Solveig Eggerz

I have always had a complicated relationship with snakes.

I grew up in four countries — England, Germany, Iceland, and the United States and hardly ever met a snake outside of the zoo. I considered snakes fascinating. I couldn’t believe how many different forms the snake assumed in the art depicting the Biblical Garden of Eden. Its appearance ranged from hideous and frightening to paintings of a friendly, chatty creature with a human female face and a blonde bouffant hairdo. Photos of kids with rattlesnakes in their arms made me shudder. Yet a snake in nature, winding its way through the grass, is beautiful. This duality between fear and fascination led me to write Sweet Potato — a coming-of-age literary novel about a young woman who keeps rattlesnakes, searches for her birth mother, and discovers that the power she was looking for was never somewhere else to begin with.

The Scene that Unlocked Everything

My protagonist, Lorenza, is a young woman who has been handling snakes from childhood. She hides her pet rattlesnake at home where her snake-phobic father won’t think to look. She works part-time at HerpLab, extracting venom. She’s not fearless, yet she enjoys the proximity of danger. Just as she’s beginning to feel like a true herpetologist, her rattlesnake bites her.

What happens next is the scene that unlocked the entire novel for me.

Hospitalized, drugged with painkillers and anti-venom, Lorenza has a vision. An orange and gold silky creature appears in her room and lights on her bed. Speaking in warm and gentle tones, she begs Lorenza to save her.

Enchanted, barely conscious, Lorenza breathes two words: Sweet Potato.

It is the name she gives her birth mother — a woman she has never met but always hungered for. Now, in her delirium, she finally sees her. The name comes from a place deep inside her: warm, nourishing, golden. Loving and lovable, Sweet Potato is the food that comforts her starving soul.

That scene — the snake bite, the mesmerizing vision, the naming born of hunger— became the beating heart of the novel.

Everything else grew from it.

What the Snake Bite is Really About

Sweet Potato is, on its surface, a coming-of-age story about an adopted young woman searching for her birth mother in a small Virginia town. But the snake bite scene points toward an underlying story: the gap between what we imagine and what we find and the danger of needing someone so much that we create a glittering being who flourishes only in our imaginations. And after a spectacular collision between dream and reality, do we have the courage to engage in the strange, slow process of discovering that the power we have long sought resides closer than we ever thought possible?

Lorenza, hospitalized and high on painkillers, names her birth mother Sweet Potato because she hopes for sweet, warm, loving, comfort. The rest of the novel is about what happens when vision meets the reality.

I’ve always been drawn to that particular kind of human experience — the collision between the story we tell ourselves and the truth that eventually arrives. I wrote about it in Seal Woman, where a woman remakes herself on an Icelandic farm after the war only to realize how much of herself she has left behind. I wrote about it in Sigga of Reykjavik. A young woman fights for her own independence—just as Iceland does against the colonial power—only to realize that she needed something else to become the person she always knew she was meant to be. In Sweet Potato, I found a new way in: a rattlesnake, a painkiller dream, and a name born from hunger.

The Fear and the Fascination

Something shifted in me while writing this book.

I had always held snakes at the same careful distance I held my fear of them — acknowledging the fascination, yet nursing the fear. I had always been aware of snakes in art. How there was a sacred side to the fear as shown in snake mythology and religions in cultures as diverse as Egyptian, Greek, Norse, Aztec, Hindu, and Chinese.The serpent monster could also represent transformation, eternity, and wisdom. Today we see symbols of ancient beliefs in tattoos and jewelry such as the representation of eternity as in the snake biting its tail, the ouroboros. And the medical symbol of the ancient Greek healer, Asclepius, in the two snakes coiled around a staff.

And then I discovered the research on the healing power of toxins found in snake venom.

Snake venom proteins, peptides, and enzymes are being researched as treatments for not only cancer and heart disease but also for Alzheimer’s, Parkinsons, and chronic pain. Captopril,  which lowers blood pressure, is the first of the ACE inhibitors. It is derived from the Brazilian Pit Viper, bothrops jararaca.

A protein called contortrostatin is found in the venom of the southern copperhead pit viper. This is being studied for healing breast cancer tumors and for preventing metastasis. The disintegrin in the protein targets and destroys the tumor blood vessels that feed cancerous tumors, in a process known as anti-angiogenesis.

Something that kills can also heal. This duality became central to Sweet Potato. As Lorenza’s understanding of snakes shifts from their mythical/magical power to their medical power, something shifts in her understanding of herself. The snake bite that nearly kills her is also, in the end, the thing that saves her.

Writing for me is about discovery. I didn’t plan any of this when I started writing. This is what the snakes taught me.

About Sweet Potato

Sweet Potato is a coming-of-age novel set in the Shenandoah Valley of Virginia, in a fictional small town called Margin where the Blue Ridge Mountains rise in the distance and venomous snakes are part of the landscape. It follows Lorenza — adopted, stubborn, curious, and drawn to creatures most people cross the street to avoid — as she searches obsessively for her birth mother and discovers, through the unlikely world of herpetology, that the power she was looking for was never somewhere else to begin with.

It publishes October 1, 2026.

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