E.H. Jacobs

I am a New England based writer and psychologist. After earning my bachelor's degree from Vassar College and my Ph.D. from Temple University, and training at Harvard Medical School, I served in various professional capacities as well as being on the clinical faculty of Harvard Medical School. I was in private practice for many years. After writing and publishing books, articles, papers and book reviews in psychology, I decided to pursue and study more literary forms of writing. I have always been a voracious reader of all types of subject matter - fiction, nonfiction, and poetry. Over the past decade, I have published fiction, poetry and nonfiction pieces in various literary journals.

My second novel, Into a Wider Sky: A Tragic Novel of Good Intentions, highlights ethical boundaries that we might cross with good intentions but without realizing the complex factors motivating us, which then have serious personal and family consequences. The story follows a middle-aged psychologist, Dr. Alexander Nicholas Hoffman, who is struggling with the feelings of impotence and insecurity that often beset us as we age. Alex is a successful, competent and conservative professional and family man who, along with his anxieties about aging, is struggling with guilt and confusion over his missing adult daughter and his feeling that he is not accomplishing enough professionally. These feelings are exacerbated by his jealousy of his one-time rival, Dr. Antony Santa Maria, who has become well known because of a book he published that promotes his questionable clinical practices. In his frustration with a chronically depressed patient, Alex decides to surreptitiously enter her life through online chat rooms in order to push her to make changes that he has been unable to see her accomplish through their therapy. When she finds this out, the patient pursues a relationship with a shady character and treatment with Antony, both of whom end up exploiting her with disastrous results for herself, Antony and Alex. Ale also finds that his younger daughter has been dating another patient of his, a teen-age arsonist who killed his own mother in a fire he set, and, because of patient confidentiality, he is unable to tell her why he is so opposed to the relationship. This novel engages the reader in a family and ethical drama in which the stakes keep being raised until the end.

Splintered River is my first published novel. I began thinking of this work after the killing of Michael Brown in Ferguson, Missouri. That tragedy, and too many similar ones since, greatly disturbed me, as it did many Americans. I remember seeing this very powerful black and white drawing in the Broad Foundation in LA by Robert Longo depicting the police in Ferguson. Longo's image has stayed with me and haunted me since. I began collecting newspaper reports of the shooting and its aftermath. I became interested in how that incident and subsequent ones were dealt with, responded to, used and manipulated by so many people, for good and for ill. We tend to see the players as good or bad, depending on our point of view, but, as a psychologist, I understand that even those with noble motives might be spurred on by unconscious forces that they do not understand, and those we see as "bad" might be more complex than we give them credit for. I was also, at the time, doing reading in Chaos Theory, and was fascinated by its focus on complex systems (like society) maintaining a certain equilibrium until too much complexity is added to the system so the system has to shift into a new, unexpected, form of organization to maintain its existence. I started imagining how small actions by various people, maybe not that impactful in and of themselves, might accumulate and upset the apple cart to a disastrous point of no return.

This has been the evolution of my thinking for this novel, and I am very gratified that I found a publisher that valued my vision.

We are all familiar with that old cliché about life imitating art. The recent political and legal controversy about the president’s deployment of the National Guard in California eerily echoes the constitutional crisis depicted in my novel, Splintered River. In the novel, the ambiguities in the Constitution about command of the National Guard troops—whether and when they are under the command of the governor or the president—get exploited by a power hungry politician to sow chaos and public unrest that eventually lurches out of his, and everyone’s control. The history of our country’s founding, with the distrust of a standing army, the prohibition of having the armed forces deployed in domestic situations, the delicate and inexact balance of the sovereignty of the individual states within a strong federal system, and the need for a strong federal government to preserve the integrity of our country, comes into play in our current political situation as it does in the novel. And then there is the right to bear arms. This aspect of the Second Amendment gets highlighted as well in the novel, with unforeseen contradictions between that right and the integrity of federal sovereignty over the states, and the ambiguity over what, exactly, constitutes a “militia.” These issues are brought to life through the stories of the characters caught up in the events that are larger than them, that they are trying understand, control and, ultimately, survive: a Black teenager having prophetic visions who is shot by a white police officer who mistakes him for a threat, the police officer, who has taken a stand against racism in his department, now coping with his guilt, self-doubt and need to defend himself, a small-town mayor with white supremacist leanings, the first Black governor of his state, caught between powerful public and political figures more ambitious than himself, a Black preacher with political ambitions pushing the boundaries of the white political establishment in order to do the right thing for his followers, an enterprising reporter trying to reestablish her good name, a vice president seizing an opportunity to wrest power from a weak president, the vice president’s wife, medicated and institutionalized, in whom the memory of a long-buried scandal reawakens, the U.S. chief justice, a young woman with a complicated history with the vice president, and the grieving mother of the slain teenager, trying to survive with her sense of purpose and her dignity intact.

These events we are living through have real effects on the lives of real people, and Splintered River takes us into the hearts and minds of ordinary people trying to cope with and make sense of these forces before being crushed by them.