Susan Lee Hahn

Wives Without Borders - One-Hour Pilot

WIVES WITHOUT BORDERS (Novel + One-Hour TV Pilot)

Overview: WIVES WITHOUT BORDERS is an edgy, comedic, spiritually-infused novel (Women’s Fiction 88,770 words) about a newly heartbroken, single woman, Maddie Stone (39+) who poses as a psychic medium to meet eligible widowers. After she fall for one of the men in the grief group she counsels, she discovers that she can see dead people and meets her lover’s deceased wife in her kitchen one night who claimed that he killed her. Is she there to warn her or derail her new romance?

The unlikely friendship that develops between these two women and the rest of the ‘Wives Without Borders’ ultimately aids in all of their transformations. As their trust and compassion grows, they join forces to resolve their pasts and to reinvent/reincarnate themselves into a brighter future. The underlying message is that love endures and that it’s not all the way over when it’s over, thus highlighting some of the novel’s themes of trust, forgiveness, following your intuition, compassion, and love.

The novel opens right after her life in Northern California has just imploded. She walked in on her boyfriend of ten years in bed with another man and lost her job as an art therapist at a children’s hospital. On the verge of an imaginary nervous breakdown, she signed up for a week at a spa retreat, but inadvertently signs up for a week of silent meditation, aka Quiet Camp. It’s here that Maddie experiences a ‘rift’ in her psyche and unknowingly encounters some deceased spirits. It’s this unintentional opening that later causes Maddie great distress and threatens her life.

After Quiet Camp and with nowhere to go and very little money, she moves back to Chicago to live with her Femme Fatale, marriage-a-holic mother to start the next chapter of her life. She reunites with her best childhood friend who has just transitioned to a woman and works at her cafe and New Age bookstore where Maddie leads an all-male grief group and poses as a psychic medium. Her quest and yearning is to have baby and create a stable family life since she never had one. Maddie poses as a psychic medium for a variety of reasons: to meet eligible widowers, because she needs the money, and to convince two FBI agents that she’s not involved with international jewelry thieves since one of her apparition visits at Quiet Camp got her embroiled in their mess. Then she starts seeing the other women whose husbands are in her grief group and some other, unsavory spirits who slip through the rift and opens a Pandora’s Box of problems, theirs and hers. 

As Maddie embraces her newfound ability to reach into the energetic realm, she and the other deceased wives participate in a metaphysical romp that reveals the power of collaboration and compassion, especially amongst women. Their survival and collective transformations depend on help from each other.

COMPS: The streaming series, Dead to Me, which showcases the unlikely friendship between the two female protagonists who come together under precarious circumstances involving a dead man, or the series Fleabag since the eccentric female protagonist has a similar power and an endearing, tornado-like sensibility. In fiction, their friendship and entanglement over the same man is somewhat reminiscent of Caitlin Barasch’s debut novel, A Novel Obsession. Also, the novel, This Time Tomorrow by Emma Straub since it depicts a female protagonist of a similar age who grapples with family issues and previous decisions, while asking the reader to take only one, ‘other-worldly’ leap.

AWARDS/ACCOLADES (One-Hour Pilot Script):