Why I Wrote A Coeur Perdu

People often ask why I wrote A Coeur Perdu. I never have one single answer—because stories like this don’t begin on a clean page. They begin somewhere quieter. In a conversation that stays with you. In a silence that never leaves. Or, in my case, in the shadow of a memory I never quite understood until I wrote it down.

This book wasn’t born out of theory or planning. It emerged from a place I couldn’t ignore—a question that returned to me in different forms: What do we do with the parts of ourselves that feel borrowed, or worse, lost?

What the Story Carries

Paul Ollenson, the protagonist of A Coeur Perdu, has received a heart transplant at a young age. He survives—and like many who’ve faced death too early, he feels an urge to give back. He becomes a senior official at the United Nations, marries an accomplished woman, and lives what many would call a life of purpose.

But the heart that beats inside him is restless—not physically, but emotionally. Paul starts to think more and more about a woman named Carla—someone he once loved and lost without explanation. And then, a question begins to haunt him: Was this heart ever really mine? Or am I still carrying someone else’s grief, someone else’s unfinished story?

The novel is a romantic thriller. Yes, there’s mystery, and yes, there’s love—but more than that, there’s a slow unraveling. Paul becomes, almost unintentionally, a detective. Not the kind who follows criminals, but the kind who follows the faint traces of something forgotten. The kind who’s chasing closure, even when he’s not sure what he’s closing.

Why I Chose This Story

I didn’t plan to write about organ transplants. I was thinking more about how we inherit things that don’t belong to us—pain, silence, unfinished conversations. What happens when a part of you keeps living because someone else has died?

This novel allowed me to explore that question in an honest way. It let me create a character who is not extraordinary in any classic sense, but who is forced to ask himself: What if the most important truths in my life were things no one ever told me?

And maybe that’s why A Coeur Perdu has resonated with so many readers—because we’ve all felt that. We’ve all lived with questions that didn’t quite have answers. We’ve all been haunted by a moment or a person that we can’t explain away.

The Layers Beneath the Genre

I’ve often been asked if A Coeur Perdu is a thriller or a love story. My answer is yes. It’s both. But it’s also a study of identity. A meditation on memory. A confrontation with the idea that love doesn’t always give you clarity—sometimes it gives you more questions.

If you enjoy psychological thrillers, you’ll find tension here. But it’s not the fast-paced kind that rushes from chapter to chapter. It’s the slow, persistent tension of a man looking for answers in silence, in dreams, in the details no one else notices.

Writing with Emotion, Not Intention

I wrote this book because I needed to. I had questions I couldn’t shake. I’ve always believed that a story should begin with something unresolved inside the writer—otherwise, it risks being only a performance.

Ce cœur transplanté est un cœur perdu. That’s what I wrote in the original French edition. “This transplanted heart is a lost heart.” But perhaps it’s not only the heart that feels lost—perhaps it’s the man. And the journey of the book is not about finding someone else, but about finding yourself in the aftermath of what you never got to finish.

Closing Thoughts

If you’ve ever felt that your past is holding onto you more than you are holding onto it, A Coeur Perdu might speak to you.

I didn’t write it to entertain, though I hope it keeps you turning pages. I wrote it to hold a mirror to that quiet space where love and grief, memory and mystery, live side by side.

Thank you for letting me share that space with you.