Stories are woven throughout RJ Jacobs’ life: from his early days as an English major to his career as a psychologist and now, his successful side hustle. While in college at the University of Florida, Jacobs dabbled in writing, though he’s quick to laugh it off.
“Candidly, it was terrible. I didn’t have a good sense at that time of what was marketable, or why someone would go into a bookstore and pick up a book,” he says.
He fortuitously enrolled in an elective psychology class that changed his trajectory.
“I learned something that really mattered—really true, applicable names for concepts I had observed but didn’t know existed,” he recalls. “A lightbulb went off. I switched my major from English to psychology.”
Through undergrad and then graduate school, writing took on the form of academic journals and dissertations, which are, of course, anything but fiction. After school, life happened in the form of a career and a family. But the desire to write novels always lingered, and he knew as the years went on it was now or never.
“I essentially bought a laptop and got it going,” he laughs.
Working on a novel, he says, was an extremely cool, though extremely private, process. You go about your day as usual, then enter a world entirely your own once you sit down to write.
“It becomes almost this refuge or imaginary place that you can go,” he says. “I have a job that has a lot of face time to it, so it’s nice to have an introverted hobby.”
His debut novel, a mystery/thriller titled And Then You Were Gone, was released in 2019, and now two subsequent books (Somewhere In The Dark and Always The First To Die) have joined the first on shelves.
“As a psychologist, I have a sense of how circumstances are a better predictor of behavior than character,” he says. He cites the bystander effect—almost anyone in certain social situations is going to respond to their environment.
But while psychology has certainly influenced his books (bipolar disorder is a central theme in And Then You Were Gone), he notes that the influence is perhaps stronger the other way around.
“I feel like it makes me a much better therapist,” he begins. “It’s nice to have that solitary time to recharge my batteries. But also it’s a tremendous source of metaphor.”
If this were a story, what part of the story would the events be that you’re talking about right now? If we were editing the story, what would we want to highlight? What would we want to cut? How big of a chapter do we want to make this? Who’s the main character here?
Jacobs often works with veterans. “They struggle with not what happened to them, but what they did, and they can’t integrate that into the rest of the story,” he says. “What would a redemption arc look like? Which act are we in? If the curtain went down now, what would be the next scene?”
These are all tools in Jacobs' inventory to help people understand, process, reflect, and heal in his practice.
Jacobs' most recent novel, This Is How We End Things, was published in 2024. He has another book on the way (stay in the loop on Instagram, @rjjacobs75) and is accepting new patients through his practice at Heritage Medical Associates.
A Bellevue resident, Jacobs has a daughter in high school and a son in college. He enjoys running, working out, and playing in a weekly soccer game. rjjacobsauthor.com