On Entering Notre-Dame: A Season Inside a Story

On Entering Notre-Dame: A Season Inside a Story

There are books a writer creates, and then there are the rare few a writer is quietly ushered into — where the work stops feeling like something built and begins feeling like somewhere lived. The Hunchback of Notre-Dame was the second kind. From the very first line I wrote — long ago in Paris, where the rooftops touched the sky — I did not feel as though I were inventing a world so much as being welcomed into one that had been waiting, patiently, in stone and bell and rose window, for someone to walk through its doors again.

I have written many stories for Noellie, and I have loved each one the way a mother loves each of her children differently. But this one asked something more of me. It asked me to sit with mercy until I understood it, to hold the word sanctuary in my mouth until it stopped being a plot device and became a prayer. It asked me to look at Quasimodo — strange, powerful, tender, unseen — and to consider all the wounds we carry that the world glances past without ever truly looking. And it asked me, without ever meaning to, to think of my own wounds, my own hunches, my own quiet hope that someone might look past the stone of me and see the light still glowing underneath.

I did not want to leave that world when the manuscript was finished. I found myself lingering in it the way one lingers in a cathedral after the tour has ended — reluctant to walk back out into the ordinary daylight, wishing for one more moment beneath the vaulted ceiling, one more breath of candle smoke and colored glass. Notre-Dame became, to me, not merely a setting but a companion — steady, ancient, and quietly certain that mercy would win in the end, even when the story around her insisted otherwise.

Perhaps this is why the word sanctuary would not let me go. Long before I ever set out to write this story, Notre-Dame had already become one for me — not in metaphor, but in the plain, physical truth of standing inside her during my first visit to Paris in June of 2025, when something in me went quiet in a way I had not known a place could make happen. I remember a nun placing a small card into my hands that day, and the strange, weightless feeling of having been handed something I did not know I was praying for — as though heaven had reached down through centuries of stone to touch one very small, very specific corner of my life. I have returned to her more than once since, in the year that followed, and each time she has met me the same way: unhurried, unchanged, entirely certain of her own steadiness even when I was not certain of mine. I did not fully understand, until I began writing this book, that I had been carrying her sanctuary with me the whole time — and that some part of me had simply been waiting for the right story to set it down inside of.

There is a particular grace in writing something that stays with you while you are making it. I did not expect this book to be the one that did. But I closed the final page of the manuscript with something loosened in my chest that had been tight for a long while, and I understood, finally, that the story I had written for the smallest readers had also, somehow, been written for me.

Some cathedrals are made of stone. Others, it turns out, are made of the stories we finally let ourselves believe.