Mid-Life Crisis and Reinvention

Kaira Rouda has “written just about anything you could imagine,” including marketing materials, newspaper articles and a nonfiction book. But one thing she has wanted to do for a long time is to produce a published novel. Rouda can cross that off her bucket list Sunday when her debut novel Here, Home, Hope is released.

Rouda described the work as a tale of “mid-life crisis and reinvention.” The main character, Kelly Mills Johnson, lives a good life with her husband and two children in the fictional suburb of Grandville, Ohio, a place Rouda said “could be anywhere.” But Johnson is restless. Rouda said those who have read the novel told her it is funny, poignant and something to which they can relate.

“My belief is that a lot of people try to make everything seem perfect on the surface, and I’m kind of fascinated as a writer about what happens beneath the surface,” said Rouda about how she came up with the story. “This is especially true in the suburban setting, where everything might seem very similar or homogenous, but there’s actually lots of folks and different lives happening that you might not know about.”

Rouda said she is planning for Here, Home, Hope to be the first of four novels set in Grandville. She just completed the manuscript for the second one, and said it should come out next year. Rouda has written novels for much of her life, but she has never completed the publication process. She said she would get discouraged after the first rejection by an agency.

“I finally decided this time to stick with it, and really go for it,” she said.

Rouda said writing fiction is an enjoyable and different experience from writing nonfiction. She compared Here, Home, Hope to her 2008 book Real You Incorporated, a guide for women on branding and starting their own businesses.

“Fiction has a lot more emotional depth to it than anything nonfiction would have,” Rouda said. “And it’s also scarier to send it out to the world and see what people get out of it. With a business book, it’s pretty much, ‘this is how I do business, this is what I know about business.’ You put it out there, and that’s what it is. Fiction is much different.”

She continued, “It’s been interesting to talk to people about Here, Home, Hope, and the characters. People say, ‘Where did you get inspired for this? Why did you do this?’ There’s really just so much more depth to it.”

Born in Chicago, Rouda, lived in various places—including briefly in California—as her father, a marketing professor, got different jobs. She spent the final years of her childhood in Columbus, Ohio, and then returned there after attending Vanderbilt University to begin a 20-year career in marketing and various publishing fields. Rouda has been recognized as a top entrepreneur by several media and other organizations.

After selling their residential real estate business, Rouda and her husband Harley came to California with their four children two years ago. They eventually decided on Point Dume as the place they wanted to live.

“I’d always wanted to move back to California,” she said. “We kept going deeper up the coast to select where to live, and I just fell in love with the beauty and everything else about Malibu.”

But to continue her new career as a novelist, Rouda has to make sure she does not get too distracted by the paradise that is Malibu.

“Where I come from in Columbus, it’s gray and cloudy a significant portion of the year,” said a laughing Rouda. “It’s much more conducive to staying inside and writing. So while writing in Malibu I have to take breaks to make sure I can keep myself at the computer, because there is so much more that would lore you outside here than there was there.”

The launch party for ‘Here, Home, Hope’ will take place at Room at the Beach in Malibu Country Mart from 5 p.m. to 7 p.m. For more on Rouda and her novel, go to www.kairarouda.com.