Inspiration: I didn’t know anything about DID (dissociative identity disorder, aka multiple personalities) until I began my own healing journey. When I was diagnosed with DID, I realized it was nothing like the cringe-worthy stereotypes on shows and in movies. And I came to know many others with DID who didn’t feel it was safe to come out because of those painful stereotypes. I wanted to replace them with what I saw in these friends: being different, being brave. It would be complicated, alien to most readers. They’d need a compelling story to carry them through. And then I found the opening to the novel in a small news story: a mysterious death, a surviving infant.
“Astonishing, shocking, loving…Step into this novel and you will find yourself submerged; wake from it, and you will find yourself transformed. Web of Angels is a rare gift, perfectly named; within this novel, Lilian Nattel has offered us the work, the weave, of angels.”
– Gail Anderson-Dargatz, author of The Cure for Death by Lightening, A Recipe for Bees and Turtle Valley
On a narrow street in the grey of dawn, in a row house with stained glass, a sixteen-year-old girl lay motionless. Her hair was blonde, short, gelled in spikes, her legs unshaven, her pink nightgown straining over a nine-month belly. Her sister leaned against her, whispering her name, while far away in a watery world, the baby opened her eyes.
Web of Angels
What happens when a woman’s hidden past returns to haunt her home and neighbourhood?
On the surface of things, Sharon Lewis is a lot like any other happily married mother of three: she is the beating heart of a house full of kids, cooking and chaos, with an uncanny knack of knowing where her husband put the car keys and who needs a little extra TLC. As a busy mom, her only time to herself is at night, connecting with others like herself, as she truly is, on the internet.
Life is good until the morning Heather Edwards, a pregnant, teenage friend of the family, kills herself. The reverberations of that act, and the ugly secrets that sparked it, prove deeply unsettling to Sharon’s whole family, and stir up her own troubling realities: she has DID, or dissociative identity disorder, previously termed “multiple personalities.” And the multiples who comprise the woman the world knows as Sharon are aware of something about Heather, and what may be happening to Heather’s surviving sister. Will Sharon’s urge for justice and her need to protect the innocent out her true nature? Will a woman with DID be able to persuade her quiet and respectable community that crime is at home there, too?
“An important book. Groundbreaking, demanding, brave and beautiful. Unforgettable fiction. Brilliant. The miracle is that, in Nattel’s hands, this book becomes a testimony to the fierce kindness in the human spirit that battles evil and wins.”
– Sheree Fitch, author of Kiss the Joy as it Flies and Pluto’s Ghost