Lindsay MacMillan is a writer, businesswoman, and hopelessly hopeful romantic. After growing up in Michigan in the land of cows, cornfields, and kindness, she graduated magna cum laude from Dartmouth College. She was formerly a vice president at Goldman Sachs and has worked in both New York City and London. The Heart of the Deal is her first published novel, and she shares unfiltered poetry and prose on Instagram (@lindsaymacwriting).

For many years, I was writing novels and poetry in the margins of my day job—an early-morning, late-at-night labor of love that gave me purpose while working in finance on Wall Street.

The book I wrote in my mid-twenties followed a young woman climbing the corporate ladder while secretly dreaming of a more creative life. She felt the pressure to get married by thirty and climb the corporate ladder and achieve conventional definitions of success, but she wrestled with the growing ache that her job wasn’t her true calling.

So, she quit her great-on-paper finance job. She left the relationship with the nice guy from back home. She chased her creative dream and bravely faced the unknown, ending up single and boldly alive at the end of the book.

It felt so liberating to write a story like that. But I didn’t think I was actually going to live it.

I thought that I actually would be married by thirty. I actually would have a more conventional life.

Until the ache grew so strong. Because I had already written about a character on her own liberation journey, it was easier to access mine.

And so, I too quit my finance job. I too left my “safe” relationship at age twenty-nine. I too carved a creative life for myself, charting a new path full of highs and lows.

What I’ve come to realize—and what both surprises and comforts me—is that my fiction often comes true. I don’t write memoir, but in penning fiction, I’m able tell emotional truths before I’m ready to speak them aloud in real life. Somehow, by the time the book is finished, the character on the page has already lived what I’m still trying to become brave enough to do.

That’s the magic of fiction—it doesn’t just mirror life. Sometimes, it leads it.

My debut novel, The Heart of the Deal, was written while I was a working at Goldman Sachs. I’d wake up at 5 a.m., write for an hour, then put on my heels and head to the office. My protagonist, Rae, was not me—but she shared my environment, my yearnings, and my questions. Could I make a life in the arts? Could I leave behind something prestigious for something more personal? Could I trust that success doesn’t always come with a title?

Writing Rae’s story gave me a kind of courage I didn’t know I was building. She became a blueprint. A breadcrumb trail I could follow. When Rae finally leaves her job and dares to call herself a writer, I wept. And a few years later, I left my finance career too—this time not just on the page.

My second novel, Double-Decker Dreams, was set in London—a city I had just moved to after nearly a decade in New York. It was a romantic comedy about a woman searching for meaning abroad, only to question whether the life she thought she wanted was truly hers.

I wrote the novel before I had fully answered those questions in my own life. I even tried to follow the character’s ending—going back to my small hometown, dating the safe and steady guy, trying on a quieter version of success. But my spirit had other plans. Writing that story helped me realize I didn’t want the ending I had scripted for her. I needed to write a new one for myself.

Sometimes fiction is a vision board. Sometimes it’s a cautionary tale.

By the time I wrote Summer on Lilac Island, my third novel, I had returned to Michigan for a season of rest and reset. I was living in the same small-town world I’d once sworn I’d never go back to. But something had shifted.

The book is set on Mackinac Island—a magical, car-free place in Northern Michigan—and follows a mother-daughter duo whose relationship evolves over the course of one summer. While the setting was deeply familiar, the characters were not. They showed up with their own personalities, wounds, and arcs. I wrote perspectives far from my own—mothers, grandmothers, adult daughters with secrets I’ve never kept. It was a creative leap, and a liberating one.

Unlike my earlier novels, this one wasn’t a parallel to my life. It wasn’t foreshadowing or processing. It was imagination at full volume. And yet… by the time I finished the book, I had deepened my own relationship with my mother. I had returned home with less resistance. I had healed parts of myself I didn’t know were still aching.

The fiction didn’t directly reflect my life—but it changed it. Art had made space for a different kind of growth.

Even as my books grow more fictional with each release, the emotional undercurrents still flow from real life. The longing for freedom. The question of how to live authentically. The tension between responsibility and desire, expectation and instinct. These are the themes I return to again and again, not because they’re trendy, but because they’re true. For me. For my characters. For my readers.

Each book is a time capsule. A breadcrumb. A coded letter to myself that says: Yes, you were here.

And each time I finish one, I feel a little more equipped to become the woman I was trying to write all along.

I’ve stopped trying to draw a hard line between fiction and reality. They are collaborators, co-creators, mirrors. Sometimes my books reflect the past. Sometimes they script the future. Sometimes they simply give me the space to be braver than I’ve been.

I still don’t know what story I’ll write next. But I know this: if I follow the characters, they’ll show me what I need to learn.

And if I’m lucky, life will catch up in the most unexpected, magical ways.

Summer on Lilac Island

Summer on Lilac Island by Lindsay MacMillan

Gigi Jenkins swore to never return to her hometown, Mackinac Island, but losing her job left no other options. When Eloise, her divorced mother, tries to set her up with the island’s new doctor, Gigi strikes a deal: she gets to pick a date for Eloise. What begins as a matchmaking ploy evolves into a summer far beyond anything they could’ve dreamed of.

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