By: Jonathan Reed Hale
When Leigh Seippel talks about writing Ruin, there is no mention of outlines filled with symbols or carefully mapped allegory. The novel, he says, came instinctively. Its momentum grew from the emotional collision of two decent people suddenly pushed into humiliation and poverty. Frank and Francy Campbell are not designed to stand in for ideas. They are meant to move, to react, to struggle. Once their former life collapses, they have only two options left. Swim or sink.
That sense of urgency drives the book forward. Frank takes up artisanal brewing and fly fishing not as poetic gestures but out of practical necessity. He needs work, purpose, and something to hold onto while everything else slips. At the same time, fear shadows every decision. He worries about losing Francy not just emotionally but socially, to a figure Leigh half jokingly calls a Jay Gatsby type. Francy, for her part, turns to painting because it is the only thing she can do that still feels honest. Her fear runs in the opposite direction. She worries she may have to leave Frank behind in order to survive the long stretch of life still ahead of her.
Readers often describe Ruin as rich with symbolism, especially in its use of fishing, rural labor, and even luxury objects. Leigh insists this was never planned. In his view, any object placed inside a story inevitably takes on symbolic weight. What matters is not the symbol itself but what the characters do with it. He even admits to a rare regret as a writer. Some readers questioned why the Campbells still own a Lamborghini after bankruptcy, interpreting it as a crude metaphor. Leigh points out that bankruptcy law protects ownership of a car so that a person can still work and rebuild. For him, the problem was not symbolism but a missing line of explanation. The novel was never about showing off wealth. It was about what people make of what remains.
At its heart, Ruin is a book about identity under pressure. Leigh wanted to write characters of inner strength and decency facing an existential crisis. He pushes back against what he sees as a trend in contemporary fiction toward the odd, the deviant, or the narrowly personal. Frank and Francy are not extreme figures. They are ordinary in the most demanding sense. Their struggle asks what happens when privilege evaporates and the traits that once defined a person no longer function.
Research, in the traditional sense, played little role in shaping the novel. Leigh describes his preparation simply as living, observing, and remembering. His familiarity with finance informed the emotional truth of collapse. His experience with art and fishing shaped the texture of daily life. The land itself came from decades spent in the Hudson Valley, where he lived on a small farm. While Ruin is not a roman a clef, he jokes that it might be a farm a clef. The goats and chickens that appear in the book were companions in real life. The coyotes, less so.
That intimacy with rural life gives the novel its grounded atmosphere. Farming in Ruin is not sentimental. It is physical, repetitive, and often indifferent to human plans. This mirrors the emotional state of the Campbells. The land does not rescue them, but it does not lie to them either. It demands presence. It demands effort. It refuses shortcuts.
Writing the emotional interiority of the characters came naturally to Leigh. Frank’s inner life emerged by imagining how he himself might react if suddenly stripped of status, security, and belonging. Francy required a different approach. Leigh drew on women he has known and admired, focusing on their quiet strength, their dignity, and their capacity to act under pressure without spectacle. Francy’s pain is rarely loud, but it is constant, shaping her choices as much as Frank’s guilt shapes his.
Despite its dark subject matter, Ruin allows space for humor. Leigh thought of the novel as a painting, built from both dark and bright strokes. Moments of irony and warmth prevent the story from collapsing into despair. This tonal contrast reflects real life, where loss rarely arrives without absurdity, and survival often depends on the ability to notice what is still light.
In the end, Ruin does not offer a lesson neatly wrapped. It offers something harder and more honest. Resilience, in Leigh’s vision, is not reinvention as spectacle. It is the slow, uncertain work of becoming someone else without fully escaping who you were. Identity is not recovered. It is remade, one imperfect choice at a time.
Get your copy of Ruin by Leigh Seippel.
