Solitary Refinement grew from closely observing demanding neighbors: superficial people armed with vicious, gossip-heavy conversation; morning driveway divas gathering with alcohol-infused coffees; gaggles of one-uppers congregating at the country club and golf course; and the cult-de-sac patrol zealously hunting for violations of the covenants and restrictions. Those scenes, voices, and little power plays became the raw material for a book about isolation, performance, and the strange theater of suburban life.

If you work from home, you already know the pleasure of being interrupted mid-thought by someone who needs you right now, for a crisis that will evaporate the moment you stand up. Balancing family, work, pets, household chores, and volunteer shifts is already a three-ring circus with a leaking tent. When the circus is interrupted, your carefully regimented schedule becomes a statistic.

I was an insignificant outlier that nobody invited to the important tables; the one with no social status and a “little writing hobby.” My husband and I raised our kids the old-fashioned way, teaching them the value of hard work and the responsibility of being decent citizens—instead of outsourcing them to a team of specialists.

We mowed our own lawn, maintained our own vehicles, remodeled the house, and spent decades applying that same energy to animal rescue—questionable mutts, fosters, and the medically hopeless. One of them was Patch: a 13½-year-old food-driven Beagle-Basset mix who showed up incontinent, heartworm-positive, brain-tumored, arthritic, Cushing’s-ridden, tailless, and unclaimed. Vet said three weeks. Patch said nothing, ate everything, and lived three more years, mostly out of spite and the possibility of snacks. Patch now lives on in Solitary Refinement as Snaggletooth, the protagonist’s elderly hard-luck mutt and rebuttal to veterinary estimates.

Meanwhile, others had “staff” to complete chores, raise the trophy children, and walk designer dogs that cost more than our first car.

Living in upscale suburbia was punishment enough, but I became overwhelmed by entitled narcissists with misplaced priorities, all demanding attention. There were no filters, no boundaries, and no regard for private property or personal space. Spandex clad royalty on their way to the gym or day spa; discontented housewives with augmented breasts and cheating husbands; and the arrogance of well-dressed men boasting about money, investment clubs, and how successful they were. But I watched marriages collapse, money evaporate, and overleveraged estates go on the auction block.

Home security cameras regularly alerted me to sneaky HOA board members depositing nastygrams in our mailbox. A handful of power-hungry individuals who spoke fluent bylaws became the self-appointed bastions on neighborly conduct; those who viewed excess grass clippings as a war crime.

Daily intrusions included modulating chimes of the doorbell, garbled speech through the intercom, and incessant calls to my cell and landline. There were committees to chair, fashion shows at the club, and surprise inspections from the HOA architectural committee to measure the height of our lawn. And while I desperately wish that the creation of a neighborhood sub-committee known as “Street Captains” was part of a fictitious narrative, sadly, it was not.

While the HOA enforcers kept trying to intimidate me into silence, I was quietly taking notes, memorizing voice inflections, and casting them for a future literary debut. Country club meetings were just field research. Silence wasn’t surrender—it was reconnaissance.

I felt sorry for these people and imagined how exhausting keeping up appearances must be. Suddenly, a story began to unfold about a woman who desperately holds onto a false life and loses her grasp on reality. Hiding in a house she can no longer afford, in a neighborhood she cannot afford to leave, while her former circle remains blissfully unaware that one of their own has fallen off the map. She quickly becomes collateral damage, and the elitists who once defined her world, have turned on her.

I penned Solitary Refinement as a satirical skewering of the terminally self-absorbed. But it’s also a story with heart, giving the protagonist a genuine, if messy, path toward becoming a more decent human being. It’s a story about the gap between the life you perform and the life you actually live, and how losing everything can finally make room for what’s truly important.