When An Author's Fourth Wall Breaks
In celebration of the release of The Gulf of Lions and in recognition of the lions that lurk in the odyssey of ordinary life.
This post is so much more than a celebration of the release of The Gulf of Lions by Caitlin Shetterly. Yes, today is the day this book releases into the world. It is beautiful. Full of depth. Complexity. “Urgent and unforgettable,” as my blurb pointed out. But it’s the story behind the story that I want to share with you today.
As Caitlin and I were chatting in the lead up to publication, I asked if she wouldn’t mind sharing in this space the way her real life began to mirror the fictional world she had created. The Gulf of Lions is about a mother who, recovering from the trauma of breast cancer and a mastectomy, takes a once-in-a-lifetime trip across France with her two daughters. In France, she finds out what it means to fully live.
And for Caitlin, she discovered what it was to live alongside her character when she was diagnosed with the exact same breast cancer. I’ll let her tell her own story, as she shared these words during a recent event:
Last April, six months after I sent my newest novel off to my editor, I was diagnosed with cancer in my left breast. It was the exact same kind of cancer I had meticulously researched for an entire year to give to my main character, Alice. Mine was in the exact same breast as hers.
When I started The Gulf of Lions, I had set out to write a book about a mother who not only survives cancer but thrives. I’d noticed, over the years of reading aloud to my two sons, that in many books, the mother was often disconcertingly dead or dying. My sons liked to tease me about it. But I was tired of this trope. (I have a feeling it made them uneasy, too.)
I wanted to know: What would a woman who’s busy surviving cancer instead of dying from it do with her “one wild and precious life”? My answer came while traveling across France in 2022 with my husband and sons: Obviously, she’ll go to France. Once I had that, the story poured out of me: France, the wine and food, the cafés and sunlight, the Pyrenees and Mediterranean, Alice’s fear giving way to joy—it was all so vivid, so tactile. I felt good when I sent the book off.
It was a cold spring morning when a nurse practitioner called me to deliver the news. What happened to me then was an existential crisis: My fourth wall was broken. The division between myself and my main character shattered. I had never experienced anything like that before. And now it seemed that the only person who could truly understand what I was going through was Alice, my fictional friend.
At that time, so many terrible things were happening in America and across the globe. I had already not been sleeping much since March. My cancer felt like a mere footnote.
I texted a friend around this time, “I am just unsure that hope is truly something that is helpful to a person who is scared or up against it…what I’m finding is that hope is actually dangerous for me. I have to be available to all options. That leaves me with a question of faith.” Faith, I reasoned further, was nothing without hope. They were inextricably entwined. And by faith, I mean faith in the natural world, in essential goodness, in ourselves. Anyway, when one goes, I was learning, so does the other.
Every night last spring, after the lights were out, my husband, Dan, played a piece of music called “Mirror in the mirrors,” by the Estonian composer Arvo Pärt on his phone. All we could do was hold hands and listen to Part’s ethereal music in the dark. It was impossible to contain the tears that slid down my cheeks.
In May, two days before Mother’s Day, I had a lumpectomy and a lymphadenectomy—breast conserving surgery. (My character, Alice, had not been so lucky: she’d lost her entire breast, something she has a terrible time reconciling in my novel.)
On a cold, rainy day in June I got “mapped” for radiation—that means they put little tattooed dots on your skin which technicians will use to line up the radiation machines. My five weeks of radiation were scheduled to start in six days. During that mapping session, as I lay in the tube, holding my breath for long periods so that they could make sure that the radiation wouldn’t hit my lung, the enormity of what was happening suddenly hit me.
I went to the car and sat alone in the parking lot. I called my friend Rachel and told her I was too terrified now to go to radiation alone. The whole thing had snowballed for me, I couldn’t be brave anymore.
Rachel told me she would take care of it. Within a few days, she had set up a round robin of friends, and even three of my friends’ husbands, who would drive me to Maine Med in Portland for my daily appointments and then drive me back home.
In the waiting room at each appointment, I sat unashamedly close to them, my leg touching theirs, their soft animal comfort next to me. Not one of them moved away, not even the husbands. They didn’t know it, but something was getting solved for me in their warm, generous presence: a deep feeling of unworthiness I’d carried since I was a child was softening.
I will remember last summer as one of the best periods of my life. Yes, radiation hurts terribly. But this odyssey, every day, with the gentle care of my friends, and the nurses and technicians at Maine Med, was astoundingly moving.
When my radiation was over, I realized, all of a sudden, that hope had come back, like a moth fluttering in through a hole in the screen on a summer night.
Faith took many more months to reappear for me, and even now it’s a shaky daily practice. I find it in moments of gentleness between people, in the resilience of the natural world, in my two sons’ courage and tender smiles, in the comfort of sitting next to my neighbors on Sunday mornings in church.
My novel is about to be published. The story I have just told you will not be on its pages when it hits bookshelves in two weeks. I am faced now with wondering how I will explain my personal journey, and more, how I will reconcile for myself in a more public way that I am still in the middle part; that I don’t know the end yet.
When I named my novel The Gulf of Lions it was for both a stretch of the Mediterranean Sea in Southern France where Alice takes her daughters after she’s recovered from cancer, and, also, for the lions that can lurk in the odyssey of an ordinary life.
The truth is that most of us have dangerous and scary journeys at some point in our lives—we share this with each other. And in this time in the world, in particular, when so many are enduring the worst cruelty humanity has to offer, it’s important to remember that we have each other.
The simplest thing we can do, I know now, is to sit as close as we can, let our legs touch, maybe a shoulder. Just being there doesn’t take the suffering way, but it might improve it. It might even let in a tiny sliver of hope, which makes all the difference. What comes after hope, when faith returns, is the true mystery of the universe.
Trust me when I say that you don’t want to miss this story. Grab a copy for yourself and one for a friend. Add it to your book club calendar. This is a story to both savor and share. Find it at your favorite bookseller or at the link below.
Want to hear more of Caitlin’s story? Check out these additional articles:
https://people.com/i-gave-a-character-cancer-then-got-it-too-exclusive-11976504
https://www.bookreporter.com/blog/2026/05/06/changing-the-narrative-on-dead-moms-in-books
https://lithub.com/alice-and-me-how-my-struggle-with-cancer-mirrored-my-protagonists/