Inklings Week 2026: A Q&A with NYT Bestselling Author Patti Callahan Henry
The Author of Becoming Mrs. Lewis Joins Inklings 100!
It’s that time of year, where we celebrate all things Inklings for the annual Inklings Week and International Inklings Day on May 11th (the day C.S. Lewis and J.R.R. Tolkien first met)! This year is extra special being the 100th Anniversary of their meeting. We have a great set of posts and contributors this year and a giveaway, so be sure to subscribe and not miss a post. You can find all the posts here. And don’t forget to enter this year’s giveaway!
Today is another wonderful Q&A, this time from NYT Bestselling author Patti Callahan Henry! She’s written wonderful award-winning books, including the story of C.S. Lewis’ wife, Joy Davidman in Becoming Mrs. Lewis. She’s also wrote Once Upon a Wardrobe, a beautiful tale of siblings’ encounter with Lewis and Narnia. Thrilled to have her here today!
1. Many fans of Lewis and Tolkien are drawn to the stories of their writing and friendship. What was it about Lewis and Joy’s relationship that drew you to Joy and her role in Lewis’ life, but also her own story?
What first drew me wasn’t only Jack Lewis, though I have loved his work for most of my life. It was Joy. I became fascinated by this brilliant, fiery, complicated American woman and the question of how she came to alter the life of one of the most beloved writers of the twentieth century. Their love story felt improbable in all the best ways—intellectually, spiritually, and emotionally. But the deeper I went, the more I realized that the least interesting thing about Joy Davidman was that she became Mrs. Lewis. She was a gifted writer and award-winning poet, a searching mind, a mother, a woman of deep wounds and deep courage, and I wanted to know her as a person in her own right, not simply as the woman in someone else’s shadow. I wanted to show her not as the woman behind the man but beside the man.
2. Becoming Mrs. Lewis won numerous awards and is a bestseller (and rightly so!), what do you think draws people to the woman beside Lewis?
I am so honored and humbled by the awards and readers who have found this novel. I believe, and it’s only a guess on my part, that readers respond to Joy because she feels emotionally alive on the page. I tried to capture her wit, intellectual fearlessness, emotional hunger and her unwillingness to settle for easy answers. For far too long she was a sad footnote in Lewis’s story, when in truth she was an enormous presence in his life. Joy was his companion, and his intellectual equal. I hope readers sense that they are meeting a woman who should never have been hidden from view. And beyond all that, Joy’s intense longing, which we read in her sonnets, for love, for meaning, and for truth, feels achingly human. I hope we recognize ourselves in that kind of yearning.
3. What has Joy taught you about being a writer?
Joy taught me courage. She taught me that writing asks us to be braver than we feel, to trust what is deepest and truest in us, and to stop apologizing for the very voice we’ve been given. Writing her changed me because she possessed a kind of boldness I admired—an unwillingness to shrink herself to make others more comfortable. She also reminded me that the writing life is rarely neat. It must be claimed in the midst of family, heartbreak, doubt, and the ordinary demands of living. There was something profoundly freeing to me in entering Joy’s mind and heart, and in understanding that the writer’s task is not to please everyone, but to tell the truth as faithfully and beautifully as she can.
4. As you did your research for this, was there any historical tidbits that really stuck out to you? Whether inspiring, interesting, or maybe caught you off guard?
So much surprised me, but what stayed with me most was discovering just how significant Joy’s influence was on Lewis’s work (especially Till We Have Faces). I think many readers will be astonished to realize how deeply she entered his intellectual and creative life. I was also struck by how much of Joy’s own voice remains for us in her letters, poems, essays, and books. Her love sonnets were a gift to me as a novelist, because it allowed me to move closer to her interior life and to understand not just the events of her story. And perhaps most moving of all was uncovering the vulnerability beneath her brilliance and often sharp wit.
5. You also wrote Once Upon a Wardrobe and have mentioned before how the draw of Lewis is such a personal one. How does that shape the Lewis related stories you’ve chosen to write?
My relationship to Lewis has always been deeply personal. I didn’t come to him first as a scholar; I came to him as a child who opened a wardrobe door. His books have walked beside me through different seasons of my life, and they have changed as I have changed. That personal bond shaped both of these novels. In Becoming Mrs. Lewis, I was drawn to the intimate, transformational love story at the center of Joy and Jack’s lives. And while writing it, I began to notice what I think of as the breadcrumbs of Narnia scattered through Lewis’s life and imagination. That wonder led me to Once Upon a Wardrobe, which is, in many ways, my love letter to story itself, and the unanswerable magic of where stories come from. I’m always drawn to the juxtaposition between logic and imagination and how we remedy that in our own lives. There is no better place to explore that than in Lewis’ work in Narnia.
Thank you so much Patti!
About Patti:
I’m Patti Callahan Henry, NYT Bestselling author, podcast host of original content, and founder and co-host of Friends and Fiction. My latest novels are historical fiction: Becoming Mrs. Lewis: the Improbable Love Story of Joy Davidman and C. S. Lewis, Once Upon a Wardrobe, Surviving Savannah, and most recently the NYT bestseller The Secret Book of Flora Lea. My books have been translated into over 20 languages and have been Barnes and Noble Book Club Pick, Amazon Editor Pick, Goodreads Book of the Year finalist, People Magazine Choice, Book of the Month Selection, and more. I have lived up and down the East Coast from Philadelphia, to Florida, to Atlanta. I now live in Mountain Brook, Alabama, where I moved a decade ago and am just now calling home.
About Becoming Mrs. Lewis:
When poet and writer Joy Davidman began writing letters to C. S. Lewis—known as Jack—she was looking for spiritual answers, not love. Love, after all, wasn’t holding together her crumbling marriage. Everything about New Yorker Joy seemed ill-matched for an Oxford professor and the beloved writer of The Chronicles of Narnia, yet their minds bonded over their letters.
Embarking on the adventure of her life, Joy traveled from America to England and back again, facing heartbreak and poverty, discovering friendship and faith, and against all odds, found a love that even the threat of death couldn’t destroy.
In this masterful exploration of one of the greatest love stories of modern times, we meet a brilliant writer, a fiercely independent mother, and a passionate woman who changed the life of this respected author and inspired books that still enchant us and change us. Joy lived at a time when women weren’t meant to have a voice—and yet her love for Jack gave them both voices they didn’t know they had.
At once a fascinating historical novel and a glimpse into a writer’s life, Becoming Mrs. Lewis is above all a love story—a love of literature and ideas and a love between a husband and wife that, in the end, was not impossible at all.