Readers often ask me about the love scenes in The General’s Princess. Some ask with a wink. Some ask with real hesitation. Both are fair questions, and I want to answer them honestly.
The short version is that every word was written with care and with purpose.
Why I couldn’t write it any other way
I’ve been a psychotherapist for over thirty years. For most of my days, I was an emotional guide for people carrying wounds the rest of the world never saw. My work took me into the aftermath of ritual abuse within religious and satanic cults, organizational trauma, sexual abuse, and domestic violence, and into the kind of severe dissociation that trauma can leave behind. I met it all with an open heart and the tools of my training. Those years stayed with me. When I began writing a novel that would explore sexuality in all its forms, from indifference to violence to love, I knew I was walking on sacred ground.
The question I kept asking myself was simple: How do I write this with respect?
The answer was to write it truthfully, from the inside out, the way I learned to listen in the therapy room.
Desire, harm, and love are not the same thing
One thing I hope readers take away from this book is the difference between three things that often get blurred together: sexuality, abuse of power, and romance.
For someone living with PTSD, the line between what feels abusive and what feels intimate isn’t always clear. A touch that should feel safe can bring back a memory. Closeness can feel like danger. That conflict is real, and survivors live with it every day. I wanted my characters to wrestle with it honestly rather than skip past it.
That’s why the trafficking thread in the story isn’t just plot machinery. A ring operating in the shadows, reaching from the palace grounds in Saudi Arabia to girls taken on Spring Break in Mexico, is the backdrop against which love has to be earned.
Pain first, then healing
I learned this over and over in my practice: you have to understand pain before you can move toward healing. That work happens quietly, in the background, long before anyone is ready for intimacy.
The love scenes in The General’s Princess grow out of that process. They aren’t written to titillate, though I accept that they might. They show what it looks like when two people choose tenderness, trust, and consent in a world that has shown them the opposite.
What our narrator thought
When Joe Courtemanche agreed to narrate the audiobook, I was thrilled. Joe is a military veteran, a retired U.S. Navy linguist, an author, and an actor, and he brings the book’s Arabic and Spanish to life with remarkable authenticity. He is also a man of faith, and he told me candidly that he had to think carefully before saying yes.
Here’s how he put it:
“The General’s Princess is not just a story of human bondage or suffering or funny Arabic accents that I have to create. It’s also at its heart a love story, and for me as a Christian author and somebody who has great reverence for human sexuality, there was a question of whether or not it would be something I’d be comfortable doing. I found after reading the manuscript that it was something I could do. It seemed genuine, but most importantly, it was integral to the plot of the book. If it’s gratuitous, no, I’m not going to do it. It’s pretty much that simple. But in this case, the sex scenes were more love scenes than sex scenes, and I was okay with it because it fit and it advanced the premise of the book.”
More love scenes than sex scenes. I couldn’t have said it better myself.
A note for readers
If you’re a survivor, or you love someone who is, this story was written with you in mind. It doesn’t look away from hard things, but it never treats them lightly. Please read at your own pace and take care of yourself along the way. If the story stirs up something heavy, reach out to someone you trust, or to RAINN at 1-800-656-4673.