Overcoming obstacles

Inspiration behind After the Fall

What most people don’t know about After the Fall is that it’s a personal love letter to my wife, Leah, whom I’ve been married to for almost 20 years. For most of her life she has dealt with anxiety and depression related to her family’s biological history and at a certain point of our marriage. There were certain things we tailored our lives to which I never quite understood because she was never really aware that she had anxiety and depression. The music could never be turned up too loud. We avoided large crowds, etc. I thought they were personal quirks and lifestyle choices not realising or understanding what anxiety was all about. About 12 years in, it really started affecting our lives as a married couple. Against all her beliefs, she finally went to therapy and eventually saw a psychiatrist and began taking medications to deal with her condition and miraculously, like clouds parting after a storm, she became a completely different person. Happier, more calm, and there was a spirit in her that I hadn’t seen since we left college. In retrospect many years later, we realised that her anxiety and depression was heightened after the birth of our first child and she was going through postpartum depression.

I always found the nursery rhyme of “Humpty Dumpty” to be rather sombre and thought of an idea of redemption. You go through a traumatic experience that you don’t want to experience ever again so you tailor your life to avoid those triggers. Thinking about the aftermath of a traumatic incident like falling from a wall, I used the story as a metaphor for my wife’s experience. Avoiding triggers, facing your problems, and eventually overcoming them while also evolving into something greater. Humpty Dumpty turns into a bird (most people forget he’s an egg) and my wife blossomed into a person who seemed to continue on with a life that felt like it had stalled for many years.

My wife now has a gold bird feather tattooed on her back and I have a bird feather tattooed on my arm as a symbol of our love for one another. And that’s our story.

DAN SANTAT, Author of After The Fall

www.us.macmillan.com/author/ dansantat