Why Lilith Exists: A Manifesto on Trauma, Madness, and Dark Romance
A review recently landed on Goodreads for Closer to You. It said that Lilith—the side character—was unrealistic, forced, and “random.” That I made her “unhinged and deep at the same time” in a way that felt like I was trying too hard. It also said the book itself was cliché, that the heroine should’ve run to therapy after everything she endured, and that not doing so made the story feel inauthentic.
That review stayed with me. Not because it was cruel—it wasn’t. But because it speaks to a deeper misunderstanding about trauma, madness, and why characters like Lilith exist at all.
This post isn’t about defending my book. It’s about telling you why Lilith matters, why I wrote her the way I did, and why dark romance is not—and will never be—safe.
Trauma Doesn’t Look Like the Movies
I’ll be blunt: I have so much fucking trauma, I shouldn’t even exist. By all rights, I shouldn’t be here. I know what it feels like to live through things that leave scars no one else can see. I know what it’s like to walk around with wounds so deep you wonder why the ground doesn’t open and swallow you whole.
And no—I didn’t run to therapy. Not because I didn’t want help, but because that isn’t the reality most of us live in. In the real world, there are five-year waitlists for trauma therapy. Five years of carrying everything alone. Five years of pretending you’re okay. Five years of living with the noise in your head because there is nowhere else to put it.
So when someone says, “Why didn’t the heroine get therapy?” the answer is simple: because this is real. Survivors don’t always get therapy. Survivors don’t always get better. Sometimes they just survive. And that survival doesn’t look like tidy healing arcs—it looks messy, brutal, and often misunderstood.
Why Lilith Speaks in Fragments
Let’s talk about Lilith.
She’s not polished. She doesn’t speak in elegant monologues designed to charm the reader. She says things that feel random, disconnected, sharp-edged. Sometimes she sounds profound, sometimes she sounds insane. And that’s the point.
That’s what untreated trauma sounds like. That’s what madness looks like when it’s cracking through the surface. People who have lived through horror don’t present neatly. They zigzag between deep insight and chaos, between brutal honesty and nonsense. That unpredictability isn’t a flaw—it’s the very essence of what makes them terrifyingly human.
Lilith was never meant to be “relatable.” She was meant to be unsettling. She was meant to bleed all over the page. She’s the shadow in the room, the voice you can’t quite trust, the girl who makes you squirm because she feels both too real and too unpredictable.
Dark Romance Isn’t Here to Comfort You
This is where dark romance separates itself from traditional romance.
Traditional romance promises safety: love heals, villains are punished, therapy works, happy endings are guaranteed. Dark romance doesn’t make those promises. It takes the things polite fiction shies away from—obsession, madness, captivity, trauma—and puts them under a spotlight.
That’s why Lilith doesn’t exist to make you comfortable. She exists to remind you that trauma doesn’t always produce resilience. Sometimes it produces madness. Sometimes it produces people who are impossible to live with, impossible to love, impossible to save.
And that’s why, if you think she was too much in Closer to You—you might want to skip Book Two. Because Lilith goes off the rails. She’s not quirky. She’s not tragic-but-redeemable. She’s absolutely, terrifyingly fucking nuts. She unravels completely. And I didn’t soften her. Not one bit.
Why I Write People Like Lilith
I wrote Lilith because I know what it’s like to be called “crazy” when really you’re just in pain. I wrote her for the people who’ve been dismissed, shamed, or mocked for how their trauma spills out of them. I wrote her to show that not everyone heals neatly—not everyone can heal.
Dark romance isn’t here to hand you clean lessons. It’s here to show you what happens when wounds never close. It’s here to explore the shadows we all pretend don’t exist. And Lilith is one of those shadows.
The “Cliché” Argument
Another part of that review called Closer to You cliché. And honestly? That’s fine. Because here’s the truth: archetypes are supposed to repeat. They’ve been repeating since the beginning of storytelling. The stalker. The obsessive lover. The broken side character. They show up again and again because they strike something primal in us.
Carl Jung called them archetypes of the collective unconscious—patterns of character and story that we are drawn to, generation after generation. They’re not clichés. They’re myth, dressed in modern clothes.
So yes, you’ll see echoes of familiar patterns in my work. But you’ll also see them twisted, cracked open, turned inside out.
Final Thoughts
Lilith wasn’t written to be liked. She wasn’t written to make sense. She wasn’t written to soothe you.
She was written to bleed.
If you come to Closer to You looking for a comfortable escape, you won’t find it. If you come looking for fluffy happy endings, you’ll be disappointed. But if you come willing to sit in the mess—the obsession, the trauma, the jagged corners where love and madness blur—then you’ll understand why Lilith matters.
Because in the end, she’s not a mistake. She’s not a cliché. She’s the most honest thing I’ve ever written.