What would you do if the man who changed the course of your life suddenly became part of your family?
Award-winning novelist Katherine Sherbrooke returns with This Much Is True (Sibylline Press, September 18, 2026), a gripping, timely, and emotionally resonant novel that explores the lasting impact of trauma, the complexity of memory, and what it truly means to reclaim one’s story.
Title: This Much is True: A Novel
Author: Katherine Sherbrooke
Blurb: On her fifty-eighth birthday, veterinarian Veronica Harmon appears to have everything she could want: a loving marriage, three grown children, and the joy of celebrating her youngest daughter’s engagement and first solo art exhibition. But when Veronica meets her future son-in-law’s parents, she is stunned to recognize his father as the young man who assaulted her in high school more than forty years earlier.
Veronica has never told anyone—not her husband, her children, or her closest friends—about that night. Now, over the course of a single weekend intended to unite two families, she must confront a devastating choice: remain silent and welcome this man permanently into her life, or reveal the truth and risk shattering her daughter’s future.
With compassion, nuance, and psychological insight, This Much Is True, inspired by the classic John Hughes film “Sixteen Candles,” examines how survivors navigate shame, silence, memory, and agency. Rather than focusing solely on the trauma itself, the novel asks a deeper question: What happens when a survivor finally recognizes that the power to define the story belongs to her?
Author Interview
At what point did you decide to be an author, and what was your path to publication?
My childhood dream was always to write fiction, but there was no obvious entry-level job or career path I knew of to get me there, and I decidedly needed to pay rent. I got as close as I could to publishing by getting a job at a magazine which covered high growth start-ups and the entrepreneurs behind them. Before I knew it, I had caught the entrepreneurial bug. It wasn’t until twenty years later, after cofounding and selling a company, that I began to write in earnest.
The path to publication was a long one. I started taking craft classes like mad at GrubStreet as I began to write my first novel. It took me three years to complete that book, called Fill the Sky, 78 queries to land an agent, and then it was another year on submission before that novel found a home. I’ve published three more in the last ten years and am endlessly grateful for the opportunity to pursue that long-ago dream.
What do you do when a new idea jumps out at you while you’re still working on a book? Do you chase the squirrel (aka “UP syndrome”) or do you finish your current project first?
I’m not typically a squirrel chaser. I’m a keeper of lists. Story ideas occur to me all the time and I jot them down to be revisited later. Most of them evaporate from my mind soon after and would be completely forgotten were it not for that list. So far, there’s only been one that nagged at me persistently enough that I started to “sneakily” do research on the side, with every hour spent making me feel like I was cheating on the book I was “supposed to be” writing. I finally admitted that the new idea had entirely taken hold of me and was the book I most needed to write. That became Leaving Coy’s Hill, which was picked up by the New York Times as a notable novel and won Honors in Fiction from the Massachusetts Book Awards, so I’m glad I did!
Who is your favorite character to write, and why is that person your favorite? If picking a favorite character would be like picking a favorite child, which character seems to be the most demanding of your attention and detail as a writer?
I love writing a good villain. I find it very satisfying to put right there on the page the kind of behavior I find detestable and then give that character his or her due. It feels like an act of defiance against those individuals who’ve rankled me in my own life. That’s different than a “favorite” character, though. My favorite characters are the ones that stand beside my protagonist and help her understand her inner worth, the kind of friend I value in my own life. It’s my protagonists that are the most demanding of my attention—so far, all women who face difficult situations and swim upstream against cultural norms. I write to understand who they are, what gives them the courage to go against expectations, and how they change in the process. It takes a lot of time and attention to figure all that out!
Describe your writing process. Do you outline, plot, and plan, or is your writing more organic?
I’m definitely not a planner! I tend to start with a character, a setting, or a premise I find interesting and then “write into” the story. I begin with a vague sense of where the story might go but it usually takes me 50-100 pages before I start to have any idea who my characters really are. Only then can I make sense of the choices they will make and what the consequences of those actions will be, which often means circling back and taking a different path on page five than I originally picked. While this may not be the most efficient process, what I like is that it allows unexpected ideas to bubble up from the subconscious. That’s where the gold is!
Tell us what you enjoy most about writing contemporary fiction?
I enjoy the immediacy of writing a story that my reader can imagine themselves living right now, in our current society. Every character dilemma asks the reader to consider what she would do in that situation, so I like to offer a surprising or unusual way of looking at the problem and offering the reader a safe place to consider that point of view.
What have you found to be most challenging about writing contemporary fiction?
Technology! It’s challenging to make a book feel timeless given how fast technology changes. Specificity helps ground a reader but naming an app or a device can make a scene feel dated almost as soon as it is written. There’s also an inherent challenge in writing a contemporary story about characters that have unwillingly fallen out of touch or the tension that can be created by sending a character out of town and not able to stay abreast of something important happening at home. Technology has more or less taken those dramatic tools out of the writer’s toolbox. On the good news side, it demands that we writers look for a more emotional version of missed connections, which is far more interesting anyway.
Have you been able to incorporate your previous experience in your jobs/education in your writing?
A cofounded and ran a business before turning to writing, and so my protagonists all have substantial careers. I’m interested in the tension, for women especially, between work we love to do and the pull of family. I also enjoy exploring how a strong female leader by day shows up at home or with friends. I’ve mined a lot of my own experiences to add those layers to my characters.
Do you identify with your main character, or did you create a character that is your opposite?
My main characters all have pieces of me in them. I write in great part to better understand myself, so even if the character lives a very different life than my own and we aren’t similar in obvious ways, there is usually some part of their emotional journey that is akin to my own.
Describe the book or series in 10 words or less for people just learning about it.
A survivor finds redemption in a most unlikely way.
Is there anything you would like people to take away from your book?
That women have more options than society would like us to believe.
Share some advice for aspiring authors. What advice would you give to your younger self?
Write for yourself. Write for the love of it. Write and rewrite until you adore what you’ve created. If you love what you’ve written, someone else will too.
What is your favorite line from your book?
“You don’t have to leave a place to discover something new. Just look up to the sky. It’s never exactly the same from one day to the next.”
About the Author
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