Babette Fraser Hale, the talented author, has penned a captivating book titled This Familiar Heart: An Improbable Love Story and will be sharing her insights in a speech and signing copies of her book at The Heritage Society, from 6:00 p.m. to 7:30 p.m., on Tuesday, May 21, 2024, at 1100 Bagby Street. We will toast with wine in celebration of her recently published book that promises to be a heartfelt exploration of love, life, and loss. This is a story about appreciation and healing.
The story unfolds the passionate and unlikely romance between popular Houston columnist and author, Leon Hale, and prize-winning writer Babette Fraser Hale, who was twenty-three years his junior. Their journey begins with a turbulent courtship, gradually evolving into a partnership, and ultimately culminating in a long marriage. The poignant tale concludes with Leon’s difficult passing during pandemic isolation in rural central Texas, leaving Babette to reflect on their shared experiences and face unexpected surprises after his death.
If you’re intrigued by unconventional love stories, this one is definitely worth adding to your reading list!
Book Description: This Familiar Heart: An Improbable Love Story
Writer Babette Hale met columnist Leon Hale in Houston in 1980. Their marriage lasted 40 years, until Leon’s death in 2021 during the pandemic.
In this intimate rendering of a relationship, we learn how deceptive surface impressions can be.
Leon Hale, author of Bonney’s Place, was sixty years old, a “country boy” who wrote about rural Texans with humor and sensitivity in his popular column for The Houston Post and, later, the Houston Chronicle. Babette Fraser at 36 was a child of privilege, a city girl educated abroad, struggling in her career while raising a young son. No one thought it could work.
Even Hale himself held serious doubts. But it did endure. The interior congruencies they discovered through a long and turbulent courtship knit them tightly together for the rest of his life.
And when he died during the Pandemic isolation period, searing levels of grief and doubt threatened Babette’s understanding of the partnership and marriage that had sustained her for forty years. Had he really been the person she thought he was? Had he kept secrets that would forever change her view of him?
In candid, evocative prose, she explores the distorted perceptions that often follow the death of a cherished spouse, and the loving resolution that allows life to go on.
About the Author
Babette Fraser Hale is no stranger to literary acclaim. Her previous work, “A Wall of Bright Dead Feathers,” won the debut fiction award from the Texas Institute of Letters in 2022. Her storytelling prowess has also been recognized through the Meyerson Prize from Southwest Review and inclusion in the “Other Distinguished Stories” section of Best American Short Stories, 201534.
“I’ve been writing for publication since I was fifteen, but my passion—of the inanimate variety—is books. I’ve been a journalist, editor, publisher, part owner of a bookstore, and all the time writing fiction. This Familiar Heart is my first book length non-fiction. Both the story collection and the memoir are set in Texas, where I live.”
