The False Flat – Write on the World

Sometimes, life’s most pivotal moments happen when you least expect them—like a chance encounter over a box of Cap’n Crunch cereal. In Melissa Collings’ The False Flat, protagonist Penelope Auberge reminds us that even the messiest lives can be reshaped with courage, a little humor, and the right people by your side.

Pen is at her breaking point: juggling an overbearing mother, a toxic relationship with her married boyfriend, and a finance career where her efforts are overshadowed by her male colleagues. Instead of sinking under the weight of it all, she does something most of us only dream of: she uproots her life, leaving Minnesota for Tennessee to start fresh. Determined to open her own financial business and build a life she can truly call her own, Pen sets off for Nashville with a plan to reinvent herself. But she soon learns that even the best-laid plans can’t erase the past.

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Melissa R. Collings is the award-winning author of the bittersweet love story, The False Flat. Before Melissa started writing, she worked as a surgical physician associate in Nashville, where one of her favorite procedures was reconstructing a lower-lumbar tattoo after a back surgery. Her stories, like her, are always a mix: light and dark, laughter and tears, outlandish and grounded, beautiful and ugly, glitter and charcoal smears. Her interests are way too varied; her imagination never fails to get her into trouble; and she lives by her life philosophy: nothing is impossible, and everything is better with glitter—except surgical wounds.

Q: When did you first catch the writing bug? What drove you to persist?
A: I’m originally a surgical Physician Associate (medical provider). I worked 50-60 hours per week doing spine surgery, rounding on hospital patients, and seeing patients in the clinic. I enjoyed my job, but when my husband and I were expecting our first child, I decided to take a long hiatus from medical work and stay home to raise our daughter. I’d worked since I was very young, so this was a steep adjustment for me. I needed something for myself, so I turned to a psychological suspense novel I’d started before college.

Back then, I’d been working as a receptionist and had a lot of down time. I had an idea for a book and started writing it to fill my time. I didn’t think anything would come of it. But when I was at home with a newborn, I picked that novel up again, and I discovered a whole new world.

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