Bay Area writer and physician Christine Henneberg wrapped up her memoir, published it and was ready to take on something new. She started writing fiction and ended up with a full-length book.
“There aren’t very many things in my life that I do without a set goal or intention in mind, but writing a novel actually ended up being one of them. It was something I was doing for fun and to follow some ideas that I had in my mind after I was done with the memoir,” she says.
Henneberg celebrates her self-published debut novel “I Trust Her Completely” (274 pages, $17, May 6, 2025) on July 1 at Green Apple Books on the Park with a reading, Q&A and conversation with Dr. Ana Coutinho. a friend and colleague.
“I Trust Her Completely” follows Henneberg’s 2022 award-winning “Boundless: An Abortion Doctor Becomes a Mother,” which details her experiences as a women’s health care practitioner and her considerations of motherhood.
The novel, she says, has been “a way to explore a lot of the same themes as the memoir, but with a different kind of freedom and imagination — and access.”
It centers on two women — Josie, a queer writer who’s had a abortion, and Radhika, a mother, abortion doctor and author — who reunite post-college in San Francisco.
“It’s a very San Francisco novel,” says Henneberg. “Josie’s experiences are very inseparable from the setting, both the time and the place, and from [the city’s] opportunities and its limitations. The particular moment in time when these two friends are living there is like another character in the book,” she adds.
Josie, the narrator, and Radhika initially come across each other in a Safeway and, from there, they rekindle their friendship, which intensifies, prompting quality plot twists.
“I really wanted there to be surprises, particularly for readers reading [about] a queer character, maybe for the first time, and certainly an abortion doctor, maybe for the first time, as a main character. I wanted to disrupt people’s expectations a little bit,” says Henneberg.
She also sought to challenge the heteronormative question “Can a man and a woman ever really be friends?” with “Can a queer woman ever really just be friends with another woman?”
While the answer is yes, it doesn’t make for a less complicated relationship between Josie and Radhika. Their dynamic implores readers to give thought to the nuances of female friendships.
Henneberg says, “It was interesting for me to explore, ‘OK, then what is the obsession?’ I think it’s something that is familiar to a lot of women. That’s what I really wanted to get into—that deep and complex and sometimes obsessive nature of friendship between two women, whether they’re gay or straight or anything in between.”
At one point, Josie feels a need to explain her abortion to Radhika, but Radhika assures her that it’s unnecessary and that she understands.
“Radhika’s like, ‘Don’t worry. I get it. Life’s complicated. You don’t need to explain to me that you had an unintended pregnancy,’” says Henneberg.
“When I knew I was going to represent abortion in some way in the book, I wanted it to be represented in a story other than some of the typical ones that we hear,” she adds.
While abortion is a theme in “I Trust Her Completely,” the story’s focus is wider.
“It’s about the reality of everyday lives, of difficult choices and many, many things outside of our control … It’s about two women living their reproductive lives and making their choices and also living through events that they never would have chosen for themselves,” she says.
Christine Henneberg discusses “I Trust Her Completely” at 7 p.m. July 1 at Green Apple Books on the Park, 1231 Ninth Ave., San Francisco. Admission is free; a $10 donation (partial proceeds benefit the nonprofit Access Reproductive Justice) is welcome. RSVP at thethirdplce.is.event/.
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