor with a broken arm.  The guy I fought was named Ani Sakya, and Ani was, and is, Tibetan.

It probably sounds counter-intuitive to you, but Ani and I became close friends, and because of that I was around his family a lot.  He had 4 brothers.  His parents fed me.  His extended family included a great-aunt who was a nun, and a great-uncle named Dezhung Rinpoche who was a scholar and a lama.  Dezhung Rinpoche was purportedly the reincarnation of a former Dezhung Rinpoche--in fact, he was supposedly the third one, and when he died, a fourth was found.  So I was around for all of that and have no doubt it led me to write Evelyn in Transit.

I'm not sure I really know what it means to be a Buddhist, but I do know that certain of its core concepts make a lot of sense to me.  I always hoped that, one day, I'd find a way to write about it, but I also felt that so doing was full of perils.  Imagine my joy, then, when this character named Evelyn began to coalesce for me, offering a way.  She made this novel a great pleasure to write.  She had me laughing along the way, and crying too.  I love her in some weird way actually and, now that the book is written, I miss her too.