We chat with author Lauren Ho about Two Lives With You, which follows an overwhelmed husband and wife when that what-if wish comes true in an emotional and bittersweet novel about choices, sacrifice, and the love that they might lose forever.
You have an impressive resume as a former legal counsel and philanthropy advisor How did you find the time to write? Have you always had a passion for creative writing?
I’ve always loved daydreaming and coming up with stories, and have been “competitively” short-story writing since I was a kid. Even when I grew up and got a job, I always made time for this passion of mine—if you love doing something, you’ll find a way to indulge.
It sounds as though your previous work in humanitarian diplomacy and conflict settings has been a sobering experience. What role has fiction played – both as a writer and reader – in helping you to find your way back to hope and love?
Fiction has always been how I process the world. Humanitarian work, especially in conflict settings, exposes you to fragility, power, and suffering in very stark ways, and that can be sobering. Fiction gives me a space to sit with those realities without the constraints of policy language. It allows me to explore the emotional truths beneath the geopolitical ones, which in itself is a kind of catharsis.
I believe fiction is inherently political in the sense that it decides whose interior lives matter. As a reader and writer from a minority background, I return to it because it restores dimensionality—where love, humour and contradiction can exist alongside injustice.
In featuring a frontline medical worker, I drew from anecdotes shared by family members and friends working in the US healthcare system, including one working in a Baltimore trauma hospital—the relentless emotional demands, the micro and macro aggressions, the mental, physical and emotional toll of constant crisis. Writing Dana was a way of exploring how someone carries that weight and still remains open to intimacy in their private lives. For me, fiction is an act of dehumanization—a way back to hope and love without denying reality.
In TWO LIVES WITH YOU, you expertly explore what happens after the happily-ever-after in the context of an ordinary millennial couple and capture the raw, unvarnished reality when the afterglow fades and the drudgery, the doubts, and the distance start to seep in, especially when life gets rough. What do you hope readers will take away from Dana and Nigel’s story?
In TWO LIVES, I wanted to explore the quiet, everyday struggles of contemporary (millennial) couples who’ve grown up ingesting a rose-tinted, IG-friendly ideal of romantic love—to showcase the unglamorous moments that don’t make it into fairy tales and social media posts. It was important to me to show that relationships don’t unravel only because of dramatic betrayals, but often through exhaustion, miscommunication, and life’s ordinary pressures. I hope readers see that going through difficult seasons doesn’t mean a relationship has failed. Sometimes it’s precisely in surviving those rough patches together that couples find a deeper, more resilient kind of love.
Dana is an overworked ER nurse who has never had the time to process the trauma she experienced during Covid. Tell us more about her and why you chose this career for her.
Dana was inspired by family members and friends working on the frontlines of the U.S. medical system, and former colleagues working to provide care in conflict settings. I’ve seen how burnout accumulates quietly—how trauma isn’t always processed in the moment, but carried home in small, invisible ways. I chose trauma medicine because it’s high-intensity, relentless, and emotionally demanding. I have deep sympathy for people who work in those environments and then try to show up fully in their personal lives. Dana embodies that tension between professional resilience and private vulnerability.
Her husband, Nigel, has been laid off from his job as a creative and is finding his way as a stay-at-home father. Tell us more about his situation and why he and Dana are butting heads.
Even as “woke” millennials, many of us grew up in societies or traditional households that quietly reinforced the idea that men must “bring home the bacon.” Being a product of such a background, Nigel may see himself as progressive, but those expectations still shape him. When he loses his job and can no longer provide financially, it shakes his sense of identity—especially because he’s always tied his self-worth to traditional markers of success. Those insecurities can unsettle even the most self-aware person. I wanted to heighten that tension by making Dana equally accomplished in a high-pressure career, so their conflict becomes not just about money, but about pride, purpose, and shifting roles.
What was it like to step out of your comfort zone to write a novel with an element of magical realism?
I’ve never seen myself as a novelist confined to one genre. To me, a story is a story—it just demands the form/genre it needs. I’ve written a murder mystery before and have a horror project in progress. Magical realism felt less like a departure and more like another tool to explore emotional truth in a slightly heightened way.
What were some things that surprised you while writing this book in terms of new plot twists or how the story developed while writing?
How hopeful it turned out to be. I’ve read this book countless times through revisions, and I still find myself emotional in the final act—in a cathartic way. The hope feels earned rather than sentimental.
Why is representation of AAPI stories so important to you, and how does your Malaysian heritage inform your work as an author?
It’s deeply important. I’ve lived much of my life abroad, including over a decade in Europe, and I grew up reading (English) books centered on people who looked nothing like me. Now my daughter reads children’s books with protagonists who share her cultural background, and I’m incredibly grateful for that shift. Writing contemporary novels set in Singapore and Malaysia, centering Asian voices, is both a responsibility and a point of pride for me.
How was the book’s title chosen, and what does it signify for you?
The title speaks to the idea that within one relationship, we can live multiple emotional lives. There’s the life we imagine, the life we actually live, and the life we build together after change, especially trauma. TWO LIVES WITH YOU reflects that duality: the version of love before hardship and struggle, and the version after, reshaped but still chosen.
What is the main message you hope readers will gain from this novel?
That while our circumstances may differ, our vulnerabilities are often the same. If we read widely and across cultures, we begin to see how much we share—in the way we love, fear, and in what we long for. Our common humanity binds us more than we realize.
Outside of writing, what do you enjoy doing with your free time? Do you have a secret talent readers would be surprised by?
I’m not sure you could call this a talent—I am a below-average singer with above-average confidence in a karaoke room. The same could be said for my enthusiasm for stand-up comedy.
