About the Author

While working at a large, midwestern university, Isabella Synan holed up in her office trying to make sense of what spurs an educated, successful woman to give up her freedom and become the willing sex slave of a complicated man, and what might cause her to leave again. The resulting novel attracted a NYC agent who tried, without success, to find a publisher for her book. The time’s not right, he said. Thirty years later, when he was about to retire, he found the manuscript again and contacted Isabella. Once again, he could not find a publisher, and attributed it to the #Me Too movement squelching women’s willingness to spare any sympathy for the Harvey Weinsteins of the world or the Bernard Barenbaums of fiction. Meanwhile, Isabella decided to go the Indie route and publish the novel herself.

Isabella is drawn to dark internal landscapes that, paradoxically, illumine our humanity: how we behave behind locked doors, the behavior we don’t talk about, even to closest friends, and the ways that ordinary people develop to cope with emotional traumas and unspeakable acts that marked their childhoods and shaped their sexual desires. Isabella’s family warned: “If you don’t stop writing about misogynistic sex hounds, or trying to make pedophiles sympathetic, you’re going to have the FBI at your door.”

The author wrestles with questions that lead directly to the underbelly of our lives: How does a strong, independent woman navigate a world of men who rule by domination and control? What happens when a woman falls under the spell of a sexual partner who doesn’t play by the rules? What are the rules and the cultural mores that shape definitions of normal and perverse? It took five editions of the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders (DSM), the moral gatekeeper of our sexual practices, to determine that so-called alternative lifestyles, all variety of kink, and the restrained BDSM that’s practiced by millions in private, are legitimate topics of conversation in mainstream culture. They’ve always been fodder for juicy skin novels, dark romances, and embarrassing sub-genres like BDSM fiction, books you cover with the Arts or Business section of the newspaper when riding the subway.

But what happens when an author brings the uncomfortable conversation to the dinner table? When family or friends say, you’re writing about what? Maybe we don’t want to know you. First off, she gets a pen name. Enter Isabella Synan (she borrowed the name from a distant relative who was more concerned with surviving the potato famine in Ireland than pondering how culture labels sexual behavior as kink or mainstream, benign expression or pathology, pleasure or harm). While fellow writers revel in the limelight, Isabella prefers the darkness, available only in the undercover of anonymity; but readers can engage the author via her website to comment on the book or discuss any aspect of it.

Isabella not only set out to write a mainstream novel about what some may delicately call bad behavior, but she pushed boundaries to explore what happens when a relationship begins as an ordinary romance, progresses to sex toys and spankings, with both parties consenting, and then goes wildly out of control and crosses the line into cruelty and abuse, maybe even criminal behavior. The author played with the contradictions inherent in every relationship of power imbalance and took them to the extreme.     

Unlike E.L. James’ young Christian Grey, who learned to control his emotions through his practice of BDSM, Isabella created Bernard Barenbaum, an older, more mature version of a lesser god who practices BDSM without limits or control. One might view him as quintessential male: the anti-Ubermensch. She created Margaret, who doesn’t understand why she wants to submit and surrender, as the archetype of women who want to please, embodying the ideal female partner who juggles servitude to her master with loyalties as a mother trying to keep her child safe. Isabella used a call and response style in the novel, where the daughter’s moral outrage, when reading chapters of her mother’s book after her death, is a kind of Greek chorus for mainstream society’s evolving consciousness about how humans play out power imbalance in socially constructed gender roles.

Isabella’s bio includes writing credits for both fiction and scholarship. She chose not to continue her former respectable life as an academic, living off the letters after her name, but surrendered to the unpredictable and scary, the irresistible work of an author. It doesn’t pay the bills, but it beats her earlier jobs as a younger woman working in a fertilizer factory, at a painting company, and at the candy counter in Woolworth’s. While this first stand-alone novel marks the end of her fascination with controlling men, she’s still figuring out how to rear sons who prefer compassion and equality to power, and daughters who love and are loved without becoming slaves.   

Her second novel, The Mothers, will be published in 2025, exploring the underbelly of becoming a parent through egg donation and surrogacy, particularly the ways that our emotional lives are being stretched to reckon with ever evolving technology.