In 1976, Jonathan Evison was eight years old, newly relocated to Bainbridge Island, and a complete mess.
That was the year that Evison’s father brought the family to Washington, ostensibly for a Navy job, then surprised the family of five by turning around to return to the Bay Area, alone. It was the final act in the slow-motion rupture of his parents’ marriage, one that began with the death of an older sister, Gail, in an automotive accident four years before, on her 16th birthday.
The upheaval forced his mother, Jessie, to become the family breadwinner to her four children in the home, just to keep the Evisons just above the poverty line in a community of plenty.
Evison, the baby among his five siblings, says he had untreated “off the charts ADHD” at the time, and acted out at home and in school in all the predictable ways. As Jessie Evison put it: “He was such a handful as a kid, I was tearing my hair out with him.”
What held Jonathan together were three things.
One was a determination at that age — an age when most kids can’t yet settle on their favorite cereal or cartoon character — that being a novelist would be his life’s work. And a third-grade teacher, Fran Hanford, who took that determination seriously and gave her rambunctious charge room in a corner of the classroom to explore it while the other students went on with their scheduled lessons. (There he wrote his first story, “The King Without a Crown,” which was later republished by Seattle Pacific University Press.)
“I had a ton of energy and creativity; I just didn’t have the requisite focus to put it to any good use before I found writing,” Evison recalled. “I found not only my focus in writing, but also my escape. In a world and a family that was kind of breaking up around me, the writing, that leap of imagination, was something I could control, a world where I could dictate what happened.”
The other was the constancy of the love and support he got from his older siblings, and in particular his mother.
“My mom is like the ultimate teammate,” Evison said. “Sometimes I think maybe her sense of self lies in the act of belonging more than the personal freedoms of being an individual. I know that’s a feeling I relate to, that I no doubt learned from her.”
And now, with his ninth published novel, “The Heart of Winter” ($28.00, Dutton), Evison is giving his mother the ultimate novelist’s gift. “I just told my mom, ‘I’m writing you the love story I wished you would have had.’”
“The Heart of Winter,” released in January 2025, is the story of seven decades in the lives of Abe and Ruth Winter, an opposites-attract couple who met and married as University of Washington students in the early 1950s and later raised their four children on Bainbridge Island. Their comfortable-on-the-surface life is confronted by one challenge after another: marital complacency, cultural clashes, thwarted desires, the death of a child, and disfiguring cancer, among many others, always finding the deeper level of their love before the damage undoes them.
Jessie Evison is not Ruth Winter, and she’ll be the first to tell you. But the parallels are many. For instance, Jessie was being treated in Seattle for the same kind of facial bone cancer that afflicts Ruth throughout the book when the idea for “The Heart of Winter” struck her son.
“That decision came when I was by her side through her cancer, sitting there in doctor’s offices, or by her bedside, or throughout the radiation, wishing that she had an enduring, steadfast husband by her side rather than me,” Jonathan Evison said. “I mean, I was better than nothing, but in a perfect world that would be the mate you chose, and the one who chose you, through sickness and health, as the story goes.”
At 90, Jessie Evison lives with Jonathan, 56, along with his wife of nearly twenty years, Lauren, and the couple’s three school-age children — in the same house they moved into nearly a half-century before. She’s one of her son’s first readers, along with Lauren, and a regular front-row presence at his book-launch events at Eagle Harbor Book Company on Bainbridge (though she missed the “Heart of Winter” event Jan. 8 while recovering from a fractured shoulder).
And, Evison said recently on his podcast, “A Fresh Face in Hell,” even though he’s doing fairly well financially these days, his mother still slips him “six or seven bucks, everything she has, for gas or a cheeseburger,” because she still feels guilty about their impoverished past.
Theirs is very much a mutual-admiration society, and “The Heart of Winter” is, for Jessie Evison, the ultimate expression of the love between mother and son. “It was just a beautiful, beautiful love story, and I’m so very proud of him,” she said. “I wish my love story had been as wonderful as Abe and Ruth’s.”
“The Heart of Winter” is not the first Jonathan Evison novel to tap into his damaged family dynamics for literary inspiration. He’s dialed into his own personal journey, as well: “The Revised Fundamentals of Caregiving,” published in 2012 and later made into a film starring Paul Rudd and Selena Gomez, was derived from his own experience as a caregiver to a young man suffering from Duchenne muscular dystrophy. And “Lawn Boy,” released in 2018, was informed by his work on Bainbridge Island landscaping crews among the community’s nouveau-riche. (It was also, due to a willful misunderstanding of a plot point by a non-reader, one of America’s most banned books in 2021, and led to death threats against Evison and his family.)
In “All About Lulu,” the father-and-sons bodybuilder characters were inspired by the Gold’s Gym pursuits of his father and brother. The tragic death that launches the redemptive journey of the main character in “Revised Fundamentals” is drawn from his sister’s passing. And his mother was the same age as the title character of “This Is Your Life, Harriet Chance!” when it was written, and her experiences and observations helped authenticate those of Harriet.
And Evison turned in a manuscript a few months ago to his publisher, that’s based on a reimagining of his brother Davey, who took his own life five years ago. Titled “My Good Side,” it is, as he wrote in an October 24 Facebook post, an attempt to give Davey, a frustrated lounge singer and “humble servant to the Great American Songbook,” a happier alternative reality. His desire with the book is “to please and entertain my brother’s ghost with a novel he would love and relate to, which honored the music he held in the highest esteem.”
Just as he did for his mother in “The Heart of Winter,” so, he said, he did for Davey. “I have written my brother the story, and the ending, he deserved.”
It stems from a deliberate, deeply considered pivot in Evison’s storytelling priorities.
“I think, yes, I’m at a phase of my development as an artist and a person, where I’ve lived long enough to not need so much distance from my characters,” Evison said. “The draw to honor my family in this recent phase is not so much nostalgic as it is a desire to honor these people who built me, who showed me the way to this place I am now, which is not a place without difficulties, but is a place of gratitude.”
He added: “I feel like I’ve been true to myself my whole life, and my mom and my brother helped show me the way to that authenticity, though neither of them got their ultimate yearnings themselves.”
It’s a pivot in character inspiration, but not in theme. Every one of Evison’s novels, from the first story he wrote in Mrs. Hanford’s third-grade classroom, through eight unpublished books until his breakthrough just before his 40th birthday, are in a sense the same story, the same sideways spin on the American Dream: “A decent person wanting, and trying, to be loved.”
Willy Vlautin, the Portland-based novelist, most recently of “The Horse,” is one of Evison’s closest friends. Vlautin writes the same kind of empathetic, humanistic, warmhearted stories set in the American West. And he understands—maybe better than most, having come from a broken and impoverished family himself—how Evison’s origin story set him up for success in telling his own stories.
“His secret weapon has always been that he writes with a big open, broken heart,” Vlautin said. “You know he’s going to break your heart, make you laugh, and make you think. And you trust him with your heart, you trust that he knows what he’s doing. That every dip in the road is there because he wants you to feel it. And he does all that with a sort of broken belief in the power of love.”
