Road Traveled

I wrote this novel with one question in mind: can a man still maintain a noble, chivalrous masculinity in the modern world without becoming a fraud, a predator, or a performance of strength rather than the real thing?  That question is at the center of The Road Traveled and its protagonist, Garrett Moore. Popular culture has given us no shortage of men who admire old codes of masculinity without truly living them. Tony Soprano, for example, famously asks what happened to Gary Cooper, "e;the strong, silent type,"e; even as his own life is marked by violence, infidelity, self-destruction, and the ruin of others. Don Draper projects the image of a composed, admirable man while privately unraveling and leaving damage in his wake. Garrett is my attempt to test something different. He is a young man trying to move through a modern world of ambition, sex, fame, academia, loneliness, temptation, and emotional chaos without losing the decency that formed him. He is not perfect. He craves recognition. He can be proud, stubborn, jealous, and self-protective. But this is not a solitary study of masculinity, because no man exists in a vacuum. Garrett's trajectory is actively shaped, challenged, and mirrored by an array of fiercely ambitious women who refuse to be passive observers. At the center is Emily. She is a woman of immense intellectual brilliance—a national lecturer and author of celebrated literary biographies—who finds herself structurally constrained by a small college, having anchored her life where her less capable husband landed. Emily is navigating her own complex web as the protégé of an esteemed male professor who has always harbored predatory designs on her. That tension is further multiplied by his wife, Marie, a prominent and observant psychologist. Surrounding them are Alyssa, Vanessa, and Allison, young women aggressively carving out the early, volatile stages of their own careers, alongside April, who manages the sharp-edged gatekeeping of the publishing world. Because life does not compartmentalize itself, this book refuses to sit neatly in a single genre. It is a deliberate hybrid. It pulls threads from romance, psychological tension, institutional ambition, and the darker edges of human obsession to form a holistic lesson in human behavior. It is a study of power—who holds it, who weaponizes it, and how gender and generation alter the rules of engagement.