About This Episode
Julee Balko is back on Uncorking a Story to talk about her third novel, Square Hearts. The book follows Nicola Cooper, a widow who lost her husband in a tragic car accident two years earlier. When her husband's best friend offers her a cottage in North Carolina, Nicola tries to rebuild her life — but gets tangled up with a narcissistic neighbor, unexpected lessons in lust from her daughter's violin teacher, and margarita nights that keep pulling her closer to a man who's a reminder of everything she lost.
At the center of the story is the idea that every heart has four sides — and the journey to put them back together after loss. Julee and Mike talk about writing grief with honesty, representing neurodivergent characters authentically, the pull of romance tropes, and why self-love might be the most important love story of all.
Key Takeaways
- Self-love is the real love story. Julee deliberately wrote a second-chance romance with a twist — one where the woman falls back in love with herself as much as with another person. Readers in later stages of life have responded strongly to this theme.
- Neurodivergent representation matters. Julee's three daughters are neurodivergent, and she felt girls with autism and different forms of neurodivergence are underrepresented in fiction. The character Daisy gets five chapters from her own point of view, and readers with autistic children have told Julee she "got it right."
- Grief becomes part of your story. Unlike her first novel which was about processing grief, Square Hearts explores how grief integrates into your life and how you learn to love again while carrying it.
- Narcissism makes compelling fiction. Inspired by a real friendship with a narcissist, Julee used specific language patterns from her research to create the character MAVE — a "found family gone wrong" who sweeps Nicola up before revealing her true nature.
- Two years felt like the right amount of time. Julee chose to set the story two years after Nicola's husband's death — enough time that readers would accept her beginning to move on, but recent enough that grief still drives the narrative.
- First drafts should be fast and furious. Julee writes her first drafts quickly without overthinking, and finds that being in "writing mode" makes her a noticer of everything — grocery store conversations, small moments — all become material.
- Book four is halfway done. The next novel follows a woman obsessed with romance books whose lofty expectations start to erode her marriage. Julee describes it as snarky and fun.
Square Hearts
A novel about how the heart has many sides, but people have even more. A second-chance love story with a twist.