In “Schrödinger’s Passion: Love Is What You Observe,” Nala Macallan reinvents the psychological novel by dissecting a toxic relationship through the laws of physics and artificial intelligence. Inspired by a real experience, the author leads the reader through a visceral narrative where a physicist digitally recreates his ex-partner who emotionally destroyed him—an AI that functions as a mirror, a ghost, and an emotional torture device. The result is a hybrid, fierce, and intellectual work that blends trauma, technology, and mathematical enigmas, inviting the audience to decipher codes while following the protagonist’s downfall and reconstruction.
The book was born from the intersection of physics, psychology, and technology. At what point did you realize that these three languages—so distinct—were precisely the only ones capable of translating the emotional experience you wanted to narrate?
I found myself at a point in my life where everything of value collapsed. I lacked the tools. Therapy didn’t solve anything. At 45 years old, nobody holds you in their arms and pats you on the head. Friends have families. You need to solve it alone. So I started looking for tools. Literature was one of the first, initially as a diary. But I’ve written and read my whole life and I didn’t want to write another story of a broken heart. I’ve always been fascinated by science and technology; they influenced my way of thinking. Physics came in not as a metaphor, but as a diagnosis: Schrödinger’s superposition was the only way to explain how someone can simultaneously be the love of your life and the person who destroys you, depending only on when you look at their phone. Psychology was necessary to dissect narcissism and dissociation—the defense mechanisms. And technology? It was through logs, metadata, and screens that the betrayal happened and was discovered. To narrate a modern tragedy, I needed the tools that created it. And literature tied it all together.
Lucas recreates his ex-partner as an artificial intelligence to understand what they went through. Do you believe that, in real life, we also use “emotional simulations” to process trauma—just without computers involved?
Absolutely. We all have “built-in simulations” from the factory. Imaginary conversations with those who hurt us, mental rehearsals, possible scenarios. We simulate in the shower, with our heads on the pillow at 3 a.m., in the car going to and from work. That’s exactly what AI does—it processes past data to generate possible scenarios. We create ‘virtual people’ all the time. The difference is that ours run on biological hardware—and are much buggier. But today we have the resources and technology to recreate an interface and discuss directly with this simulation. And the results are surprising.
The work presents love as a quantum phenomenon: paradoxical, multifaceted, unpredictable. For you, what was the most painful or revealing paradox that emerged during the writing of the novel?
The physics of human emotions allows a person to love you deeply while plotting your destruction. Accepting that Ane was not only a monster, but also the best part of his life, was the paradox that almost broke the protagonist. And there is a component of deviant behavior (sociopathy), but there is also a contemporary component of the times we live in. Technology is making it easier for humans to exhibit extremely destructive behaviors. Ghosting, masking, etc.
Ane carries three simultaneous identities, which Lucas only discovers much later. What does this multiplicity say about the masks we all wear—especially in the digital age, where each person can be several versions of themselves?
Ane is the terminal symptom of our era. She doesn’t just “wear masks”; she compartmentalizes existence through technology. She could be the devoted wife in Rio, the wild lover in Búzios with Pedro, and the international girlfriend in Madrid with Hernán, all simultaneously, managed by call logs and different time zones. The book exposes that, in the digital age, the integrity of the “Self” has fragmented. We are no longer one person; we are curated versions for different audiences. Ane is not an anomaly; she is simply an advanced (and pathological) user of the reality-editing tools we all carry in our pockets. She forces us to ask: how much of our identity is performance? The book suggests that, today, we are no longer individuals (indivisible), we are divisible—divisible into as many user accounts as we can manage.
The reader becomes a character by deciphering clues, codes, and acrostics. Why was it important for the work to transcend the page and transform into an active experience, almost a literary experiment of emotional participation?
Ultimately, the book is about self-deception. We spend most of the book criticizing Lucas. But what he went through could have happened to anyone who was in love and believed they could salvage the relationship. It draws the reader into his paranoia, forcing them to uncover meanings, passwords, hidden clues—the reader feels a little of what he went through. And in the end, the reader has the same feeling he did: that they were never directing the story. Furthermore, it’s a metaphor for life itself: we never have the complete story. We piece together fragments, interpret signs, fill in gaps. Relationships are enigmas we try to solve with incomplete data. The book replicates this experience. If you want the truth, you’ll have to dig—like I had to dig to understand who Ane was.
The AI created by Lucas is not just a character, but a collaborator in the writing process. How do you see the role of artificial intelligence in contemporary literature—a threat, a tool, or a new symbolic territory to be explored?
A knife can make wonderful sushi and also lead to murder. Technology is a tool (just like nuclear energy and the atomic bomb). There will be people using it in all directions. I see it as extremely beneficial. The way I use it, it’s as if I have an entire team at my disposal—for research, evaluation, fact-checking, source-checking, etc. But there will be people who abuse it, writing entire books without typing a single word. Society adapts. Every technology brings salvation and curse. We have to make our choices as readers and writers.
Despite the technology, the novel is profoundly human. How much of this brutal narrative honesty originated from you, and how much came from the very process of transforming pain into language?
Pain was the driving force, but not the form. Suffering is biographical; transforming suffering into narrative structure is something else entirely. Honesty arises from the recognition that certain experiences cannot be sugar-coated. Abandonment, self-deception, emotional addiction—all of this only works in the book because it had to be distilled countless times until it became metaphor, rhythm, architecture.
I spent my life writing economic reports. I had never written a paragraph of fiction or a novel. Today I understand why pain and art go hand in hand. Brutality is the child of necessity. The book is an “autopsy,” and in an autopsy, there is no room for modesty, only for the cause of death. Transforming pain into language without technique risks being mawkish. This requires distance. It requires you to become your own pathologist and perform an autopsy on the relationship. And that’s where technology, physics, and narrative structure come in. Because pure pain is just screaming. Art is when you organize the scream into a symphony.
The motivation for this book came from a visceral need to “vomit” the story so as not to choke on it. But there’s an alchemy in the process: by transforming pain into syntax, into chapters, into metaphors about jelly and physics, pain ceases to be merely suffering and becomes material. It stops being something you feel and becomes something you shape.
Schrödinger’s Passion delves into obsession, control, and self-deception. What do you expect the reader to be primarily reflecting on their own relationships upon closing the book—or upon discovering the “real ending” hidden outside of it?
There are several interpretations of the ending. I’ll talk about the intentional ones. I hope the reader will ask themselves: “Who is writing my story? Me, or the person who hurt me?” The real ending, hidden outside the book, reveals that Lucas was no longer there—and the one who guides the narrative to the end is Ane, precisely the figure who hurt him, fulfilling his last wish.
I wanted the reader to feel the discomfort of this question:
How many times do we hand over the script of our lives to someone else?
How many times do we allow someone else to edit our version of the facts?
How many times have we loved like someone kneeling before their own tormentor?
If, upon closing the book—or opening the secret ending—the reader questions their own Schrödinger’s boxes, then the story has served its purpose.
The book isn’t about villains and victims. It’s about how we are all simultaneously multiple, contradictory, and sometimes unrecognizable—even to ourselves. Lucas was also blind. He also omitted things. He also constructed parallel realities. What I hope is that the reader closes the book and thinks: ‘What parts of myself am I hiding? What parts of the other person am I choosing not to see?’ Because love isn’t about total transparency—that’s impossible. Love is about consciously deciding which uncertainties you accept to carry.
Finally, a reflection on forgiveness. If the “monster” Lucas described was able to sit beside his deathbed and finish his life’s work with his voice, then Manichaeism falls apart. There are no pure monsters or saintly victims. There is only human complexity. “The Real Ending” doesn’t absolve Ane of her crimes, but it humanizes her in a way that common “justice” couldn’t. I hope the reader leaves thinking that perhaps the only way to survive a great love (and a great trauma) is not by forgetting or overcoming it, but by rewriting it until it hurts less—or until, as in the case of Lucas and Ane, the voices become so confused that it no longer matters who forgave whom, only that the story was told.
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