Today, Feathered Quill reviewer Katie Specht is talking with Abel Marosi, author of Divorce Dialogues.

FQ: Tell our readers a little about yourself. Your background, your interests, and how this led to writing a book?

MAROSI: I’m an economist, and my work has taken me across Latin America, Africa, and Asia—usually on short assignments of two or three weeks to review development projects. Those trips were long enough to get a genuine sense of local cultures and to see firsthand the challenges ordinary people face. What struck me everywhere was how deeply rooted the sense of duty is: the willingness to sacrifice for one’s children and extended family. Local literature often captures this beautifully, and it made me realize that conveying this universal sense of responsibility is a meaningful literary goal.

FQ: Have you always enjoyed writing or is it something you’ve discovered recently?

MAROSI: I started writing poetry as a teenager and kept occasional diaries in my youth. I returned to diary writing after my first child was born—initially to capture meaningful moments, of which new parenthood provides many. Over time it became a habit, and I committed to keeping it up for the sake of completeness. I eventually filled seven volumes over more than twenty years. Through that process, I realized how describing events and actions can reveal character without relying on explicit explanation.

FQ: Tell us a little about your book – a brief synopsis and what makes your book unique.

MAROSI: The book is structured so the reader uncovers the story through a collection of documents—there is no traditional narration at all. Letters between characters provide the initial context, and from there the reader pieces things together. Giving a full synopsis would undermine that sense of discovery. What can be said is already clear from the title and back cover text: the book centers on a marriage in crisis. The husband suspects his wife of infidelity and hires a detective to gather evidence. Most of the book consists of the detective’s reports. That documentary structure—letting readers discover the story rather than being told it—is what makes the book distinctive.

FQ: What was the impetus for writing your book?

MAROSI: The book is loosely inspired by a real story that I found compelling and believed would resonate more broadly. The themes are familiar but complex: desire, moral obligation, responsibility for young children, social expectations, and the pressure to conform in a traditional society. The way these tensions play out is realistic, though far from predetermined - how the ensuing conflicts are resolved is not necessarily predictable.

FQ: Please give our readers a little insight into your writing process. Do you set aside a certain time each day to write, only write when the desire to write surfaces, or something else?

MAROSI: For diaries to feel fresh and alive, they have to be written soon after the events they describe. Otherwise the small details that give a story its flavor disappear. So I disciplined myself to make time, even on busy days. That routine eventually led me to write regularly in the evenings several times a week.

FQ: The genre of your book is a fictional literary documentary. Why this genre?

MAROSI: If I had to categorize Divorce Dialogues, I would say it's a fictional literary documentary. Building the story from transcripts and documents allowed me to eliminate the traditional narrator. The challenge was ensuring that the characters’ feelings and motivations came through even when unstated. Crafting dialogue that sounded authentic and revealed personality was essential.

FQ: Do you have any plans to try writing a book in a different genre? If so, which genre and why?

MAROSI: Yes. My next project is a World War II story told in a more conventional narrative style, though it will also draw on archival letters from fallen soldiers to capture their state of mind as they faced danger. At its heart, the theme is similar to Divorce Dialogues: loyalty, moral duty, and the roles people assume—or are assigned—during difficult times.

FQ: Who are your favorite authors?

MAROSI: My travels introduced me to Jorge Amado, the Brazilian novelist whose work centers on the country’s North Eastern region. That area is culturally rich, shaped by African myths and beliefs brought by enslaved people. Old animist gods survived by blending into Catholic traditions, and Amado’s vivid storytelling shows how culture shapes emotions, expectations, and social norms—and how painful the consequences can be when those norms are broken. Gabriel García Márquez, the Colombian Nobel laureate, is a master of character. Chronicle of a Death Foretold fascinated me because it shows how cultural expectations can trap people in roles they feel unable to escape. Mario Vargas Llosa, the Peruvian Nobel Prize winner, wrote what may be my favorite novel, The Bad Girl. It follows a Peruvian expatriate navigating the shifting Anglo-American cultural scene of the Beat Generation. Through his hopeless love for an elusive woman, the novel turns everyday events into expressions of longing, and it ends with a tragic but morally redemptive resolution. I admire how these authors reveal the power of culture in shaping human behavior.

FQ: Which do you find easier, starting a story, or writing the conclusion?

MAROSI: Writing the beginning of the book was easy. The basic storyline was clear from the start - so the book opens with a letter from Radek, the husband, to his sister Sylwia, written after everything has happened, explaining how he assembled the materials that follow.

The difficult part was the middle. The challenge was figuring out how to tell the story through documents — selecting the right dialogues, making them believable, and creating secondary characters, like babysitters, whose casual conversations fill in the narrative gaps left by the absence of a traditional narrator.

FQ: How do you approach a new story and when you set pen to paper, is there a specific process you follow (or do you just write and let your story take the lead to where it must go)?

MAROSI: Anna, the wife, is torn between her desire for freedom and the expectations of a traditional society, embodied by her mother, who is determined to maintain appearances. Anna is emotionally unstable and easily influenced, and her choices continually introduce new characters and complications. The reader can never be entirely sure what will happen next, which creates a natural momentum—you turn the page to find out.

FQ: How did you approach the need to keep readers engaged and tuned in to keep turning those pages?

MAROSI: Anna, the wife, is torn between her desire for freedom and the expectations of a traditional society, embodied by her mother, who is determined to maintain appearances. Anna is emotionally unstable and easily influenced, and her choices continually introduce new characters and complications. The reader can never be entirely sure what will happen next, which creates a natural momentum—you turn the page to find out.