“. . .His first novel, What Happened to Sophie Wilder, is about many things — the New York publishing world, the growing pains of post-collegiate life, the rigors of Roman Catholicism — but at its center it’s a moving meditation on why and for whom we write.
‘When we are inspired,’ the British psychologist Adam Phillips has observed, ‘rather like when we are in love, we can feel both unintelligible to ourselves and most truly ourselves.’ Just ask Dante. Or Charlie Blakeman, Beha’s 28-year-old novelist narrator. When first met, Charlie is renting a room from the uncle of a college acquaintance in a town house on Washington Square. He has published a novel that almost nobody noticed and the future of his writing career looks bleak. Enter — or make that re-enter — Sophie Wilder, the wise (Sophie), wild (Wilder) love of his life, whom he first encountered almost a decade earlier in a freshman writing workshop.” [. . .] –Sarah Towers, The New York Times, June 29, 2012
