Madeleine Henry Interview - The Love Proof ~ JeanBookNerd

Photo Content from Madeleine Henry

Madeleine Henry started her career at Goldman Sachs. While working in finance, she became moved by yoga philosophy and left the field to write.

Her novels incorporate yoga, Zen, and New Age ideas across a variety of genres. Madeleine has appeared on NBC, WABC, and The Jenny McCarthy Show. She has been featured in the New York Post and Parade. She graduated from Yale in 2014. She shares more information about her life on @MadeleineHenryYoga and about her upcoming third novel on @FoodFightBook.

Who or what has influenced your writing, and in what way?

I admire how precise Donna Tartt’s language is in The Goldfinch. It’s detailed, intricate prose that creates the most vivid world I’ve ever found in a book. I’d say it’s lifelike, but it’s richer than that. She is so observant that reading Theo’s perspective creates the experience of being an enhanced human being.

I admire Blake Crouch for turning my mind inside out. His stories engross me as the stakes escalate out of this world, beyond my wildest expectations, until they’re tapping into questions of what reality is and what it means to be human.

I admire Tracey Garvis Graves for how warm her latest book is. Content creators have a choice of what to emphasize in this world, and I appreciate when people emphasize warmth and love.

Last, I have a background in journalism and finance, which taught me to value truth and brevity. I also practice a lot of yoga, which helps keep me in touch with my heart and soul and enriches my writing with yogic ideas and themes.

Tell us your most rewarding experience since being published.

Every minute I get to write with the reasonable expectation that I will get to share those words is a privilege, and I don’t forget that. Everything else is just icing on the cake.

What do you hope for readers to be thinking when they read your novel?

I hope readers connect with The Love Proof. I hope it’s a peacemaking novel, that it touches people’s souls, that it contributes to healing, and that it encourages people to see the best in others and in themselves. I hope it’s a force of good.

What was the single worst distraction that kept you from writing this book?

I like to think that I’m pretty focused and don’t have distractions, but maybe that’s just because I’ve rationalized all of my distractions and view them as contributions to a full life.

What part of Sophie did you enjoy writing the most?

I love writing about good people. I view Sophie as deeply good, so I enjoyed writing everything about her. Especially the moments when she was most wounded and tender. Maybe because those felt like a nourishing escape from the rest of the world, where most people tend to have their guards up, hiding their struggles and weaknesses. So, her ache for Jake and her sensitivity were beautiful oases to me.

Can you tell us when you started THE LOVE PROOF, how that came about?

I started writing this book in 2018, the same year I left my job in finance because I felt like that profession lacked heart and human connection. I wanted to be involved in something with more soul. This book expresses that revelation, among other things.

If you could introduce one of your characters to any character from another book, who would it be and why?

I would introduce Allegra from Breathe In, Cash Out to Michael Singer of the memoirs The Untethered Soul and The Surrender Experiment because I think he would help her find peace. Allegra is an investment banker in New York City, harboring a secret dream of being a yogi. She’s suffering because her life is the opposite of what she wants. Finance is a stressful field focused on making as much money as possible. Yoga values love and peace.

Singer teaches that we’ll suffer as long as we keep trying to mold our lives into what we wish they were, instead of accepting our lives as they are. He advises that we let go, surrender to the flow of the universe, and trust that it will carry us to wherever we need to be.

TEN QUOTES FROM THE LOVE PROOF

10. Jake and Sophie stood three steps apart, their bodies connected by light.
9. Oddly, learning about widespread loneliness had made him feel momentarily less alone.
8. “A lot of people think science is sterile”—Jake’s ears pricked up—“and heartless and boring, but not me. I’ve always had this feeling that there are eyes in everything, that the world is alive down to the atom. But we grow up and start to see things the way we expect. We stop questioning, listening, but I think the universe is always talking to us: through symbols, our guts, or feelings we can’t explain. I want to know as much as I can.”
7. “If you could have any dream come true, what would it be?” he asked.
“I’d want to know everything. You?”
“I’d want to have everything.”
6. Sophie kissed him. They froze in a wishbone angle joined at the mouth.
5. For Sophie, he’d wondered, who’d been there just to sit and talk? Beyond that, who’d had the intellectual capacity to engage with the full breadth of her mind? To ask about her morning, what she ate for lunch, and then, just as seamlessly, what she thought of the fact that when you line up the angular velocities of planets in their orbits and put them into a ratio, we find what is considered our major and minor musical scales today? Is there a rhythm to the universe?
4. “In a course devoted to time, a difference of time is in fact the most important kind of difference of all.”
3. “I’m sorry to say this, but you are thirty minutes less than what you might have been.”
2. Their cursors pulsed like pinned clock hands.
1. “All right,” he said. “To the start of time.” writing the book.

What’s the most ridiculous fact you know?

Only 40-percent of the world is free! Only 57-percent has access to the internet.

What were you doing the last time you really had a good laugh?

Last night, my fiancé and I watched an episode of “Portlandia” on Netflix which really got me. In the episode, Fred wakes up to find that he’s gone completely gray. It turns out, he doesn’t know how old he is. So, he tries to figure out his age. Really, the episode explores aging and people’s resistance to it in a hilarious way. Fred starts to worry that he hasn’t done anything meaningful with his life yet, so he thinks maybe he should have a kid. It was so ridiculous, but somehow relatable. I got kind of hysterical.

Best date you've ever had?

The first date I ever had with my fiancé! He took me to the “Meet the Breeds” event for the Westminster Kennel Club. That’s where there are two of every kind of dog. We went around the arena petting a hundred different dogs together (in a pre-COVID world!).

If you could go back in time to one point in your life, where would you go?

I’m really enjoying the present, so I don’t think I would accept that offer! Life gets better the older I get. Young people are forced into so many big groups: classes at school, sports teams, dormitories, analyst classes at big firms. Everything was an organized group activity, and that was tough for me because I’m pretty introverted. The older I get, though, the more freedom I have with my time, so I can carve out slices for myself. Over the years, I think your life becomes an increasingly true expression of who you are.

What's the most memorable summer job you've ever had?

I lived in Washington, D.C., for a few summers as an intern at the Treasury. It was interesting to live and work in the geographic center of American politics.

What event in your life would make a good movie?

With a good writer, anything’s possible!

My first book, Breathe In, Cash Out, as I mentioned, is about an investment banker who wants to be a yogi. That story is loosely based on my own experiences, as I used to work in finance and practiced yoga obsessively during that time. That period would make a good movie, because it taps into a broader phenomenon of people in office jobs having existential crises. We look at our phones, see Instagram influencers in glamorized lifestyles, and wonder why we’re still at a desk and not meditating in Kauai.

What is something you think everyone should do at least once in their lives?

Develop some sort of spirituality. I think it’s important to disidentify with the material, physical world and see yourself as part of something greater and beyond this one human life. I believe that’s good for mental health.

What was a time in your life when you were really scared?

In between leaving my job in finance and selling my first novel, I was scared that it might not sell. But I took a giant leap of faith, started writing The Love Proof, and promised myself that I’d keep writing for as long as I can.

What was the best memory you ever had as a writer?

When WME agreed to represent my first book! It sounds silly looking back on it, but that’s when I thought I’d really made it, that there was no higher mountain in this world to climb than that one. I felt euphoric. It’s so hard to get any attention at all for a piece of writing, and that was the first time I got a real endorsement from someone in the business.

Where can readers find you?

I’m on Instagram @MadeleineHenryYoga, on Goodreads, on Simon & Schuster’s website, and my author website is www.itsmadeleinehenry.com. I will be doing several events for The Love Proof starting in February, and details for those are on Goodreads.

A brilliant physicist studying the nature of time embarks on a journey to prove that those we love are always connected to us, leading to surprising revelations in this fresh and unique love story.

Sophie Jones is a physics prodigy on track to unlock the secrets of the universe. But when she meets Jake Kristopher during their first week at Yale they instantly feel a deep connection, as if they’ve known each other before. Quickly, they become a couple. Slowly, their love lures Sophie away from school.

When a shocking development forces Sophie into a new reality, she returns to physics to make sense of her world. She grapples with life’s big questions, including how to cope with unexpected change and loss. Inspired by her connection with Jake, Sophie throws herself into her studies, determined to prove that true loves belong together in all realities.

Spanning decades, The Love Proof is an unusual love story about lasting connection, time, and intuition. It explores the course that perfect love can take between imperfect people, and urges us to listen to our hearts rather than our heads.

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