On Writing Women’s Lives

People write for many different reasons. I certainly do not write to turn my own life into content. I am interested in women’s lives and stories, not in the public consumption of an author’s private life. I am interested in human situations, in decisions and their consequences, and in the moment when someone realizes that the rules they have lived by may never have been their own.

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I write in Hungarian because that is the language in which my stories first take shape, even though my life has long unfolded between different languages and cultures. I am Hungarian, but I no longer see the world exclusively from a Hungarian perspective. Over time, I have become European in outlook, shaped by many different cultures.

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My childhood was defined by two very different worlds. I grew up in socialist Hungary, with a mother who studied Marxist philosophy and a father with a Western outlook, whose work allowed him to cross the Iron Curtain regularly. I learned early that the same reality can be described through two entirely different stories, each of them internally true. That way of seeing has stayed with me ever since, shaping both my worldview and the way I think. It taught me not to interpret the events, experiences, and realities around me from a single point of view.

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As a young adult, I had to find my place in the economic and social landscape of a country that had collapsed and was rapidly rebuilding itself. For twenty-five years, I worked in leadership roles, mostly in international and strongly male-dominated environments, within a Central and Eastern Europe that was itself being reconstructed. For historical reasons alone, there were almost no usable female leadership models available to me. I had to learn how to make decisions, negotiate, take responsibility, claim space and hold it without losing myself in the process.

This experience is not merely biographical background to my books. It is a way of seeing.

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In my stories, I often write about power, intimacy, family inheritance, female autonomy, and unspoken agreements. These questions do not interest me as theory, but in practice: within relationships, friendships, families, workplaces, and social situations where personal decisions soon reveal themselves to be never entirely personal.

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I do not write flawless heroes, and I do not write parables. I write people who are usually intelligent, competent, and well-intentioned, yet still misunderstand others, defend themselves badly, remain silent when they should speak, and speak when they would be better off listening. I am not looking for villains, but for situations and interpretations. I am interested in how love becomes control, care becomes expectation, self-protection becomes attack, or closeness becomes freedom.

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Humour is part of the same way of seeing. Human behaviour is rarely only tragic or only ridiculous. Most of the time, it is both. Even the most serious situations contain something absurd, and even the lightest moments can carry real stakes.

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For me, fiction is not a brightly coloured parable about reality built from grand words. It is a way of moving closer to everyday life, and of daring to make decisions, make mistakes, and even laugh at ourselves.