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Bay Area physician and writer Christine Henneberg released her first book, the autobiographical “Boundless,” in late 2022. That book, which was the grand prize winner of the 2022 BookLife Prize Nonfiction Contest, reflected on Henneberg’s journey through medical school, her reproductive care career, and becoming a parent for the first time. After she wrote her memoir, she found she wanted to continue exploring “the very conflicted ambitions I felt between wanting to be a mother, wanting to be a writer, wanting to be a doctor,” she said. Beyond her own personal experience, she was also pondering “ideas and problems I could work out in fiction that I couldn’t in nonfiction. They needed to be dramatized and told in a certain way,” she said.
Henneberg, whose writing has been published in high-profile publications including The Atlantic and The New York Times, has now published her first novel. “I Trust Her Completely” is the story of an intense friendship, set against the backdrop of the Bay Area during the COVID-19 pandemic.
“There were so many different ways people responded to the constraints on our lives, how that amplified the ways that women, in particular mothers, can judge each other,” Henneberg said of life during lockdown. “I wanted to put that kind of friendship under the spotlight of a story.”
“I Trust Her Completely” is told from the perspective of Josie, a queer woman and writer living in San Francisco who’s recently decided to pursue motherhood as a single parent. By chance, she runs into Radhika, a friend from college whom she hasn’t seen in nearly 20 years. Radhika is as dazzling to Josie in adulthood as she was in their university days. After battling cancer as a young adult, she’s a successful physician who specializes in abortion and miscarriage care, living in a luxurious Laurel Heights home with a loving spouse and two adorable young children (although, Josie sometimes thinks, she doesn’t seem to particularly enjoy the demands of parenting). Radhika is also a gifted writer, with a book deal and deadline rapidly approaching. As she did back in college, Radhika takes Josie under her wing, suggesting they workshop each other’s manuscripts, encouraging Josie to finish the novel she’s long been working on. As their lives become more closely intertwined, they reckon with ambition, motherhood, choice and trust, with sometimes devastating results.
Josie and Radhika, though fully fictional, are not only drawn from some of Henneberg’s own feelings and experiences, but also serve to represent what she called the “inherent conflicts” that sometimes arise when people are making complex decisions about their health, about motherhood, and in life in general.
“There are moments where it’s about choice and plenty of moments where it’s about just choosing from the options that are available to you, and it doesn’t necessarily feel like a choice,” she said.
Working in health care, Henneberg meets people from many backgrounds and walks of life. She chose to make her protagonist a queer character in part to challenge stereotypes about who needs and receives reproductive care.
“I see that silencing of queer pregnancy, queer abortion, queer miscarriage,” she said. “Maybe for people who don’t live in that world or are not living in a queer community, it may not have occurred to them. It’s an unexplored dimension of women’s health and abortion care.”
As a doctor, Henneberg emphasizes her patients’ rights to make decisions that they feel are right for them, and she strives to give her fictional characters the same respect, even though they’re the products of her own imagination.
“I tried to strike a relationship where I could let her make choices that didn’t feel comfortable to me,” she said of Josie’s journey. “That makes it a stronger story.” The same goes for the character Radhika, who also faces difficult choices. Henneberg hopes the questions raised by their stories will prove thought-provoking.
“Who does a woman have to make decisions for when she’s making decisions about her body and her health?” she said.
While reproductive rights remain a difficult, sometimes contentious topic, especially in the wake of the 2022 U.S. Supreme Court decision overturning Roe v. Wade and the current political climate, Henneberg said she has in recent years noticed a slight shift.
“I do feel like women come into the clinic and, because they’ve read or heard more stories about abortion in the news, they know that they’re not alone,” she said. “Shame and guilt are still rampant but I just hear more women expressing a feeling that they’re not the only ones who have come to me for this problem. Maybe they don’t feel quite so alone or as invisible as before.”
Henneberg grew up in Palo Alto, and as a young teen won the Palo Alto Weekly’s Short Story Contest, with a story about junior high social dynamics. She’ll return to the Peninsula for a brunch event in Atherton on May 18, through Happy Women Dinners, among a few other events scheduled around the Bay Area in conjunction with her novel’s launch.
She said that she hopes readers who pick up the book will understand that while the characters are fictional, their experiences represent “stories that could and do really happen. That anyone could read them and think, ‘Oh god, these decisions are never simple, they’re always complicated, they’re almost always very hard,'” she said. “That’s not necessarily a good thing, but I think it’s a good thing for all women to know and recognize when they have to make hard decisions of their own.”
More information is available at christinehenneberg.com.
