Michelle S. Morris has lived a thousand lives. From beginning her career in the White House, advising political leaders, then working national and state campaigns to journalist and then advising and writing for corporate executives, from small town to big city and the international stage, from mothering triplets to watching the love of her life slip away under the shadow of a brain tumor, her life has been one of resilience, duty, and reinvention.
And now, in her new career, she emerges into the public eye not as an advisor or executive, but as a novelist.
Her first book, Comes Around, is a powerful homecoming and healing story, revolving around a woman named Halley McCarthy. But to appreciate the book in all its impact, one has to know the woman who wrote it.
“I’ve always written,” Morris explains, sitting easily in her Michigan home, among bookshelves and family photos. “Even if I wasn’t writing fiction, I was writing stories through speeches, through strategy papers, through articles, videos, and executive communiques. It’s the way I make sense of the world and try to create those connections for others.”
She takes a moment before going on. “But fiction … fiction is where my heart’s always lived. There’s beautiful and awful truth in fiction.”
Morris wrote through her childhood, writing stories in notebooks and journals and aspiring to be a writer. But the world had other plans: stability, sacrifice, resilience. She married an Irish musician, had triplets, and her life took a different turn. Her husband was diagnosed with a brain tumor, a disease that would claim him over a decade, slowly and agonizingly.
Morris built a career – three, actually – before meeting her husband, who loved her creative side. But suddenly she did not have a choice. She became the single provider and caretaker, pulling off the impossible with grit and grace. But there were always more stories. “They lived inside me,” she says. “They waited.”
When the moment finally arrived, she decided to make fiction her next move. Comes Around is the result of that choice, a novel full of themes that reflect Morris’s life: messy families, caregiving, sorrow, the bravery to go back to your roots, and the slow, and hard labor of healing.
The novel’s protagonist, Halley McCarthy, is a fictional character, but her challenge is real. She quits a glamorous career and an ill-fated engagement to go back to her hometown in Michigan. There, hemmed in by her own insecurities and the ghosts of her past, she has to learn to start over, with the help of her overly protective family and their motorcycle club dynasty.
“It’s not autobiographical,” Morris maintains, “but it is emotionally true.
She adds, “The multi-generational family is something I’ve had in my life. And I’d like to say, while not the main character, Grandma Mary McCarthy is probably my favorite – she adults hard and is tough as nails, with a big heart … and has some serious skills you’ll have to read the book to discover.”
Fans have reacted with great love for both Halley and the voice that speaks through her. The emotional authenticity of Comes Around speaks to women who’ve experienced many pages of their own. There is no fairy tale here but the wish that, even in the face of unimaginable loss, a human may continue to grow, to love, to dream.
Morris is already in the process of writing her next books, intending to publish multiple annually. She doesn’t view this as a one-time project, however, but rather as the next act of her creative existence.
Her authorial goal is straightforward: to make connection. To write relatable, resonant stories in which readers can look in and see themselves not idealized or broken, but human.
“I’m not trying to be clever or edgy,” she says. “I just want to tell a good story. One that makes people feel less alone – helps them see they too can be resilient and have hope, always hope.”
In Michelle S. Morris, readers have found more than a promising new novelist. They’ve found a woman brave enough to begin again and wise enough to know that every story, like every life, deserves its moment to be told.
This article appears in Jul 2-8, 2025.