Debut Novelist Holly LaBarbera Tackles Serious Subjects in 'All I Know'

Therapist, adjunct professor, and author, Holly LaBarbera, joins us to discuss her debut novel, All I Know. As she describes it, “The story is about two intertwined, dysfunctional families… it’s about this one woman’s discovery to move beyond your childhood wounds and issues and how to find love and live a healthy life with healthy adult relationships. The main character, Kai, has been in love with this boy for her whole life… [it] starts as a crush and develops into an adult relationship, but she needs to, kind of, find her way to love herself before she can love anyone else, and so it’s kind of her journey of that, but I really wanted to explore these complexities of families and how it impacts us as adults because that’s something I work with all the time as a therapist.”

While her novel includes a love story, LaBarbera also explores other relationships within the book, including the sibling relationship between Kai and her twin brother, Kade. “I was very close with my brother and sister, and I really wanted to delve into… different types of relationships, but the sibling relationship was really important to me… and I think twins have this kind of thing of even more so, this more of a connection and yet you are these two different people, and Kai and Kade have different struggles… and they have different relationships with their parents that make things very complicated, particularly for Kade… He’s depressed, and so I wanted to also show how that impacts him and also how it impacts Kai and the rest of the family… I work with a lot of depressed teens, but I also work with a lot of kids and adults that have family members going through struggles like that, and so I wanted to represent their perspectives, both of those perspectives.”

For LaBarbera, writing the first draft of All I Want only took 6 months to complete, but editing and revising the entire story took about 2-3 years. With the demands of her day job, she found it difficult to carve out small amounts of time each day to work on her writing. Instead, she chose to work on it in large portions at a time. She remarked, “I want to spend a whole weekend just writing nonstop or revising or editing… I need big chunks of time and so I’ve done that. I’ll block out a weekend and then I’m working on it all that weekend. Doing the whole half-hour a day or an hour a day thing doesn’t really work. It’s hard for me to transition from my clients, and my private practice, and my teaching, and that kind of thing, and my family, and then transition to the book and then transition out of it, so it works better for me to set aside a clump of time and do it then, and so that’s kind of how I work with it.”