Guest post written by author Sarina Dahlan
Sarina Dahlan was born into an Indonesian family in Thailand and immigrated to the California desert at the age of twelve. While children in the West grew up on fairy tales, she learned parables through ghost stories, mythologies, and Japanese manga.
A graduate of the University of California, San Diego, with degrees in psychology and visual arts, she has blended both disciplines in careers as an advertising producer, a corporate marketing strategist, and a writer. She lives in San Diego with her young family and a senior cat. Her debut novel, Reset, was an instant bestseller.
Freeset, the last book in the Four Cities love tryptic, will come out May 21, 2024.
Growing up, I could always be found reading—in dark corners, underneath the stairs, in a nook between a table and a chair, wherever there was peace. I’m convinced most writers’ origins begin in crevices and shadows.
All the stories I’ve loved have been bittersweet. I find comfort in them—in the poignancy of life, in the preciousness of fleeting moments, in the idea that beauty can come from the ugliest of places. My favorites have helped me process some heavy questions in small nuggets.
Before I began writing in earnest, I spent sixteen years in Corporate America wrapped up in numbers and data. Trained to look at people as categories—income, spending habits, return on investment—my job was money. But after the company was acquired and I refused to move to a new state to keep my same job, I decided to use my severance payout to buy what was most precious: time. Specifically, time to write.
Reset came to me late one night in 2017 in the form of a question as I was staring at my blank computer screen after deleting 70,000 words of the novel I had spent months writing. What if we could delete our memories the same way we do documents?
For a year I wrote daily, letting the story and the characters guide me. I followed Aris and Metis, past lovers who lost each other after their memories were wiped in tabula rasa, a process everyone goes through every four years in order to maintain peace in the utopia of the Four Cities. No memories. No attachments. No wars.
By being in discovery mode, writing became exploring—living with the characters, loving with them, understanding them, being afraid for them, and finding hope in love as they do. It was the opposite of how I had approached my corporate job where everything had to be meticulously planned and tracked (much in the way things are run in the Four Cities.) I brought into it Buddhist philosophy from Thailand where I grew up, the lyrics of my favorite song Imagine, and the essence of the books that have shaped me.
I finished Reset in 2018, got an agent the same year, and she sold it in 2019. In 2020, while Covid upended the world, I was assigned my very first editor. Peggy’s love for the book fueled me through the arduous editing process and the uncertainty of life in that time. A month after we wrapped up, she passed away. I had no idea she was sick. There is a line she wrote in the synopsis that rings different after I found out—“Reset will make you consider the haunting reality of love and loss, and the indelible marks they leave behind.” I added her into my dedication and the book came out in May 2021, four years that began with my personal reset and ended with the world’s.
While I waited for Reset to go through the production process, I began writing Preset, its prequel. I hadn’t intended to write a series but I was curious about the two creators of the Four Cities. What had to have happened to them and the world for them to conceive of a place ruled by the fear of loss?
Just as I did with Reset, I let the characters lead me. The story follows a married couple, Eleanor and Eli, as they struggle to save the last of humanity after a catastrophic war has ravaged the world. For him, I took inspiration from another larger-than-life visionary, Steve Jobs. Her, I found in all the intelligent female characters I’ve read about who have ever been overshadowed. The couple guided me through thirty years of their relationship and I projected into their world our own current events, my anxiety about climate change, history, advancement in AI and science. Having seen the world through their eyes, I’ve come to understand their fears.
As I was finishing the book, we lost my father-in-law and our life came to a halt. While my mother-in-law was in the hospital from grief, I made a promise to dedicate Preset to him and her. I thought it would be appropriate—a book about a long marriage dedicated to a couple with a long marriage.
Months after, when my new editor came to me, we relooked at the book and saw all the weak points. Diana helped me to see that the story I had written wasn’t the real story I was trying to tell. I was relieved and terrified in equal measure. I knew I had to rewrite half the book to make it better, but how? Then two things happened while I was in the throes of editing that made everything click. One, I realized I was afraid of Eli like everyone around him. Two, Roe v Wade was overturned in June 2022. I had no choice but to face my fears head on. Preset became my scream about injustice and my hope for a better world. It came out in 2023 and I used the hope I found at the end of writing Preset to fuel Freeset, the third book in the series.
This time, I wanted to center the story around the created-children, Cass and Bastian. But my mind was crowded and I ended up writing a long drawn out story that I could not see an ending to. I was too deep in the tunnel to see the other side. With the help of Diana, I realized why. I was afraid to write the big ensemble story the series needed. Until that point my books tend to be intimate with close perspectives—that was my comfort zone. But everyone’s freedom in the Four Cities hinges on each other’s, and the characters demanded it be about community. So, I rewrote it in entirety.
Freeset isn’t dystopian fiction with one hero. It is a story about people coming together after realizing that no one is free until everyone is free. It’s about love for others being a fuel for change. About letting go of the past to embrace a new beginning. After I finished, I dedicated it to those who serve as bridges. But as the book was being printed, just like Eleanor’s cat had years prior, my cat of twenty years passed. You will find him in my dedication too.
For seven years and multiple lifetimes, I’ve lived in a world that demanded I give up love for comfort. That I trade pieces of myself for safety. Through my characters, I have fought to break free from that world. Our lives have intertwined, our losses intermingled. Writing them has indelibly changed me.
It’s been my honor to have spent the last seven years sharing the lives of those in the Four Cities with you.
