Jessica Scott | Identity

A few weeks ago, I gave a talk at Unsuitable Duke on Alpha Masculinities in romance and one of the things I talked about was identity – how my romance heroes and heroines see themselves. In his book THE RIGHTEOUS MIND, Jonathan Haidt argues that morality blinds and binds. It binds you to a group but it also blinds you to the world beyond your group. My heroes are strongly bound to their group. Their identity is often wrapped up tightly in being a soldier. And they're all pretty damn certain about the world they live in and the way that it works.

First Sergeant Gale Sorren is absolutely bound up in his identity as a soldier. He's lead his entire life focused on being a soldier. On leading his men. Even after his wife left him and took their daughter with her, he was still focused on being a soldier. Except that now he realizes that he's screwed up royally. So he's at Hood to try and make amends to his daughter.

But he's not counting on developing feelings for his ex-wife again. And Mel is just like the rest of my heroines. They hold up a mirror and show them that the world may not be the world they thought it was. It's not that they're wrong so much as it's that they're not right. And Mel has to realize that she's made mistakes, too. Both of them are a looking glass for the other.

The challenge for me as the author is to set up a way for both my hero to be right and my heroine to be right. I don't want to break either of them. The idea of a happily ever after for me is not one being wrong or right but to find a partner who makes you better. Gale has to trust Mel to love him despite everything that he's done during the war. And Mel has to trust that he's going to be there for her when he's never been before.

The central idea in all my books really is coming home from war. It's not just getting off a bus and putting on civilian clothes. It's changing everything about the way you interact with the environment. It's changing the people you are around. When you're deployed, the people around you are other warriors. The normal world that you take for granted here – going to the grocery store, toilet paper in the bathrooms, or even just going to sleep with the relative certainty that you won't die in your sleep are all things we don't really think about every day. But when you come home, it's a culture shock. The only place you feel "right" is with the people you were deployed with. And it's a process to reconnect with your family. And for someone who has never had that connection, it's a complete upending of his way of interacting in the world. Gale has to learn how to be a father to a teenage daughter. He's also got to learn how to be lover to his ex-wife before she can trust him again. But they're both learning to reconnect, to love again. To trust.

At the heart of my stories are always a reunion. Either coming home from war or reuniting with an old love. It's connecting with a world outside of the army, to someone who loves you regardless. That's the heart of the stories in the new Homefront Series. I hope you'll check them out.

About HOMEFRONT

He's always loved her...

First Sergeant Gale Sorren waited a war and half a lifetime for a chance to get stationed near the ex-wife who left him years ago. When he finally musters the courage to see her, the life he imagined she was living was nothing close to the reality.

She's never stopped loving him...

Melanie never stopped worrying about Gale each time he headed off to war. But he's never been there when she needed him and she's had fifteen years to steel her heart against him.

But when Gale moves to Fort Hood, he finally has a chance to make things right with Melanie and the daughter she raised without him.

Can Mel trust her heart to a man who has always let her down?

About Jessica Scott

Jessica Scott is a career army officer, mother of two daughters, three cats and three dogs, wife to a career NCO and wrangler of all things stuffed and fluffy. She is a terrible cook and even worse housekeeper, but she's a pretty good shot with her assigned weapon and someone liked some of the stuff she wrote. Somehow, her children are pretty well adjusted and her husband still loves her, despite burned water and a messy house.

She's written for the New York Times At War Blog, PBS Point of View Regarding War, and IAVA. She deployed to Iraq in 2009 as part of OIF/New Dawn and has served as a company commander at Fort Hood, Texas.

She's pursuing a PhD in Sociology in her spare time and she was featured as one of Esquire Magazine's Americans of the Year for 2012.