I’ve landed on Iwo Jima. I’ve died in the mud of the Western Front.
I know this the way you know something you can’t unlearn. Not as belief exactly. As memory that doesn’t belong to this life and yet won’t leave.
This novel began there.
I wrote God Is Everything to lay out what I understand about consciousness, about what God is, and about what happens when we die. The argument in that book is that consciousness doesn’t end. It persists, moves on, and finds new form, and the soul is older than any single body it occupies.
That structure works as philosophy. What it can’t do is show you what any of it looks like from the inside. Fiction can. That’s why this book exists as a novel.
This is one of the books I care about most, because it let me stop arguing and start showing. I’d already made the case once. I wanted a reader to close a novel feeling the thing the argument could only describe, and that turned out to be much harder and much more fun.
What does reincarnation look like from the inside?
Ordinary, mostly, and nobody writes the ordinary lives.
If reincarnation is real then somebody walked through the siege of Tenochtitlan burdened by a particular betrayal they had no words for. Somebody sat in a room in Vienna in 1895 and experienced a recognition so precise and so old that no psychology Freud had yet invented had a name for it.
What I wanted was the ordinary details of extraordinary circumstances. The toothache in seventh century Basra. The bad light on a Tuesday in fifteenth century Florence. An arm rising toward something far away for a reason the body can’t explain.
Grand history is easy to write and it isn’t what a life feels like from within.
The book on this: Reincarnation follows two souls across eighty-two thousand years, told through historical chapters, regression sessions in 1971, and the soul sequences between them.
What’s the love story in Reincarnation?
The longest one I know how to tell. Two souls finding each other across eighty-two thousand years of depicted history. A fragment of a connection with no beginning that either of them can locate, surfacing again and again in different bodies, different centuries, and different circumstances. In 1971, two people sit in a therapy office in New Haven carrying something across all of it that neither can consciously access. I didn’t expect the structure to carry that as well as it does. Historical chapters, therapy sessions, and soul sequences running between them. It works, and I was surprised by how much.
How far back does reincarnation research go?
Seventy-eight thousand years, to an overhang in East Africa.
A woman comes back to camp with a steenbok across her shoulders and the smell of blood worked deep into her hair. The group has already settled for the night. She hears the children before she sees the fire, their voices dropping as the dark comes on and the bush presses in close around the overhang, patient and enormous.
She ducks under the low shelf of rock, lets the animal slide from her shoulders near the coals, and that’s when she sees him.
No exposition, no framing, and nothing to signal which two people these are. The recognition happens on the page the way it happens to them. That’s before anybody has language for it.
That opening is the scene I worked hardest on. Every instinct says to explain who these two are, and explaining would have killed it. I trusted the reader to keep up, and it paid off.
What do the historical chapters of Reincarnation look like?
They’re places on ordinary days, described by somebody standing in them.
Tenochtitlan in 1521. The market at Tlatelolco runs as far as he can see in every direction. Sixty thousand people on a market day and more at festivals, a number so large it’s stopped meaning anything except noise and heat and the smell of fresh tortillas and cacao and the blood of the animal stalls and the specific salt-rot of the dye quarter. He’s walked through it since he was a child and the size of it still does something to him.
A casualty clearing station in Pas-de-Calais in 1916. The ward smells of carbolic and, underneath the carbolic, of something the carbolic can’t reach. Nurse Agnes Parr has been there seven months and no longer notices it. She notices it now because the man in bed fourteen has it, and bed fourteen sits far enough from the door that the cross-draft doesn’t reach.
That’s the detail I wanted: a woman noticing a smell she’d stopped noticing, in a specific bed, at a specific distance from a door.
What happens in Frances Webb’s office in Reincarnation?
Two people arrive nine minutes late and something has changed since the previous week.
Frances notes the time and then tells herself she hasn’t. The charge that ran between Diana and Ruth in that room, and the careful way they avoided looking at each other, has gone. What replaced it is rawer.
Diana keeps her coat on for the first four minutes. Ruth sits as far to one side of her chair as the chair allows, shoulder turned fractionally away.
Then Diana takes her coat off.
That’s how the 1971 chapters work. Nothing supernatural is required for a therapist to read a room, and the regression sessions are considerably more effective for sitting inside an ordinary professional setting where somebody is paying attention to who sits where.
I loved writing Frances. She reads a room the way a good novelist has to, by watching who sits where and who keeps a coat on, and those sessions are where I got to be most patient with the reader.
What’s the present-day story in Reincarnation?
A marriage in a backyard in 1963 and everything that follows it.
The ceremony was in Vera Adelman’s backyard on a Saturday in June.
Researchers who study memory find, consistently, that people are certain of things that didn’t happen and wrong about things that did.
Twelve people. Folding chairs on the grass. Somebody had strung paper lanterns between the fence and the oak tree and the lanterns moved in the early evening air. There was food on a table by the back door, the things people bring. A casserole, bread, and a cake that leaned slightly to one side, which Ruth had made herself the night before and which Diana looked at with the expression she used for things she found endearing.
Eighty-two thousand years of recognition, and the chapter everything rests on is twelve people on folding chairs and a cake that leans. I love that it came down to something that small.
I was most careful with the modern story, because if it doesn’t work, none of the rest of it does.
| Setting | When | What happens |
|---|---|---|
| Overhang in East Africa | 78,000 years ago | A woman returns with a steenbok and recognizes him, with no words for it |
| Tenochtitlan | 1521 | A man walks the Tlatelolco market he has known since childhood |
| Casualty clearing station, Pas-de-Calais | 1916 | Nurse Agnes Parr notices a smell again in bed fourteen |
| Vera Adelman’s backyard | 1963 | A ceremony with twelve people and a cake Ruth made that leans |
| Frances Webb’s office, New Haven | 1971 | Regression sessions where a therapist reads who sits where |
| Soul sequences | Throughout | Run between the historical chapters and the therapy sessions |
Do you have to believe in reincarnation to read about it?
No, and the novel doesn’t ask you to.
You don’t need to believe in past lives or souls or anything outside a conventional life. What the book asks for is simpler. The willingness to follow two people across a very long time and to feel what it costs them to keep finding each other.
I’m also a Christian, and I hold both without contradiction. God is everything, and that includes the part of everything which persists across lives, accumulates experience, and reaches toward recognition across centuries without knowing why it’s reaching.
Are the historical chapters in Reincarnation accurate?
They’re memory, and memory is never clean. The book says so before it starts.
Diana and Ruth are modern people. Educated, analytical, shaped by the twentieth century, looking backward through an accumulation of lives layered on lives going back further than recorded history. What surfaces in Frances Webb’s office isn’t a documentary record.
Think about your own childhood. You remember it, and your memories are reconstructions shaped by what you felt at the time, what you learned later, the stories your family told, and a thousand small distortions between an event and its recall. Researchers who study memory find, consistently, that people are certain of things that didn’t happen and wrong about things that did.
Now multiply that by eighty-two thousand years and hundreds of lives.
What Diana and Ruth reach is real. The emotional truth, the recognition, the connection across time. The details may be compressed, blurred, or filtered through who they happen to be in 1971. Some of it is exact. Some of it is the shape of a thing instead of the thing itself.
I’d rather a reader argue with the details than miss the feeling. Writers who treat past-life fiction like a documentary end up defending dates when they should be making somebody ache, and I didn’t want to spend this book defending dates.
My take
Some ideas need a story before they land, and past lives is one of them, so I wrote a novel. You don’t need to believe in reincarnation to read it. Follow two people across a very long time and feel what it costs them to keep finding each other. The chapter I’d point you to is twelve people on folding chairs and a cake that leans. Eighty-two thousand years comes down to that, and I wouldn’t change it.
How does Reincarnation relate to God Is Everything?
One argues it and the other inhabits it.
God Is Everything is a structure, and a structure can be examined, agreed with, or rejected on its own terms. It can’t make you feel what a claim would mean if it were true. This is the same position with a body attached to it, in two people, across a very long time. That’s what novels are for and it’s the only reason to write one about a subject you’ve already argued in nonfiction. I think too many novels about big ideas are lectures with dialogue attached, and readers can smell it from the first page. I wanted this one to earn everything through Diana and Ruth and a cake that leans, and I’m prouder of that than of anything else in the book.
In a New Haven therapy office in 1971, two women start remembering lives that don’t belong to this one. Reincarnation braids those sessions with the lives themselves across eighty-two thousand years.
Frequently Asked Questions
- Since 1967, this small division at the University of Virginia has investigated the possibility of reincarnation, WVTF (Virginia Public Radio)
- Mexico’s first tianguis: The story of Tlatelolco market, Mexico News Daily
