Ten years ago, I sat in my mother’s kitchen, clutching her last jar of bitter, chunky homemade marmalade as a grey fog descended. My parents had both died within a month of each other, and nothing had prepared me for this sudden expulsion from childhood. Who was I now, without a mother or father? Where did I go from here?
As chance — or fate — would have it, this existential crisis came at a liminal moment. My younger son had finished school; my older one, his degree. Our family was hovering between past and future, a rare window where our lives had loosened. A space we could fill with adventure.
The Camino de Santiago — a thirty-day pilgrimage across northern Spain — was my choice. I knew people who had done it, and it seemed practical. We like to walk, and it’s cheap, was my reasoning. My family concurred. Deal done. The simplicity of it was calming: you walk, you eat, you sleep, and then you do it again. We just had to get ourselves there. And so, we four set forth — my husband, our two sons, and me — unprepared, not questioning what we were doing or why.
I wasn’t looking for a story, but for a writer, the Camino was like leaping into a bubbling cauldron of ideas. The path felt dense with history. We were walking a route pilgrims had taken for centuries, searching for meaning, yearning for a different life. I’m not religious, but something stirred. Why were we walking? What were we trying to find, or to leave behind? Each step on the trail became emotional as well as physical progress. At night, falling asleep on my bunk to the rustle of sleeping bags, I felt emptied out and, gradually, restored.
I arrived home convinced that the walk-eat-sleep rhythm of the pilgrimage had returned me to my upbeat self. My old life didn’t fit anymore. So, I briskly quit my long-term job and enrolled in a creative writing PhD. At the time, romantic comedy was my genre — it was all I had published, and my favourite comfort reading. I completed the PhD with a sweet, redemptive novel about an older man turning his life around on the Camino. It was gentle. It was hopeful. But it was a false victory.
The author with her sons on The Camino de Santiago
(Image credit: Lisa Walker)
Because — plot twist — it was now 2020.
The world shut down. Life became complicated, uncertain, and darker. Among eerie footage of empty cities, my Camino novel suddenly felt wrong. Too trite, too jaunty, too… 2019. Almost overnight, my reading taste lurched in a new direction. Quirky “meet-cutes” no longer held my attention. I didn’t recognise myself in these stories anymore. Instead, I began devouring psychological thrillers. Dark, ambiguous tales with morally grey characters who would never have passed an audition for my earlier fiction. Now, though, I loved those psychopathic scheming wives and alcoholic train wrecks with a passion. They made sense to me in a way lightness no longer did.
At the same time, my older son had moved to London, which — from locked-down Australia — might as well have been Mars. We communicated through screens, pixels standing in for presence. My longing for him morphed into a fixation on his surroundings. But I didn’t picture a Notting Hill rom-com London. Instead, I imagined crumbling castles, ancient forests, and old universities warped by tradition. A dark Anglophilic dreamscape. A setting began to take shape — haunting and gothic, filled with secrets and quiet menace. It didn’t belong in my sweet, hopeful novel. So, I did the only thing that felt honest: I scrapped the entire Camino novel and started over.
I wrote the kind of story I now wanted to read — atmospheric, morally layered, psychologically complex. A gothic mystery about dark academia and literary obsession. I was startled to find my sweet rom-com about grief and renewal had morphed into a psychological thriller. But the story showed what I now knew — transformation doesn’t always come gently. Sometimes it drags us through shadows we’d rather avoid. The stories we tell ourselves about who we are can be treacherous as well as healing. And even when we walk to leave something behind, we bring more with us than we know.
The grief, the pilgrimage, and the pandemic’s loneliness ultimately changed me. It also found its way into my story. My parents’ absence became a quiet undercurrent. The Camino’s steady rhythm provided the story’s pacing. And my fantasised English setting transcended the claustrophobia of lockdown.
The Camino taught me how to walk within grief’s grey fog until it lifts. But I now understand that moving forward doesn’t hinge on a single grand choice. Renewal isn’t easy. Sometimes it looks like abandoning a book I once loved because it no longer holds my truth. It means accepting that the person I was before the loss has gone. But mostly, it’s a series of small, stubborn steps, putting one foot in front of another until the path is clear again.
The Pact by Lisa Walker will be out on January 29th with HQ, HarperCollins.