The Book I Couldn't Stop
On finishing a novel about doubt, brotherhood, and the man who stayed.
There is a scene near the end of my novel where a father and son stand in a carpenter’s workshop at midnight, unable to sleep, shaping wood because it’s the only language available to them. They both know morning will bring something irreversible. So they work. They sand and plane and fit joints in the lamplight, not because the work needs doing but because hands need something to hold when the heart is too full.
I wrote that scene at midnight. My own hands were not holding tools. They were holding a manuscript I had been revising for longer than I care to admit, in a house quiet enough that I could hear myself think too clearly.
I was thinking about my brother. How he loved the water. Loved life. And he too died young — unexpectedly, the way the people we most expect to outlast us sometimes don’t. Not on a cross. Not with any of the ceremony that history grants to significant deaths. Just gone, the way ordinary loss happens, without warning and without sufficient explanation.
Writing about James watching his brother die, I understood something I hadn’t before. Grief doesn’t ask whether you believed in the person. It doesn’t ask whether you were standing close enough or far enough. It just arrives and takes up residence and changes the dimensions of every room you walk into afterward.
This book is, among other things, my attempt to stay in the room.
Becoming James tells the story of James bar-Joseph — the brother of Jesus who didn’t believe. Not during the ministry. Not at the crucifixion. Not, if we’re reading the historical record honestly, until sometime after the resurrection, when something happened that the New Testament mentions in a single quiet line and then moves past as though it were unremarkable.
Paul, listing resurrection appearances in his letter to the Corinthians, says simply: then he appeared to James.
That’s it. No details. No explanation. No account of what was said or how it happened or what James felt when he saw his brother standing alive in front of him after watching him die.
I have spent years inside that silence.
Because what I keep returning to is not the miraculous part — though I’ve sat with that long enough — but the human part. James spent thirty years as the skeptic in a family of believers. He thought his brother was, at best, mistaken. At worst, dangerous. He watched Jesus leave the family carpentry business to wander around Galilee preaching, and James stayed home and answered for it. Managed the accounts. Explained to customers why their orders were late. Absorbed the whispers.
He loved his brother the way siblings love each other when love and resentment have been so long intertwined you can’t separate the threads. Completely. Imperfectly. With a specific kind of hurt that only family can produce.
And then he watched him die.
And then — somehow, in a way we cannot fully reconstruct — he became the leader of the movement his brother started. The man who stayed in Jerusalem when Peter fled north. The man who presided over the first council. The man Josephus describes as so respected for his righteousness that when the high priest Ananus had him executed in 62 CE, the citizens of Jerusalem were outraged. He was called James the Just.
From doubter to martyr. From the brother who hid in the crowd at Golgotha to the man who stood in Solomon’s Portico and said his brother’s name out loud in a city where that name was dangerous.
That is the transformation I wanted to understand.
I should be honest about what the final stages of this book have been like.
There is a particular kind of exhaustion that belongs to the last weeks of revision. It is not the productive exhaustion of drafting, when you fall asleep with scenes still assembling themselves behind your eyes. It is the exhaustion of precision — of reading a sentence for the fortieth time trying to determine whether the word settled or the word landed better carries the weight of what a character just understood. Of realizing at eleven at night that a plot thread you introduced in chapter four has an echo in chapter thirty-six that you haven’t fully drawn out, and that drawing it out will require changes in three chapters you thought were finished.
Of lying awake thinking: is this the right word, is this the right scene, is this the right book.
Every writer knows this. What I didn’t anticipate was how personal it would become.
I started this novel as a historical fiction project. A research problem. James the Just is one of the most underwritten figures in early Christian history — present at every hinge moment, essential to the movement’s survival, and almost entirely absent from the popular imagination. I wanted to give him a story.
What I didn’t plan was that I would spend the final months of revision thinking about my own brother.
Not because our relationship resembles James and Jesus — it doesn’t, not particularly. But because writing about brothers at all, with enough attention and enough honesty, eventually surfaces something true about what it means to love someone you grew up alongside. The specific texture of that love. The way it contains so much history that sometimes you can barely see the person in front of you for all the versions of them you’re carrying.
The way you can fail them and still be loved. The way love persists across denial and distance and all the small cowardices that accumulate in a life.
The final scenes of this book are about a man who realizes he has become, over thirty years of ordinary choices, someone capable of facing what he once ran from. Not because he found certainty. He never fully does. But because the community he built, the people he stayed for, the work he kept doing even when he couldn’t name what he was doing it for — all of it added up to something.
It added up to a self.
I cried writing those scenes. I am not especially prone to crying over my own work. But something about James standing in the place where his brother died, in the city where he once said I don’t know him, and being asked one more time whether he is what he is — something about that broke me open in a way I wasn’t expecting.
I was thinking about my brother. I was thinking about all the ways we fail the people we love and all the ways love survives the failing. I was thinking about what it means to stay. To keep showing up. To build something in the ordinary hours that turns out, over time, to be a life worth the cost.
The book releases at Easter.
I did not plan this deliberately, and then I did, and now I cannot imagine it any other way.
Easter is the day Christians mark the resurrection — the event that James, in my telling, can never quite verify and can never quite dismiss. But Easter is also, quietly, the day that belongs to the people who stayed. The women at the tomb. The disciples in the locked room. The brother who didn’t believe and then did and then built and then died for what he’d built.
James is not the Easter story most people tell. But he might be the one most of us are actually living.
Most of us are not mystics. Most of us do not have visions on the road to Damascus or voices from clouds. Most of us have the slower version — the evidence that accumulates across years of watching mercy work, of seeing what happens when people choose each other despite cost, of carrying a question we can’t answer but can’t put down either.
Most of us are still measuring. Still waiting to be sure enough to cut.
This book is for those people. The ones who love without certainty. The ones who stay in the workshop after everyone else has gone home, still at it, still shaping something they hope will hold.
It’s for my brother.
It’s for the brothers we’ve denied and the ones who looked at us with understanding anyway.
It’s for every person who has built a life on faith that felt more like stubbornness than certainty, and found out, in the end, that stubbornness and faith might be the same thing.
Becoming James releases this Easter. If you’ve been waiting for it — thank you. It’s ready in a week or two. Or as ready as I can make it, which is the only kind of ready there is.