Jar of Hearts
Jar of Hearts
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Jennifer Hillier on Jar of Hearts
In her own words: quotes and insights from the author.Why she wrote it
A news clipping and a career lowThe book began with a real case that had never left her. Hillier was a teenager in Canada when Paul Bernardo and Karla Homolka murdered three young women, and years later a follow-up news piece found Homolka living quietly as a suburban mother in Montreal, volunteering at her children’s school. That image, of ordinary domesticity worn over atrocity, became the question the novel had to answer.
She was volunteering at her kids’ school, attending PTA meetings. It was mind-boggling that this person actually thought she could rebuild her life and be… normal. I was in my teens when the original murders happened, and they’ve stayed with me. So this follow-up piece on her, playing the suburban mom as if she didn’t help murder a bunch of young women back in the day, was fascinating. And that’s when Jar of Hearts was born. I wanted to find out what happened after someone does the horrible thing.
The Homolka story supplied the concept, but Hillier had to reach a particular place in her own life before she could write it. She said so explicitly on publication day, listing the biographical accumulation that made the book possible.
I couldn’t have written this book a day sooner than I started. I had to get my heart broken, start over, fall in love, get married again, have a baby, write and publish four books, struggle with my self-confidence as a writer, and move about a hundred times... to get good enough, and sad enough, and angry enough, and motivated enough to write this book. In other words, I had to live my life. As all writers do. It’s fiction, but it all comes from somewhere real.
The immediate professional trigger was a setback. Her previous novel, Wonderland, had been released in digital-only form after her publisher passed on a print run. Deep in that low, she read an interview with M. Night Shyamalan about failure, and his framing of what failure actually leaves you with reoriented her.
he said there’s so much freedom in failing, because when you fail, you’ve got nothing to lose. Nobody’s watching. You can do what you want. And that’s exactly what it felt like after Wonderland. No one was banging on my door asking me what I’ve got coming out next. I might as well just sit and write the book I really, really want to write, and that’s where Jar of Hearts came from.
How she wrote it
Grief’s five stages as a scaffoldThe book’s architecture came from lived feeling rather than structural theory. Hillier divided the novel into five parts, each opening on one of the five stages of grief, and the decision was personal: she had been through her own version of each stage during the divorce and rebuilding that preceded the book.
JAR OF HEARTS is divided into five parts, each beginning with a stage of grief. I know a little something about grief, and while the grief that Geo feels and compartmentalizes throughout the novel stems from something very different than what I went through, I had to tap into those emotions. I had to move through all the stages of grief in order to come out the other side to a better place.
The prison scenes required a specific kind of preparation. In 2012, while researching a different novel, Hillier spent a full day inside the Washington Corrections Center for Women. She kept every note from that visit for six years, and what stayed with her most was not the violence or the security but something much harder to dramatize.
what fascinated me the most was that the inmates looked so… ordinary. I mean, okay, some had serious face tattoos. But most of the women incarcerated there – for drugs, fraud, and assault, mostly – looked like they could work at the mall. Or answer phones at the doctor’s office. Or live next door to you. And their relationships with their fellow inmates were surprisingly intense.
She does not outline, and the book’s ending, which she calls her favorite she has ever written, was entirely undiscovered when she sat down to write it. That process of not knowing is, for her, what keeps the reader’s surprise genuine.
I never know the ending until I write it. Sometimes I have a vague notion of where I think it’s going to go, but ultimately, everything that surprises a reader surprises me, too.
The 1990s flashback sections were, by contrast, the easiest and most pleasurable material she encountered in any book she had written. She describes Jar of Hearts as the only novel she has written that she loved from the first word to the last.
The personal thread
The one book she could not have fakedWhen the cover was revealed in October 2017, months before the book’s release, Hillier published a post that read less like a promotional announcement than a private reckoning. She was staking a claim on what the book had cost and what it represented, on terms she had never used about her earlier work.
JAR OF HEARTS is all . . . heart. It’s love. It’s patience. It’s rage. It’s grief. It’s hope. It’s personal. It’s so, so emotional. On some level, I don’t know if I’ll ever write another book like this one.
In the same post, she went further. The declaration is not about quality or reception; it is about the permanent, unrepeatable nature of the conditions that produced the book, and it ends on a claim she says she has never made about any other title.
this is a book that, as a writer, I’ve always wanted to write. And I couldn’t have done it four books ago, or before I got my heart broken, or before I had a kid, or at any point in time before I actually wrote it. And then the time came, and I seized it, and whether you think the book is wonderful or terrible or somewhere in between, there’s not a single word in it I would change. And I NEVER say that.
What she wants us to sit with
Empty jars and the permanence of complicityThe novel’s title object, a jar of cinnamon hearts given to Geo by Calvin, is not decorative. Hillier worked through its meaning precisely when asked, and her explanation reframes the gift as a portrait of Calvin’s entire method of control.
The symbolism is that the jar became empty because what Calvin gave her he also took away. It is a metaphor for their relationship. His attitude, ‘I am not going to give you what you really want, but what I want to give you, and then I will take it back.’ By the time the jar was empty, she was empty, left with only the guilt.
Rape is present in the book as a long-term wound, not a plot event. Hillier spent time thinking through what that experience does to a person across years, and she was specific about where the lasting damage lives.
I tried to imagine the impact rape would have on someone’s life. It is more than just the physicality of it. There is the violation and dominance that makes someone feel inconsequential and insignificant. The body might heal, but the spirit would be affected forever.
Her goal for protagonist Geo, who served fourteen years for her role in a murder she did not commit alone, is moral discomfort rather than resolution. She wants the reader to leave without a verdict.
I want readers to be unsure if they liked, disliked, or are somewhere in between with Geo.
Writing Jar of Hearts from a position of professional freedom, with no contract pressure and no audience expecting a particular kind of book, permanently changed her approach to character. She stopped auditing whether readers would approve of the people she was putting on the page, and she describes that shift as the widest creative door she has ever opened.
Asked what the experience of writing the book gave her going forward, she returned not to craft technique but to permission. The freedom she found in the Wonderland setback had produced something she chose to keep.
Not worrying about whether my characters are liked opens up the door to do everything I’ve ever wanted to do as a writer.