As I state in the Author’s Note in the back of My Heart and Other Black Holes, I began to write the book in January 2013, a few days after the death of one of my very closest friends. I found myself in a place of deep grief and working almost compulsively on the manuscript was one of the ways in which I dealt with those feelings.

So while one of the major inspirations for the book stemmed from my own grief, I also pulled inspiration from a desire to write about the importance of love and all of its many forms (familial love, friendship love, romantic love, and most importantly self-love). Though Aysel and Roman’s relationship certainly drives the main thread of the plot, the book for me has always foremost been about Aysel’s journey to self-love and self-acceptance.

Depression is such a tricky disease to understand because it usually doesn’t present in any physical way; you don’t lose your hair, you don’t lose a limb, you don’t break out in a violent rash. But on the inside, you feel terrible. Your mind is your own worst bully, which makes self-love a nearly impossible prospect at times. Even though depression can be nearly impossible to physically detect, it is certainly a very serious disease; however despite depression’s severity (and oftentimes its longevity), it doesn’t have to be a terminal disease.

And so I set out to write a book that not only illuminates the realities of depression, but also showcases what I believe to be one of the most important components to battling and surviving depression: love and human connection. At the start of the book, Aysel is very isolated, but as the novel progresses, and she begins to let Roman into her life, she starts to see her world, including herself, from a new perspective, and this makes all the difference.

What Roman does for Aysel is what I think is one of the most beautiful things about friendship—how our friends help us to see ourselves through a different, more forgiving lens. Through our friends’ love, we learn to accept and love ourselves. Sometimes we even learn to find strengths where we used to see only weakness, find beauty where before we only saw ugliness. My dear friend who passed away certainly did that for me, and while the actual storyline of the novel is not based on him in any way, that particular kernel of inspiration stemmed from my grief of losing such an important person and desire to write a story that hopefully honors the strength and importance of human connection.

I hope readers of My Heart and Other Black Holes will be reminded of the people in their life that they love. That the book will encourage them to be kind and gentle with those loved ones. And even more importantly, I hope after finishing the book, readers will learn to be kinder and gentler to themselves because self-love and self-acceptance are paramount. Jasmine Warga.