Donna Freitas's new novel, HER ONE REGRET, just out this week, has been chosen as a Library Journal Mystery of the Month, Book of the Month Club, and Amazon Monthly Pick. Donna will be celebrating HER ONE REGRET with events Nov 7th (tomorrow!) at Books on the Square in Providence, RI, and Nov 10th at the Brooklyn, NY B&N on Atlantic Ave (please come see her if you’re nearby!).

And now, the interview.

Andromeda:

In the author’s note to HER ONE REGRET, you talk about the fact that you had written about maternal ambivalence and choice in THE NINE LIVES OF ROSE NAPOLITANO (which I loved), but that you left out the “what-if?” version of Rose’s life in which she regrets having a baby. Now you’ve written even more candidly about that topic, and you did it in the form of a suspense novel. Please tell us how you decided that this kind of genre would offer you a fresh opportunity for going even deeper.

Donna:

Well, I knew in my gut that I was going to tackle this topic after THE NINE LIVES came out and I immediately got multiple emails from readers who asked me, directly: Why isn’t there a version of Rose where she regrets her baby? I realized then that there were readers seeking that story. Longing for it. And maybe they were disappointed (even angry?) that I didn’t have the nerve to go there. So I pretty quickly decided I was going to go there even though I wasn’t sure how.

But—as someone who was roundly and cruelly and ridiculously judged for many years for not wanting a baby herself—I also knew I had to find a way into that story of motherhood regret that a broad readership might tolerate. That was actually my question when I started THE NINE LIVES: I’d been taught through my own experience and by certain publishing folk that “nobody wants to read about that woman” (i.e. the woman who doesn’t want a baby, i.e. me), how nobody likes her, and I’d imbibed pretty deeply how to (many) people I was intolerable, because my choice was so unlikable, so one of my first questions was: How can I write this character in such a way that people won’t automatically hate her? That question informed the very first pages of the (earlier) novel, where Rose waxes poetically about how much she loves the baby she ends up having in one version of her life.

As I contemplated writing about a woman who regretted having a baby, I also wondered: How can I write this story and not have (most) readers automatically turn away because of the taboo of the topic? And how can I garner at least some sympathy for this woman?

Eventually the answer came to me, forcefully and in a flash: Because she’s going to disappear. Which means we’re going to worry for her life. I was standing in my Brooklyn kitchen staring into the living room in the evening when I had this thought. I remember it clearly. I also knew the title immediately: HER ONE REGRET, and it never changed.

When I started HER ONE REGRET, I didn’t really think, explicitly: I am writing a thriller, or I am writing a suspense novel. I certainly didn’t think I was writing a crime novel. But eventually as I kept going, I thought: Hmmm, I seem to be writing a thriller. And thrillers are, incidentally, some of my favorite novels to read so maybe not that surprising after all.

Andromeda:

You are extremely prolific, having written memoirs, rom-com, YA, speculative/literary, and scholarly nonfiction. Your Wikipedia page lists nineteen titles, not counting this newest one! Once you decided to add crime fiction to the mix, how did you learn the ropes—by reading certain books, studying craft in an analytical way, or just plunging in?

Donna:

Definitely by just plunging in. But like I said above, I love crime novels, thrillers, anything suspense. It’s one of my favorite genres to read. From Karin Slaughter (who I discovered one day at an airport), to way back in my early 20s when I read THE NAME OF THE ROSE (which I think of as a mystery novel, even though it’s historical and intellectual, but I mean, it starts with a dead monk!), to more recently, novels like THE QUIET TENANT (a new favorite), or SEA WIFE (one of my favorite novels ever). Gosh, I could keep on listing.

But really, I just love to read a novel that keeps me guessing and turning pages—and this result can happen in so many forms. It’s not always “Who did it?” but more of a general: What’s gonna happen next, omg, what’s going to happen!!!! Holy shit is she really gonna do that!! that draws me to a book. And that doesn’t have to come in the more traditional format: book opens with a dead body and we wonder who committed the crime.

I mean, technically, a romance novel is a kind of suspense novel! (Are they gonna get together or what?! And how and when will it happen?!)

The best kind of novel (in general) sparks desire inside of the reader: to know what’s going to happen next. That is a big reason we read: to feel that desire to find out. To be in the story. A good story makes us want. I mean, in my perfect world, THE NINE LIVES feels like a suspense novel to readers. I kind of want all of my novels to feel that way, and we writers achieve this through plot. I love plot. Plot has always been my favorite thing as a writer. And plot—and the urgency we bring to a story as writers, our own urgent, desire-laden needs and questions—is what gives a novel the feel of being suspenseful, even if the suspense comes in the form of: Will they ever get together?!

As a one-time YA novelist, where plot and page-turning and urgency is always paramount, I think you learn early to find ways to keep a reader invested—because your reader is a kid or a teenager—and you know you need to grab ’em fast.

So even though I’ve always been an avid reader in the (technical) category of thrillers and I am constantly reading it, I think writing so much YA and Middle Grade beforehand gave me the solid foundation to write a suspense novel.

Andromeda:

Planner or pantser or something in-between?

Definitely a pantser! I am a writer like I am a reader: I love not knowing what comes next. When I sit down to write my first draft, I am fizzing with the wonder of what will happen today when I keep going with this story.

I’ll also say that—I am and always have been a mathematician. Since I was a kid. And I could do all the math in my head, much like my dad, which drove my teachers nuts. (I always had to go back and show my work). And plot is just like math—it’s a system, and I love systems (that’s how I became a philosophy major in college—so much of it is about systems). So writing a novel, a story of any kind, involves creating a system, which is the plot. And I can definitely see that system in 3-D in my head when I write. So, I can hold a whole story and its twists and turns in my head.

But of course, I’m still a pantser and as a pantser and regardless of my affinities for math, the hard part of being a pantser comes when you have to revise and make sure all the threads hang together and get dealt with. And revising HER ONE REGRET was hard—for many different reasons, including because of the taboo nature of the topic—but also because by the end it had definitely become a thriller and soon it was verging on a crime novel, and this type of novel is such a labyrinth. In the end, you need to make it all work, you need to figure out who did what and how and why and what their motives were and maybe that is one of the hardest parts of all in this category of fiction.

Andromeda:

Was there something that was specifically trickier to do in this novel than in your other works? Did you get stuck anywhere or make any craft discoveries you want to share?

Donna:

The topic itself was the hardest part: motherhood regret, regretting having a baby. It’s such a flashpoint. I had someone say to me, after reading one of the chapters of HER ONE REGRET: I don’t think a mother could ever feel this way. As in, motherhood regret is not a real thing, so what you are writing about isn’t real. I had to translate this feedback in my head into: You mean, YOU could never feel this way. I definitely felt scolded and embarrassed though, at the time, and on a few other occasions with this novel in its draft form. (It’s also true that certain readers of early drafts told me: I had fantasies like this all the time when my kids were babies!)

But then: feeling scolded and shamed and rejected was such a primary experience for me during my 20s, 30s, and early 40s because I was this woman who didn’t want a baby and for whom this lack of desire had cost her, her marriage—and people were not shy about openly shaming me back then. I know times are changing with respect to many younger women being open about not wanting to have children (though I’d argue that still, everyone expects them to have a good reason for it—climate change, money, etc—and that simple “lack of desire” has not yet entered the conversation as an acceptable reason). Yet even just 10 years ago you could barely say out loud that you didn’t want children without halting a conversation or having people shout, “Nooo, you don’t mean that!” or, in certain company, have people insult you openly. As though you deserved it, because you were obviously a terrible person, not to want to become a mother.

However: I am very, very lucky I landed with Juliet Grames (of Soho Press) as my editor for this novel—she not only had no fear of the topic, she helped me get beyond my own fears of writing about the topic which had given me (and the novel) some hang-ups in the early drafts. She was basically like: Donna if you are going to do this (write this novel about the taboo of motherhood regret), you’ve got to really do it. As in: you have to be fearless here, you need to go all the way. Because there are women out there who crave seeing this on the page. Write to them, for them.

So I did—or I did my best. I wanted to honor the topic, and the readers out there craving really seeing it play out on the page. I wanted to honor myself too, since this topic originally arose out of my own greatest fear that if I’d done what everyone wanted way back when, which was have a child despite not wanting one, that I would become a woman who regretted her baby. I had to get over a lot of fear to write this novel, and I also had to acknowledge all the baggage I brought to the table from my prior experiences and how I’d felt so intolerable as a woman myself for so long. It was scary to really go there, to really do it, as Juliet urged me to. But I am so glad that I did. And so grateful that Juliet made me! There were moments I wanted to throw in the towel.

Very last thing (I promise) on this subject: I do think that one of the miraculous things about writing thrillers and suspense, is that—the disappearance, the dead body, whatever act it is that sets the plot spinning—can give a reader a lot of oomph, a lot of momentum to say, play out all the questions she has about a certain topic that burns within her, say motherhood regret, or marital infidelity, or violence against women (I could go on). That initial act, which in my case is a disappearance, gave me a lot of rope with which to explore a topic that we do not discuss enough—or dare I say, really ever?

Andromeda:

I’m always curious about books that manage to align with societal conversations and events making headlines. Maternal regret is timeless, but given how we are experiencing a cultural shift in which a certain kind of traditional motherhood is elevated by conservative men—and promoted by tradwife influencers—do you see your book hitting bookstores at a particularly zeitgeisty moment? Do you have other favorite books that do this, and/or are you highlighting this aspect in your marketing/outreach in some way?

Donna:

It’s funny you ask this: my husband brought this up yesterday, in a bit of a worried way—he was like, You realize right, that you are going straight into this taboo topic exactly when practically the entire conservative, political universe is urging women to have more babies than ever, and where politicians are hanging the future and the economy and morality on bigger and bigger families? As in: Are you prepared for the backlash that might come?

My answer: Um, yes this has occurred to me. But I have always been in this particular conversation and going against the grain on this one—for my whole life I’ve been in it as someone who never wanted kids, so it’s nothing new for me. It’s also true that I’ve always ventured into the thorniest of conversations way before they became thorny in public—in my academic work, I was trying to get people to take sexual violence and harassment seriously fifteen years before #MeToo. So for years, my work was decidedly not zeitgeisty, then one day it suddenly became very zeitgeisty.

People, society, culture—not just conservative men but I’d also venture to say liberals in general, including liberal women—have always wanted to control women’s bodies one way or another, and push them into things we think are good for them. We’ve done that with respect to sex forever, one way or the other (You should be having more sex! No, you should be having less sex! No sex!), without necessarily asking a woman, or a girl: Do you know what you want from sex?

Telling women what to do with their bodies, how they should feel about something, what to believe and not about themselves and their futures, defies political affinities. We do it on both the left and the right. Often, we don’t even realize when we are doing it.

So the trad wife conversation just seems like yet another iteration of this sort of thing we’ve always done. I’d say that the desire to control women around motherhood, to push them into it, is for sure timeless. We love to push women toward motherhood, even if they are kicking and screaming and telling us no, no, no I don’t want to—exactly like I was, once. And I was pushed by many, many liberals to ignore my desires on this front, and many of those liberals were women.

Maternal regret though, I’m not so sure. It’s timeless in terms of women experiencing it. But definitely not timeless in terms of society’s willingness to hear about it, believe it exists, never mind discuss it—be a person liberal or conservative. Though I do think that’s changing too and now and then you see someone speaking about it publicly.

In terms of marketing, I think Soho (my publisher) has done a great job highlighting maternal regret as an important subject we need to more open about, and how it’s more common than people think. I also owe this to Juliet Grames, who put together statistics about motherhood ambivalence and regret for the marketing materials along with Soho’s amazing marketing team who did this very cool pamphlet about the topic and questions for discussing it that they sent around with galleys.

But I’m not exactly a marketing mastermind, so it hasn’t occurred to me to venture straight into those waters, though maybe I should consider it, Andromeda! (Despite my husband’s nervousness.)

Most of all, and beyond the general readership that I hope finds HER ONE REGRET compelling and worthy of talking about, what I hope is that HER ONE REGRET lands with the readers out there who have been looking for a novel that takes on maternal regret, who long to see it on the page. Just like I was so longing, desperate, needing to see a woman who didn’t want children on the page way back during my years of agony—and yet I could not find one. Aside from the sad old spinsters like Mrs. Bates from Pride and Prejudice, or the women we lock in the attic and decide are crazy. I wrote THE NINE LIVES for this reason. I was determined to see her on the page—even if I was the one to put her there.

Likewise, I wrote HER ONE REGRET for myself because I once was so afraid maternal regret would become my fate if I listened to the voices around me, pushing me into something I didn’t want to do—that I knew I was not meant to do. But I also wrote it for the women who did get pushed, and the women who went willingly, yet afterwards found themselves in a situation they wished they could get out of, yet couldn’t.

Before I close, I should also say the following: both THE NINE LIVES and HER ONE REGRET spotlight motherhood in so many different ways, including all the wonderful ones. I had a great mom, and so many of my closest women friends are amazing moms, and I admire them and how they handle the ups and downs and joys and difficulties of motherhood.

Ideally, one day it will be zeitgeisty just to let women choose the futures they actually truly want for themselves, and for us to give them all the tools and foundational conversations they need to make good choices about their own bodies and lives—good because they spring from a woman’s own desires, that she has learned to listen to—that she has learned to hear despite all the other voices trying to drown her desires out.

Andromeda:

I hope book clubs will continue this conversation and carry it across political lines. Thank you, Donna!

Donna Freitas has written over twenty books, both fiction and nonfiction, for adults, children, and young adults. Among them are CONSENT: A MEMOIR OF UNWANTED ATTENTION, and the book club favorite, THE NINE LIVES OF ROSE NAPOLITANO, which has been translated into 22 languages. Donna’s debut thriller, HER ONE REGRET, was published on November 4th from Soho Crime, and is a Book of the Month November pick. Over the years, Donna has taught at many MFA programs in Creative Writing, and she loves working with writers one-on-one on their novels and memoirs. Donna divides her time between the US and Barcelona and when she’s not reading, she’s probably eating or cooking.

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Kate took the time to answer all of the questions I word-vomited at her the second I finished reading, even the one where I basically asked her if she is self destructive. Kate, I love you, you are awesome!

Caitlin: Here’s my best attempt at a pitch/set-up for your novel: RABBIT HOLE is a literary suspense that centers on late-twenties Teddy, ten years after her half-sister Angie disappeared one night. On the ten-year anniversary of Angie’s disappearance, Teddy’s father (Angie’s stepfather) kills himself. While cleaning his study, Teddy discovers that her father had been trying to solve Angie’s disappearance, and Teddy finds herself falling down the same rabbit hole, searching for her sister as she grieves everything she’s lost. 

How’d I do? When you’re asked to describe your book, do you focus on the set-up, or more on literary merit and character exploration?

Kate: You did great! Way better than I usually do. I tend to emphasize the literary elements of the story, only because it’s really not a straight-down-the-middle mystery, and I don’t want to mislead anyone. I also tend to highlight that RABBIT HOLE is, at its heart, a book about grief. It’s dark; it’s unsettling. It’s not a popcorn thriller, even though I hope the sexier plot elements (Reddit, the disappearance, etc.) help to propel the story along.

Literary indeed: the character development in your book is very strong. I loved how Teddy did things that were, at turns, totally understandable and totally unthinkable, and yet always seemed realistic for a young person who had suffered so much loss. As you wrote Teddy, did you find yourself trying to understand her, or were you connected to her in a way that you always understood why she was doing what she did?

I am very sympathetic to Teddy. I always understood her. I have a real self-destructive streak, so writing Teddy was a way for me to explore that and take it to an extreme. I’m also not my best self when I’m grieving, and I didn’t want to shy away from the uglier parts of her story. So many terrible things have happened to Teddy, but I couldn’t have her be some perfect, passive victim. It just wouldn’t have been interesting to me. She needed to meet that tragedy with some grit and some coarseness of her own.

You mention your two sisters in your acknowledgments and how they were the reason you’re “so obsessed with writing about sisters.” What was it like for you, putting yourself in the headspace of a woman who had lost her only sister?

I live in fear of something terrible happening to the people I love. I lost my dad pretty young, when I was in high school, and it really shaped my brain. I think about death a lot. Aside from my kids and my husband, my sisters are the most important people in my life. One of them lives about a mile from me, and we’re pretty co-dependent. I would be lost without her. Fictionally, I find sibling relationships to be great fodder, because they’re so unique. It’s not a relationship predicated on promises, like a marriage. It’s not voluntary in that way. It’s not as directional as a parent-child relationship. You’re on much more equal footing. Plus, your siblings are the only people who share your memories. Teddy losing her sister would mean losing the only witness to her childhood. There’s something very odd about the prospect of growing old, while your big sister stays forever 18. There’s so much tragedy in that, especially when Teddy’s left with these complicated memories of adolescent strife. She can’t honestly participate in Angie’s hagiography.

Teddy narrates the story in first person, and through her own word choices she seems cognizant that she is letting herself sink deeper into grief and dysfunction. When she was drinking, being intentionally cruel, or inviting sex that she thinks is unhealthy. What is it about grief, or maybe self-destruction, that interests you? (Can delete if too personal…I feel like it’s a very personal question now that I’m looking at it, but I’m just going to boldly ask it, PLEASE skip if you don’t want to answer!)

Ha! It’s fine. My twenties were a fairly self-destructive time. Not that I was trying to die. If anything, I think those tendencies (to drink too much, to court danger, to ruin things that were good in my life) was somehow the flipside of a very intense will to live. They felt connected to my desire for love and my ambition. I can’t quite explain it. Death drive/Eros type dichotomy, I guess. 

And Teddy has a hard time talking about her feelings or even letting herself feel them, so she needs these outlets. In those moments where she loses control, I think the reader really understands how much she’s hurting and how much she wants someone–anyone, really–to come take care of her. 

There’s also a thing when you’re grieving, I’ve found, where the pain feels good. It feels like love. You can get a little addicted to that.

I absolutely LOVED the part of your acknowledgements where you spoke to your two kids, and how you said that you were “tempted to say that [you] wrote this novel in spite of [them],” but the truth was, you “never wrote with more focus than after [they] were born.” I read this and thought: holy shit, I think that’s true for me, too. Can you talk a little more about how having children changed your writing?

I think there are two ways that my kids changed my writing. The first is just logistical. They are, on their cute little faces, the enemy of work. Children are highly, highly time-intensive, and so is writing. So that’s just a fundamental conflict. I don’t have a ton of advice for how to navigate that other than just do your best and white knuckle your way through. Right now, I’m working on a second book that is only possible because I have three hours a day carved out where my older kid is at school, and my husband is playing man-on-man with the toddler, keeping him out of my hair.

I thought a lot about that change before my kids arrived. But I didn’t realize that I would also feel more motivated to write, and that my increased focus would cancel out the logistical concerns. I found that when my son was born I really needed him to know me as a writer. Not when he was a baby and not necessarily now (he’s five), but one day. I love being these kids’ mom, but I am not happy with “mom” as a full identity. The transition to parenthood made that crystal clear. It could have gone the other way! I was worried I’d find writing very pointless after I had kids, but I don’t.

RABBIT HOLE is set in coastal Maine, in a small town that seems thrashed by the opioid epidemic and dependent on summer tourism. As I read, I thought it was wholly possible you lived in Maine or maybe were raised here. (I was born and raised in central Maine, and now I live in southern Maine.) In the spirit of NOT being an internet creep, I only briefly looked at your website to see if it mentioned where you live: California. Why did you set this story where you did? 

I’m always so pleased when someone thinks I might be from Maine! I’m from New Jersey, originally, which for years seemed too pedestrian to be a setting. I had a fascination with Maine as a kid, and I wanted something that felt Gothic for this book–dark woods, rocky coasts, etc. A lot of the tourism/opioid things that Teddy sees happening in her town are things that I witnessed happening in New Jersey. Now that I live in LA, I can see all the things that are strange about NJ, so that’s the setting for my next book.

Next book?!

I’m working on a book called HEATHENS. I’m feeling good about it right now. I finished a draft before RABBIT HOLE came out, but I’m rewriting it, using Matt Bell’s REFUSE TO BE DONE method. The book follows two sisters, Mac and Casey, across two timelines. In the first, they are growing up in NJ in the 90s, and they are trying to escape from their abusive mother and start a grunge band. In the second timeline, in the late aughts, they are reunited after an act of violence has separated them for many years. Mac, the former prodigy, is now down on her luck (to put it mildly), and Casey, her younger sister, is a successful artist. But Casey is hiding the fact that her success is built on work she stole from her sister. It’s about art and ambition and love and betrayal.

C’MON, that sounds good!!

RABBIT HOLE launched in January, and now it’s May. What was your experience like, seeing your first novel published? 

There was a really long run-up to January 2024 where I was feeling very anxious. But once the book came out, it was great. We were lucky to get some good coverage, and Soho did a really wonderful job with everything on their end. I had a few great events with writers I really admire, and now I’m trying to transition from PR mode back to writing mode. One thing that’s nice about publishing a book–at least for me: it reminded me that writing is really what makes me happy.

Speaking of PR mode, I’m curious: you hired an outside publicist? What has that experience been like? 

It was really helpful! I was trying to do a lot of PR work on my own (searching for outlets, finding contacts, writing pitches), and I found it was a full-time job. So hiring Alisha Gorder was a great move. She really helped me get the book into people’s hands and brainstorm creative ways to talk about different elements of the story.

Last question: This Substack is mainly focused on books that fall under the giant umbrella that is suspense. Any recent or upcoming reads under that umbrella that you’d like to shout out to our readers?

Yes! I recently read and loved BOY PARTS by Eliza Clark. I’ve been recommending it to friends as American Psycho for girls. I love, love, loved Lindsay Hunter’s HOT SPRINGS DRIVE. It really spoke to me as a mom and a pediatric Weight Watchers survivor. And I’m up-to-date on the latest Tana French, who can do no wrong, in my opinion.

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Set at a luxury memoir-writing workshop on the shores of Lake Atitlán, Guatemala, grieving mother Rose goes undercover to investigate her daughter Jules’s mysterious death while working for enigmatic workshop leader Eva.

Inspired by Andrea Bartz’s chat interviews, we thought we’d try the format for an interview about THE DEEPEST LAKE, so you can see how we really talk to each other (when we’re not sending voice notes).

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Andromeda: Hello!

Caitlin: oh hello!!

Thanks for doing this. Clears throat

No problem. (cracks knuckles)

Yoga breath

Yoda voice

okay wow focus

I do have a question for you

😂

Shoot

What inspired you to write The Deepest Lake??

Someday I'll write a novel with one lightning-flash inspiration moment, but for now I'll be honest and say The Deepest Lake was inspired on several levels, in different ways, at different times. I had concerns about how writers are treated in workshops going back years, based on disturbing things I'd seen in multiple settings, both private and academic, but I never thought that could be a subject or theme for a psychological thriller—even though anyone who has been workshopped will tell you it is quite the psychological experience! But it wasn't until I had written one suspense draft and started getting familiar with tropes that I realized that an upscale memoir workshop in Lake Atitlán, Guatemala—which I had visited 6 months earlier—could be the setting for a novel involving traumatized woman and a mother seeking the truth about her daughter. When it came together, in late 2019, it came together quickly. Revisions were another matter!

the lightning-flash, whole-novel moment is a unicorn

this is REAL, and I love it!

what was the other suspense draft you'd written? something else?

(pretending I don't already know!)

Yes, the apprentice suspense novel (which I didn't finish) was about a young artist, and it was going to take place in Canada and Italy, which was only one of its weaknesses. The sprawling geography and time didn't provide that tight focus that makes a suspense novel feel more urgent. I think that as a historical and speculative novelist I was used to a large canvas—multiple countries, many decades. My novel, Plum Rains, takes place over a century. But in most cases, it's easier to write a suspense novel if you pull closed the drawstrings of space and time a little. That's my theory at the moment!

What's the scientific formula for that Caitlin—reduce volume, increase pressure?

oooooooo

that is a good formula

You definitely implemented the formula in The Deepest Lake: just two POVs, two times, one place, one big question

it works very well

I'm glad you mentioned "big question," because that's another thing that helps those of us learning to write suspense. Crime structure helps us with this—giving us the question of "whodunnit" or "howdunnit"—and a death is high-stakes. In many apprentice literary novels, the stakes are low, but even more, they are unclear.

the stakes, those are always so tricky for new writers, myself included

Not that you or I only want to write clear murder mysteries!

But I do think suspense helps train us to at least ask, "What ARE the stakes?" A novel that starts with a character simply feeling bad doesn't have a lot of momentum.

but here the stakes are high - Rose's daughter has been declared dead, in a foreign country after an investigation her mother was updated on from a distance. and in Jules’s past POV, the stakes are apparent, because we know SOMETHING is going to happen to her

And we have that fish-out-of-water set-up (glad you pointed that out), which can also raise the pressure and create conflict.

did it take you a while to figure out the stakes in this novel?

where you started with the troubling aspects of memoir-retreat culture, the gorgeous but foreign place you'd been to, etc.?

No, it came to me the moment I was verbally pitching the premise to an editor over lunch—which was before I knew I would actually write it. I was using it as an example of a cleaner structure. The moment I described a mother searching for the truth about her daughter and arriving on the shore of Lake Atitlán, looking out at the place where her daughter, who has been working as an assistant to a famous writer, drowned and was never seen again, my editor said, "That's it."

I was hoping you'd tell this story!

I'll write just about anything if an editor says, "That's it. Go write that."

and you did...but was it an "easier said than done" situation?

I think good editors and agents don't want to put pressure on us, but it helps me to know there is an audience waiting, and a possible deadline. But getting to your "easier said than done" question, the writing was wonderfully easy. I've never had so much fun drafting a book. Then I had lots of eyes on it, lots of suggestions, and I ended up writing two completely different versions of the book. Different tone, different plot, different resolution. I don't think this was a bad thing. It felt more like being in a writing room (for movies or TV) and forcing oneself to limber up and say, "There are many ways to tell this story!" In the end, I was given the choice to pick which version I wanted to continue revising with my editor, and I chose the one that was less grim, more surprising, more redemptive, more fun for me as the writer. It's a little over the top, deliberately. People who are used to thrillers may not think so, but people who are used to realism and literary fiction may think so. It was a choice. The choice also gave me a chance to play with tropes and indulge in a little satire, which one reviewer has noted but which might go unnoticed by some readers, and that’s fine!

I love that, and I had been wanting to ask about your two endings but wasn't sure if I should, because I always get squirrely about talking about the end of a book, especially a thriller or other suspense!

you went there for me!

Yes and in this case it's not just the last pages but literally the last third of the book. Completely different.

once you made a decision, was it easy to move forward and commit?

Yes. Because the version I chose was also the more recent one, and I'd put so much darn work into changing things up! It would have been horrible to choose version A and then see reviews later saying, "This was boring. It's just about grief. Nothing happened after the midpoint." Instead I chose version B.

This is actually a really interesting topic, Caitlin, and it goes beyond my book. Readers are so accustomed to seeing a finished book as if it were the enactment of some platonic ideal—as if only one version could exist. But as writers, if we allow ourselves to remember all the crossroads, we know that every book has dozens of possible versions, really. Learning to choose and then shut the door behind you is probably necessary or a writer could go insane.

I think I really agree with you—I may be misremembering what he was saying, but I think I remember a Stephen King interview or maybe piece from On Writing, and he talked about stories being like fossils you uncover, which is a really romantic idea, but to me it makes it sound like there's no decisionmaking, no alternate options, and in my experience it's never been like that!

Oh, that's interesting. The fossil idea, or a Michelangelo image—the story as the object residing in a block of marble and the sculptor just has to chip away. That has never been my experience. I change themes, characterization, events, names, everything. If I had to choose different metaphors they'd be closer to pottery, weaving, cooking or gardening, rather than fossil excavation or sculpting.

When you were in Guatemala for the retreat, did you have an interest or inkling that you might set a story in Guatemala one day?

Not at all. I spent a lot of time there thinking about the power of story--and the danger of having one's story taken away, and the kind of person who seem driven to control other people AND their stories—and I briefly wondered if I'd write a nonfiction essay about it. But then I realized it's something I have started weaving into quite a bit of my fiction, across the genres--the danger of experts who really aren't so expert (BEHAVE), the danger of falling under the sway of a cultish leader or a simplistic idea (THE DETOUR, THE SPANISH BOW). I'm clearly not a fan of authority figures, but worst of all are the authority figures who mean well and don't realize what they don't know. If you'd asked me, in Guatemala, if I'd keep working on that theme in fiction, I'd say probably not. But the questions and the specifics of things I'd seen over the years kept nagging at me.

I am relatively new to writing but this seems to be quite common—we may wander into different forms of writing, or genres, etc., but we have themes that dog us through life!

Yes, and we never say everything we meant to say, or we continue to absorb from culture and our lives and see how new events and ideas contribute to or complicate the first idea.

As a younger writer, I would have been worried thinking I might dwell on the same idea in multiple books but now I see it is both natural and marvelous.

Writing is how we make sense of the world.

Yes, and I read this tiny little book called Deep Writing once, by a therapist & writer, and he says we each have themes of our life, and you just can't avoid it!

I believe that's Eric Maisel. I re-read a few of his books about writing every few years when I start doubting life and art!

That's him!

So on the Guatemala-as-setting piece, then, HOW did you manage to make the setting SO real and rich if you weren't taking copious notes?!

I think it's so much easier when you're traveling than when you're in your home environment, because in a new place there is this constant internal monologue that happens as you notice and try to imagine how you'd describe it. Lake Atitlán, surrounded by volcanoes, is indeed a phenomenal landscape. The water is constantly changing colors, and when I was there, wildfires were turning the skies orange and brown at times, and sending these coppery shadows over the lake. At the same time, it's not the tropics. [correction from Andromeda’s biologist husband hours after posting: yes, it is the tropics. Okay okay! It’s not tropical feeling.] It's at a higher elevation, inland, and it's actually cool and sometimes windy.

One of my main characters, Eva Marshall, the famous writer, insists it's a magical place, and in some ways I agree, though I also think we outsiders have a tendency to exoticize a place by calling it "magical" when what we mean is simply that it's unfamiliar to us. As a further note, it's easier to sell a place to visitors if you promise it is a magical, life-changing place where you will be reborn. The selling of that particular dream is an undercurrent (no pun intended) of The Deepest Lake.

This DEFINITELY came through in the book—it was such a perfect setting for so much of what you wanted to say. Did you find yourself omitting or changing parts of the setting, as you remember it, to better serve the story?

Only in one sense: I will admit that I made the lake seem more dangerous than it felt to me, personally. But I'm a water person! (My first book was a kayak guide and I do long-distance open water swimming now.) Having said that, what I describe about Lake Atitlán—the depth of it, and the fact that body reclamation is difficult—is absolutely true, as demonstrated by a disappearance that occurred after I was done writing. Even more disturbing, given Guatemala's long civil war, is wondering how many other people may have disappeared into it.

a lighter question I have coming out of your experience at the retreat: did you ride a tuk tuk

I can't decide if it sounds SO fun or SO scary

I loved riding in tuk-tuks! They're three-wheel motorcycles, like auto-rickshaws, open to the elements, and readers may recognize the term from Southeast Asia. (Why do Guatemalans use an Asian term? No idea.) Drivers decorate their tuk-tuks differently and it's such a wonderful, cheap way to ride around, although it is also a bit bone-jarring and dusty.

maybe because "tuk-tuk" is so pleasing!!

The scene from the book that has stuck with me the most viscerally, for whatever reason (okay, I know the reason), is in Jules's point of view, before she has disappeared. She's hanging out with a young retreat guest, missing her mom, and they decide to start howling like wolves, calling out to their mothers. This scene just really, really got me, both as a daughter and now as the mother of a daughter. Do you remember how you came up with that scene?

I hate when writers say that characters take over—I really do. But Jules is on the dock with her friend, and they've both been drinking mimosas and tequila for hours, watching the sun go down, and Jules has texted her mom off and on all day, but only cryptically. Meanwhile what the reader knows (that Jules can't) is that her mother will be trying to understand those texts forever. Jules and Zahara just did what they needed to do, and as the author, I just wished Rose could see it, and hear it, and know how much her daughter loved her and needed her in that moment. And it's ridiculous to say, but I tear up about that scene. And my daughter, who was exactly Jules's age when I wrote The Deepest Lake—and who is one of my best editors, and a writer herself—did, too, when she read it. So I let Jules speak to Rose, and I hoped Rose could hear it somehow, and I let myself speak to my daughter at the same time, letting her know that I love her and I can hear her even when we're not together.

No I teared up too reading it, it REALLY got me. It felt very real, so I believe you that Jules took over and it became a very real experience to write that scene

I'm so glad. I would love to know I made some readers cry. Seriously!

Speaking of what readers think, I went on the goodreads page just to take a peek, mostly because I know you're in the can’t-help-but-look-at-early-reviews camp of authors, and one of the top ones calls The Deepest Lake "a thriller that actually has a story to tell." Is that your dream review, or just mine??

That's really great. Yes. I'll take that.

Did you think about your own mother while working on the book, or more about your daughters and your role as their mother?

I thought about my mother when she dropped me at the airport as I left on a solo trip (not my first) to Yucatan, Mexico when I was 17, and how she was willing to be proud of me for being an independent traveler—and also willing to keep her worries to herself, so that I wouldn't be burdened by them. And I thought even more about my daughter, who literally circled the world (Africa to Europe to Australia) while I was writing the book.

oof, so you were raised by a brave mom, which maybe helped you become a brave mom

Still teary!

(My mom is no longer alive.)

A hard copy arrived in the mail a couple days ago, and my mom has already stolen it

I'm excited for her to read it. It really is a great mother-daughter story

It's funny because one very kind reviewer from one of the trade reviews mentioned something about Rose being right—i.e., I guess, that Jules shouldn't have endangered herself by traveling—and I appreciate the very positive review but I wanted to call back, No, Jules wasn't wrong to travel! And even Rose realizes that. We have to let them go. We must.

please stop saying such emotional things, my child is almost three and I cannot handle this

Join Andromeda on May 13, 2024, at 6PM CT, 7PM ET, while she talks with two other Soho heavy-hitters about their thrillers! RSVP here.

Happy mother’s day this weekend, y’all! Any mom books on your roster?

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Now, back to our interview!

It’s easy to get distracted when preparing to interview four-time thriller author and skillful TikTok creator Megan Collins, because of course you’ve gotta watch her TikToks first, and before you know it, you’ve spent part of the morning chuckling and nodding in appreciation of her surprisingly candid videos about her writing and publishing process—as well as other favorite topics, like Taylor Swift, funny things Megan’s husband has said or texted, and how she matches her eyeglasses and earrings to her book covers. Let me watch just one more.

Megan’s candor is one of the reasons, in addition to her exciting forthcoming novel, THICKER THAN WATER, that we desperately wanted to interview her for Present Tense, where our vibe is “I’m going to talk about whatever obsesses me,” plus “I might say a few things my agent or editor might wish I hadn’t.”

First things first: your July launch of THICKER THAN WATER. I was immediately hooked by the close sister-in-law relationship you create from the first chapter, starting with the night when Julia blurts to her soon-to-be husband, after meeting Sienna, “I love your sister!” Followed by… “And I love you, too.” I was envious of that sister-in-law relationship while dreading—in the best of all ways—how it would be challenged once suspicion regarding a local murder falls upon Jason, the brother and husband who connects the women. Which came first—the desire to portray a warm and funny female relationship, the murder plot, or any of the other themes that emerge in early chapters, including suspicion of men in general?

First of all, thank you so much for your very kind words! The sister-in-law relationship definitely came first, all because my agent had expressed on Twitter a #ManuscriptWishlist desire for a “sister-in-law thriller.” Wanting to be her bestest, most favorite client and get all the gold stars, I started to toy with that idea, teasing out what a “sister-in-law thriller” might mean to me. Of course, my mind immediately went to very dark places. I saw two sisters-in-law who are always at each other’s throats, who have even tried to sabotage each other’s relationship with the man who connects them—but then he’s murdered and they’re the prime suspects and they must work together to clear their names.

I still think that’s a fun idea, but I had already done three books featuring extremely dysfunctional families and toxic relationships, so I thought it would be a bigger challenge for me to have the sisters-in-law be best friends, to have them believe their bond is unbreakable. Then, of course, as the story progresses, as they worked together to try to clear Jason’s name, the secrets and truths they uncovered would show them that their relationship had a lot more darkness and fragility in it than they previously thought. By creating that kind of arc for Julia and Sienna, it was almost like I was taking my normal storytelling process and doing it in reverse.

I love that, especially how you challenged yourself to go in a new direction! If I could sum up your oeuvre in two words, I’d say “family secrets.” And if I could add another word, it would be “twisty.” Can you tell us more about your process, from finding a new angle on themes that deepen with each of your books, to handling red herrings and reveals?

When it comes to red herrings, I often think of something the author Tana French said. To paraphrase: there always has to be a reason your character is suspicious of this person or that person—instead of the person who really did it—and that reason needs to be connected to their overall arc. Red herrings are not just plot devices meant to throw the reader off track; they should reveal things about your character, and they should serve as landmarks in their emotional journey. Through their shifting beliefs of other people’s guilt or innocence, we should be able to chart the ways in which the character’s worldview is progressing.

I think of this every time I have a character chase what is ultimately a red herring: “What is this showing the reader about the character’s internal landscape? Why is the character drawn to this theory in particular? What are they trying to convince themselves of, or protect themselves from, in believing that this person is to blame?”

As for reveals—thriller readers are smart. They’re always thinking five steps ahead, so it can be challenging to genuinely shock them. That’s why I don’t necessarily set out to surprise my readers; I focus instead on surprising my characters. The hope, of course, is that doing the latter will lead to the former, but it doesn’t bother me if a reader predicts certain aspects of a plot. I’m much more interested in creating big surprises for my characters, bombshell moments that send them spinning, raise the stakes, or push them even further from their ultimate desire.

In terms of figuring out how to structure those reveals, I like to have a big, fat, juicy one right at the middle, preceded by two or three smaller but still enticing ones in the first half, and then a kind of grand finale of surprises toward the end, like the conclusion to a firework show. And that’s nothing unique to me; that’s just something I’ve picked up from the kinds of thrillers and domestic suspense novels I love to read.

You’ve been publishing almost yearly since 2019—four books in five years. Many writers create their manuscripts in the dark and submit them to an agent or editor only after they’re fully drafted. You are on the faster track—one of those amazing authors who submit a few chapters and a synopsis, correct? The benefit, I imagine, is that you know if your editor is truly excited, but the cost is that they might weigh in and quash an idea. (More on this in our next question.) Can you share with us how you got onto that track? Were you always someone who works best with early input and collaboration, or is this something you adapted to because it’s what the publisher prefers as a way to build an audience and name recognition?

I do think I benefit from early feedback. Even when I was writing what became my debut, I was sending it to my agent chapter by chapter because it was helpful for me to receive her notes along the way. I’ve had some really good experiences getting early input from my publisher and editor—they’ve been able to steer me away from making certain storytelling choices that might have been difficult to untangle later on. At the same time, that does mean they’ve been able to quash certain ideas I was excited about, which has happened a couple of times now.

In terms of the process, the only thing I’m contractually obligated to do is submit to them a synopsis and first chapter of whatever it is I’m hoping will be my next book. But for my own sanity and tentative peace of mind, I usually start by sending a one-page pitch of the idea to see if it’s even something they’re interested in, so I don’t spend time and effort on a story they were always going to reject. I’ve had a project shot down at this phase before, and while it was disappointing, it wasn’t as devastating as another time when they gave a thumbs-up to the pitch and then passed on the actual sample pages.

If I do get that thumbs-up, though (which often includes some editorial notes), I don’t always stick to writing just the single chapter my contract requires. If I think they’ll get a better sense of the story through multiple chapters, I’ll write those first before submitting. That was the case in the most recent project I submitted (and then received an offer on). I’m doing something with the structure and storytelling in this book that I’ve never done before, so I knew I needed to sort of “prove myself” and demonstrate how I planned to execute what is kind of a bonkers idea. That meant writing and submitting the first 70 pages. When I submitted materials for THE FAMILY PLOT, however, I felt the first chapter did a good enough job of setting up the characters and tone of the story that the submission felt complete with only 15 pages. So it really varies from project to project.

In the case of THICKER THAN WATER (launching July 11), I submitted a synopsis and the first three chapters. I expected to then either receive an offer or a rejection, but instead, I got something in the middle. My editor said she loved the premise but felt the story itself kind of went off the rails (she was absolutely right) and she’d like me to revise the synopsis. I ended up having a call with her where we homed in on the true core of the story and brainstormed the type of plot that might best bring that out. After that, I completely rewrote the synopsis, revised the sample chapters to fit the new story, and waited once again for an offer or rejection. Luckily, it ended in an offer, but my editor did have more feedback for me at that stage that helped shape the story early on. In fact, each time my publisher has bought a book from me, my editor has included some early notes to consider, so often the story has had to shift quite a bit from what I originally submitted. Even though this can be pretty overwhelming at times, I do think it works best for my overall process, since I’m such a planner and plotter in the first place.

Megan, one of my favorite TikToks is the one where you talk about your next book, #5, currently titled CROSS MY HEART. You explain how you submitted your “book of the heart,” written to exorcise some of your demons and celebrate your joys, but your publisher rejected it. You moved on with another book and in the end, you tell TikTok viewers, you’re glad you did. What can you tell us here about revision, resilience, and making the hard decision of when to set aside a book?

I love the phrase “rejection is redirection,” because I think it’s really true. Whether the “redirection” means you submit a query letter to another literary agent after one rejected you, or you pivot to another book idea after the one you loved was shot down, I do think there’s always opportunity in rejection. That said, it’s definitely not easy, and one of the most difficult things to reconcile as an author is the difference between writing and publishing. Writing is deeply personal, but by its nature, publishing is incredibly public, and sometimes, the story that lights you up inside might get completely lost in—or be lost on—an industry that is first and foremost a business. That’s what happened with the book my publisher rejected, and from there, I had two choices: (1) write the book anyway and hope that another publisher felt differently, or (2) find another story that both my publisher and I could get excited about. The truth is, if I didn’t need to worry about money, I might have gone with the first option, but that was too much of a financial risk for me, so instead, I cried a bunch (wallowing is a very important step in the process)—and then I pivoted. I’m really lucky that, in doing so, I found another “book of my heart,” and that only showed me that there’s no single book of one’s heart, because our hearts are capable of feeling and knowing and experiencing so much.

You have an MFA, you’ve published poetry, you’ve taught creative writing and you are managing editor of a literary journal, 3Elements Review. Did you always plan to become a suspense writer writing for larger audiences or did that path open up unexpectedly?

Even though my MFA was in poetry, I always knew I wanted to write novels, too. I didn’t start out writing suspense, though; the first two novels I wrote—which were never published—were more family dramas, which is, of course, similar to what I do now, but without the murder. It wasn’t until I wrote the book that became my debut, THE WINTER SISTER, that I delved into thriller territory—and even then, I didn’t realize that’s what I’d done until I saw my publisher market it as a thriller! I only knew that I had written the story I wanted to tell, and that that story happened to include a murder mystery. But once I found myself in that genre, I was so happy to be there. I love exploring the darkness of humanity—and the unexpected beauty that comes out of that, too.

One TikTok question. You seem to be enjoying yourself on the platform, and I think the reason you get lots of likes is because you come across as honest, funny, and vulnerable—for example, willing to admit that some reader comments sting. What would you say to other authors who are trying to figure out if they should embrace or run away from TikTok?

I resisted TikTok for the longest time. I thought I’d be the last author to ever join, mostly because I thought joining meant I’d have to put on makeup every time I posted something, and I am much too lazy for that. I also thought I had nothing to offer in that space. On Instagram, I can post pictures of my dog and whatever book(s) I’ve read that week. On Twitter, I can share the random thoughts I have—or the hilarious things my husband says—that make me laugh. But what would I do on TikTok? If you look at the first post I ever made there, you’ll see I actually ended up joining only because I didn’t get tickets to Taylor Swift’s Eras Tour and I knew people would be posting videos of it once it started (“and IIII want to seeeeee them,” I said in a truly unhinged voice). (Important note: I later DID get tickets, but I still stalk everyone else’s Eras Tour videos.)

Once I had officially joined, I was like, “Well, I guess I should talk about my books. And about writing. And about reading. And keep talking about Taylor Swift.” So that’s what I did, and I was shocked to find that it was really fun for me. And that’s the key—and this is the point where I finally answer your question: If it’s not fun for you, DO NOT DO IT.

Give it a shot if you’re interested, but if it’s pure torture, if it pains you to brainstorm ideas for videos, then flee and never look back. When content is forced, it feels inauthentic and awkward to watch, which means people won’t watch it, which means you’re wasting your time anyway. And we all have enough distractions from our writing; there’s no need to add something to the list that you’re not actively enjoying.

But if you do enjoy it, then I’d encourage you to experiment with different kinds of content until you find what gets you the most engagement. Or do it just because it’s fun and don’t worry about engagement. The truth is, while some authors (Colleen Hoover and Jeneva Rose to name a couple) have blown up because of their own TikTok videos, most books that find popularity on TikTok do so because readers have made videos about them—not the writers themselves.

This isn’t a question, it’s a suggestion, but I’d love your comment on it. Megan, you are one of the biggest Taylor Swift fans around. You know how Louise Penny wrote a thriller, State of Terror, with Hilary Clinton? Do you see where I’m going with this?

I will drop everything now to write a book with Taylor Swift. (And yes, I slid a reference to one of her lyrics into that twelve-word sentence.)

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@megancollinswriter“This character was so anxious all the time, it was SO annoying” “This character annoyed me because she was always so stuck in the past” “This character was so non-confrontational it was annoying” #booktok #bookcommunity #maincharacter

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The very same elements that landed Kim a great book deal for her much-anticipated follow-up—including the voice of her opinionated, intelligent, hyperlexical main character, 20-year-old Mia—turn off a small subset1 of readers2. As does the fact that Happiness Falls refuses to move at a commercial thriller’s breakneck pace (it has footnotes!) or restrict itself to the twists and turns of its missing persons plot.

Happiness Falls begins with a fascinating dilemma. The only person who may know what happened to Mia’s father is Eugene, Mia’s brother: a 14-year-old who is unable to speak due to a rare genetic disorder. From there, the novel unfolds into an exploration not only of disability—especially the question of why society insists on equating verbal skills with intelligence—but of Mia’s (and Angie Kim’s) wide-ranging passions and obsessions, from music and linguistics to psychology and philosophy, including how one can purposefully manage one’s own happiness levels.

In a way, the author admits, the mystery plot is really just a Trojan horse or container for these more essential investigations of the mind and heart. But make no mistake: the mystery itself held this reader’s attention to the very end, especially because one comes to care so deeply for the family at the heart of this poignant and whip-smart novel.

A first for Present Tense, we share with you the full interview in unabridged audio form, and two video snippets (taken from the same interview) of specific utility for writers and dedicated readers who want to know how books get written as well as how authors manage to maintain their own happiness levels during the whirlwind process of getting published.

Let us know if you enjoyed this interview in the comments, and whether you prefer audio to video to transcript. We’re here to serve your suspense fiction needs! (Plus, we are greatly assisted by the encouragement.)

P.S. There’s a Goodreads giveaway for Andromeda’s forthcoming suspense novel, The Deepest Lake (Soho Crime, May 2024), going on now. Catch it in the next three days, before it expires!

AUDIO: Angie Kim in conversation with Andromeda Romano-Lax

Topics covered: Mia’s voice and DNF readers, crossover books and literary sensibilities, Tim O’Brien’s In the Lake of the Woods as inspiration, Eugene’s audiobook voice and the talents of “Autastic Tom,” how Angie writes, the happiness quotient explained, and more.

In the audio, Angie references a Good Morning America video (forward to minute 2:00 to see her students at the I-ASC—International Association for Spelling as Communication)— and the Autastic Tom video, in which he explains why he considers himself a non-speaker even though he talks frequently.

VIDEO EXTRAS FOR THE WRITERS (AND THE WRITING-CURIOUS) IN THE HOUSE

VIDEO #1: Diagrams, spreadsheets, and Angie’s road trip metaphor. Secrets inside!

VIDEO #2: Happiness, and are we better off lowering our expectations and assuming the worst? Angie presents another option.

Don’t forget to let us know your preferences for interview formats going forward. Audio only, video, combination, transcript only, other?

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Caitlin: What did it feel like to beat me for the Edgar? (I made myself squeal laughing when I thought of this question. SHOULD I KEEP IT IN THE INTERVIEW?!)

Erin: lololol of course you’d phrase it that way! Honestly, I felt nothing as much as shock. I had to turn to my husband and be like, did they really call my name? I had read all the books in the category and thought they were so wonderful, but yours in particular—The Damage—blew me away. When we met earlier in the evening I thought, thank goodness this award will go to someone so lovely and charming and funny. And now here’s where you say it did, but really, it was just such a surprise and such an honor.

Caitlin: Well now I regret the joke because you were way too complimentary. But seriously, did you know what a big deal the Edgar Award is before you were nominated?

Erin: I thought I did, but then immediately was like, maybe it’s not if I got nominated? The first person I called was my husband and he was like, “holy shit! I’ve known about the Edgars since I was thirteen and got super into Raymond Chandler.” And then I looked up the people who had won the award and about fell over.

Caitlin: Tana French won that award.

Erin: I know! And sometimes I think, I bet she still looks it up to see who was nominated every year, which means she’s read our names. Think of that! Tana French has read OUR NAMES!

So yeah, I knew it was a big deal, but what I didn’t know was that I’d written a mystery. I had been too—insecure I guess is the word?—to say I’d written in that genre. I thought I didn’t deserve to call myself a mystery writer. Like, readers would pick up the book and be like, halfway through and we still don’t have a dead body? I didn’t understand at that point how all-encompassing the genre can be. It was really gratifying to be welcomed so openly by the mystery-writing community.

Caitlin: Your third novel is coming out later this month. Huzzah! I’ll summarize it so you don’t have to, because everyone hates doing that.

Erin: I always think of that Chris Farley sketch from SNL where he’s interviewing a famous movie star and is all, “Do you remember that scene? Where you beat that guy up? That was awesome.” That’s me trying to describe my book: “It’s about this lady? And she meets this other lady? And bad stuff happens? It’s awesome.”

Caitlin: Here’s the set up: Gwen hasn’t worked since she was a summer intern; unlike her fellow interns, she was on the “get married, have kids, stay at home” track, and she knew it. Then, her tech startup husband dies, leaving her with a daughter and a world of financial grief. She reaches out to the one place she worked and one of her fellow interns, Nicola, is still there, now high on the food chain. Gwen calls her and they immediately connect, almost like they’d actually been friends that summer. Nicola gets her a job at the company, finds her housing, and offers her the lifeline of female friendship. They basically become best friends overnight. But Nicola is bothered by Gwen’s competing interests, namely, her daughter. And what ever happened to the other intern that summer, the one Nicola was so close with? And how do you extract yourself from someone you built your whole new life around?

How’s THAT for flap copy!

Erin: That’s perfect! Thank you. I think from now on we should just agree to write each other’s copy since it’s so hard to do it for your own work. And I’m going to start telling everyone, “Do you remember that time Caitlin described by book? And she said all the right beats? That was awesome.”

Caitlin: You know I loved this story. I called it a “too close, too fast” friendship. As someone who has had these (though never to such exciting ends as this one), you captured the phenomenon so well. How did you do that?

Erin: I am so into this setup, too! I didn’t marry until my mid-thirties, and for the first three decades, female friendships were much more at the center of my life than romantic relationships. Friends were the ones I called in the middle of the night, and went on trip with, and felt closest to, yet so often we only think of romantic relationships as defining us or mattering. But these kinds of friendships can end up having that same intensity only without the sex—that giddy rush of a new bestie. I too have had my fair share of friendships like this, but yeah, not to the extent in the book, although the feeling might have been just as deep. I remember breaking up with one woman—we were both crying in her car in front of our work—and thinking, is this weird? It seems weird. But I don’t actually think it is.

And to be fair, I’m sure in some of these relationships I’ve been the Nicola and in some I’ve been the Gwen.

Caitlin: Another thing I loved about the book was how Nicola was obsessed with life rules, and how you used her rules as mile markers in the story. Rule #1: Don’t Let Anyone Make You Feel Small. There was something about it that immediately evoked dread. I could see the dark side of the rule when I read it. You played really well with this the whole book: good intentions with bad results. Actions that seem defensible. Threats that are hard to name. Do you prefer reading this kind of suspense, as opposed to something more in-your-face, i.e., the plane has just been hijacked; the woman wakes up kidnapped; etc.?

Erin: I am much more about the psychological threat—that feeling of dread, rather than the physical danger. And what you say—good intentions with bad results—is just so much more interesting to me than bad people doing bad things. My husband often says, “No one wakes up and thinks, I’m going to be an asshole today.” (He usually follows this up by saying, “But boy did they succeed.”) It’s the whole, we’re all heroes in our own stories. It was one of the things that really drew me to Nicola’s voice in the book. I wanted to see how she got where she is, and why she wanted to hold onto Gwen so badly. It took me three tries writing beginning to end to crack her motivations, but once I did, I felt the story really made sense.

Caitlin: We had a video call recently to catch up, and we talked about something interesting. (Just the one thing.) Another Substack I read just posted a piece about it: it’s this issue of whether and how to plan what kinds of books you get to write. (As Kate McKean put it: “But will you get pigeonholed?”) In our call, you were asking yourself if you needed to pick a lane. At least you ain’t pigeonholed! (Please read that in a midwestern accent.)

Erin, interrupting: Always and forever.

Caitlin, soldiering on: Your first books were short story collections: THE USUAL MISTAKES and IT’S NOT GOING TO KILL YOU, AND OTHER STORIES. Your Edgar-winning first novel, DEER SEASON, is an excellent but slower-moving suspense story than your upcoming, and I’d say it has more mystery elements, too. And your second novel has a light sci-fi slant! As an outsider looking in, you look like you’re writing the stories that interest you, with a common thread of good character, real-world people, and the effects of crime and bad decisions. And yet I totally get the insecurity that maybe you’re “supposed to be” doing something different from whatever it is you’ve done. In your case, maybe you’re supposed to be branding yourself as always writing a certain kind of story. Can you try to explain the contradictory thoughts pinging around in writers’ brains?

Erin: Oh, lady. This is something I worry about constantly, and I’m 98% sure that worrying is doing no good, but I better not give it up because of that 2% chance. I read that article by Kate McKean and nodded and sobbed my little head off. I do always worry I’m doing the wrong thing, and I think you just have to navigate it idea by idea, balancing what you want to write with what other people want to publish.

After BLACKOUT sold—my first agented novel—I just assumed I would keep writing what I wanted to write like I always had, so I spent six months or so writing a draft of another thriller. I told my agent about it and she had me write up the synopsis, and very quickly it became clear that it wasn’t something the publisher was interested in. So I tried to come up with another idea that had wider appeal, and I landed on something I really loved and kind of constructed a synopsis from the ground up without writing the book first, which was bananas to me because I’d always been a pantser. But anyway, I did it, and the hard thing is, I really had to convince myself this could be a book and maybe was a book I just hadn’t written yet. I basically had to fall in love all over again, but then that idea was rejected. So then I had to do it again, and that’s the book that became COME WITH ME.

Right now I’m in the process of doing this for the next book, and so far I’m on the fourth go. Building it out of nothing, beginning to believe in it and really love it, and then having to knock that sand castle down and start again. It’s kind of devastating in the moment, but in this weird way, it’s something I’m also really proud of. I’ve always been a one-idea-at-a-time kind of girl, and to have to do this, scrap it, and come up with another idea and really love it has been oddly exhilarating. I feel like I’m reaching new levels of creativity through these exercises.

That said, what I would really love is a guarantee at the end. I want someone to say, “you write six synopses and we’ll give a book deal, no questions asked.” Or like, a contract in perpetuity that says “we’ll hang on until we find the right idea, promise.” What’s so painful for me is the not knowing, and the fear that each book could be the last. It’s like how in a marriage you can know no matter how many fights or issues you have, there’s love at the core and you’re both willing to stick it out until the next good patch. It’s like that only they have a ripcord and a million mistress/debuts waiting in the wings, and you’ve been told you’ll never love again.

Wow, have I gotten off track. I’m blaming that Kate McKean piece.

Back to what you were asking about what maybe ties my books together: I think at the core they’re about characters I really empathize with, and women and the balances of power. That’s broad enough I can hit the mark lol. But I also think it’s true. It’s like my philosophy on life: I think people are basically good, but they sometimes do shitty things. I mean, who could disagree? I am fairly sure I’ll stay in the mystery genre because it’s what I love, both as a writer and a reader, but again, it’s as broad as saying I write about women’s concerns. Really, half of humanity? That’s how you’re narrowing it down?

Caitlin: You keep busy; in addition to writing novels, you’ve got a daughter, a pretty cool husband,1 and you’re a professor. But you also review books! How often do you write reviews these days? And can you talk a bit about how you got into it in the first place, because I remember it’s been a really great experience for you.

Erin: I originally started writing book reviews because I was so sick of trying to be a writer that I wanted to go back to what I originally loved: being a reader. The ironic part was that it made me fall in love with story and language all over again and ultimately got me back to writing.

Nowadays most of my reviews are written anonymously for Publishers Weekly—a gig I heard about on Twitter, of all places—and I try to do 2 a month. The anonymity makes sense because sometimes a book doesn’t do what it seems to set out to do for this or that reason, and because these are trade reviews, you have to be upfront about that, and I don’t want other authors mad at me. When I was writing reviews for a byline, my rule was to only review books I could review positively. I wanted to write reviews that celebrated books, not tore them down.

The purpose of a trade review is different, but I never forget there’s a writer on the other side waiting for that review, and I know how nerve-wracking that can be. I treat each book with respect. I always try to keep in mind what the author seems to have set out to accomplish for the book, who the audience is, and whether I think the author has succeeded and the reader will be satisfied. It feels like an important job, and isn’t one I take lightly.

On Goodreads, it’s a whole ’nother ballgame. I give every book five stars. I think to myself, it’s hard to write a book! Five stars for you!

Caitlin: Same exact Goodreads philosophy. And on that note, a last question: read anything good lately??

Erin: I have read so many freaking good books recently, just banger after banger. I’ve read Alex Marwood’s The Island of Lost Girls, R.F. Kuang’s Yellowface, Notes on an Execution by Danya Kukafka, Romantic Comedy by Curtis Sittenfeld, Megan Abbott’s Beware the Woman, Rebecca Makkai’s I Have Some Questions for You, The Quiet Tenant by Clémence Michallon, and Prom Mom by Laura Lippman, all within the last few months. Honestly, it’s been the streak of a lifetime. I feel like I should stop washing my socks or never wear shower shoes, or whatever magical thinking sports-types talked about in Bull Durham.

And by the way, Caitlin, that’s a little gift to you: the chance to find the perfect Bull Durham meme.

If you enjoyed this interview, consider preordering Erin’s book!

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Our husbands were essentially each other’s dates for the night of the Edgars, as evidenced by how many photos the photographer took of them together.

I definitely wondered if it was too soon! I started cooking up the idea for this book in April 2020—ironically, months before I myself moved in with a friend’s family (platonically!)—and I pitched it to my editors in December 2020. Back then, you’ll recall that everyone was like, “I never want to read a book about this period…I see why there are no good books set in 1918!” So I initially pitched the book without the pandemic element, and my editor rightly pointed out that it was key to upping the stakes and trapping Kelly in place…and, as I wrote, the themes that emerged felt so obviously tied to the soul-searching the pandemic sparked. I dedicated this book to “everyone who rethought everything” because I knew I wasn’t alone in coming out of it a changed—and more authentic, truer to myself—person.

A thriller about a throuple! (Yes, Autocorrect, that is a word.) The Spare Room absolutely hinges on not only sex scenes, but also a more general sexiness and sensual self-awareness as Kelly finds her way into a relationship fitting of a romance novel. (And indeed, Sabrina—the woman Kelly moves in with, is a romance author.) I admired how the scenes managed to be neither coy nor anatomically hyper-explicit. Did writing the romantic and sexy parts come naturally or did you have to discover your own authorial style in terms of what and how much to show?

My first draft of the novel had more explicit sex scenes—I published a “director’s cut” of the threesome scene on Cosmopolitan.com, before my editor suggested I tone it down to keep the book in the domestic suspense space (after all, I wasn’t trying to write an erotic thriller). Other sexy moments are generally fade-to-black or curtains-up in the moments right after. It’s funny—I really don’t think there are many explicit sex scenes, but some reviewers call the book “smut” and one (50-word!) professional review used the word “sex” or “sexy”…four times, I think? My hunch is that people fixate on the bedroom scenes because they’re queer and poly, and therefore not what we’re used to seeing in the super heteronormative domestic suspense space.

According to Newsweek, one in eight people have tried polyamory and one in six said they’d be interested in trying it. This was a huge surprise to me. Did your idea of exploring a less conventional (but not exactly rare) relationship in a book meet with enthusiasm or caution in the publishing world?

Definitely caution! My prior books are straight thrillers with relatively little queer representation, and especially after We Were Never Here broke out, we thought readers might be thrown by my shift in tone (a shift from friendships to romantic relationships) and genre (from thriller to domestic suspense). I’m the only queer person on my publishing team (as far as I know), and it was a constant push-pull—they wanted to be coy in our marketing copy and book description, whereas I saw both the queerness and spice as features, not bugs. I think we eventually struck a good balance in how we marketed the book, and though it’s different from my prior books, it’s still got the complex relationships, character-driven plot, and twisty suspense my earlier titles share. Some pearl-clutching readers are still turned off and/or outraged by The Spare Room, but it’s pretty damn clear from the flap copy what you’re getting when you pick it up!  

Your novels before this one came out yearly: The Lost Night in 2019, The Herd in 2020 and We Were Never Here in 2021. You’re publishing at a cracking pace, and I believe you’re in that category of suspense writers who work closely with your publishing team, sharing early drafts (or outlines?) to keep the production line flowing. What is that like, in terms of the pressure to create, perhaps balanced by the motivation of having a team that can’t wait to read your next book?

Actually, I’m barely in touch with my publishing about a project between the time they greenlight an idea (based on a one- to two-page treatment) and when I turn in the first draft many months later. I’m not an outliner and I just need to figure out the plot by writing the book. But I’ve always been a fast producer because, well, this is my full-time job—I have to dovetail book advances (which are paid out in chunks over several years!) to support myself. I’m unbelievably lucky to have a creative job I really love, but I continue to balance drafting, revising, and book promotion among several titles at once because I need to pay my rent!  

Aside from giving your readers a sexy thrill ride, were there other ideas or questions that drove you to write this book? I ask because all of your books so far seem to focus on younger women navigating work, relationships, issues of trust, and identity. I’d love to hear your own take on what themes you see developing in your oeuvre. 

I’m always interested in exploring “unlikeable” traits in women: shame, jealousy, rage, obsession, insecurity, etc. There are “acceptable” ways to be a woman in society, and my heroines always fall short, whether they’re in their 30s and wondering what’s wrong with them because they’ve never had a serious relationship, or they’re plagued with shame around their own past mistakes, or—in the case of Kelly in The Spare Room—they realize they don’t actually want the husband and minivan and 2.5 kids they’ve always had pasted on their vision board. Shooting down societal expectations will always turn some readers off (I once had a reader ask, to my face, why I kept writing “unlovable” characters), but I’m just not capable of writing characters who match our expectations for women and totally lack vulnerability, aggression, self-doubt—you know, the full range of human emotions.

Thank you, Andrea!

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Megan’s candor is one of the reasons, in addition to her exciting forthcoming novel, THICKER THAN WATER, that we desperately wanted to interview her for Present Tense, where our vibe is “I’m going to talk about whatever obsesses me,” plus “I might say a few things my agent or editor might wish I hadn’t.”

First things first: your July launch of THICKER THAN WATER. I was immediately hooked by the close sister-in-law relationship you create from the first chapter, starting with the night when Julia blurts to her soon-to-be husband, after meeting Sienna, “I love your sister!” Followed by… “And I love you, too.” I was envious of that sister-in-law relationship while dreading—in the best of all ways—how it would be challenged once suspicion regarding a local murder falls upon Jason, the brother and husband who connects the women. Which came first—the desire to portray a warm and funny female relationship, the murder plot, or any of the other themes that emerge in early chapters, including suspicion of men in general?

First of all, thank you so much for your very kind words! The sister-in-law relationship definitely came first, all because my agent had expressed on Twitter a #ManuscriptWishlist desire for a “sister-in-law thriller.” Wanting to be her bestest, most favorite client and get all the gold stars, I started to toy with that idea, teasing out what a “sister-in-law thriller” might mean to me. Of course, my mind immediately went to very dark places. I saw two sisters-in-law who are always at each other’s throats, who have even tried to sabotage each other’s relationship with the man who connects them—but then he’s murdered and they’re the prime suspects and they must work together to clear their names.

I still think that’s a fun idea, but I had already done three books featuring extremely dysfunctional families and toxic relationships, so I thought it would be a bigger challenge for me to have the sisters-in-law be best friends, to have them believe their bond is unbreakable. Then, of course, as the story progresses, as they worked together to try to clear Jason’s name, the secrets and truths they uncovered would show them that their relationship had a lot more darkness and fragility in it than they previously thought. By creating that kind of arc for Julia and Sienna, it was almost like I was taking my normal storytelling process and doing it in reverse.

I love that, especially how you challenged yourself to go in a new direction! If I could sum up your oeuvre in two words, I’d say “family secrets.” And if I could add another word, it would be “twisty.” Can you tell us more about your process, from finding a new angle on themes that deepen with each of your books, to handling red herrings and reveals?

When it comes to red herrings, I often think of something the author Tana French said. To paraphrase: there always has to be a reason your character is suspicious of this person or that person—instead of the person who really did it—and that reason needs to be connected to their overall arc. Red herrings are not just plot devices meant to throw the reader off track; they should reveal things about your character, and they should serve as landmarks in their emotional journey. Through their shifting beliefs of other people’s guilt or innocence, we should be able to chart the ways in which the character’s worldview is progressing.

I think of this every time I have a character chase what is ultimately a red herring: “What is this showing the reader about the character’s internal landscape? Why is the character drawn to this theory in particular? What are they trying to convince themselves of, or protect themselves from, in believing that this person is to blame?”

As for reveals—thriller readers are smart. They’re always thinking five steps ahead, so it can be challenging to genuinely shock them. That’s why I don’t necessarily set out to surprise my readers; I focus instead on surprising my characters. The hope, of course, is that doing the latter will lead to the former, but it doesn’t bother me if a reader predicts certain aspects of a plot. I’m much more interested in creating big surprises for my characters, bombshell moments that send them spinning, raise the stakes, or push them even further from their ultimate desire.

In terms of figuring out how to structure those reveals, I like to have a big, fat, juicy one right at the middle, preceded by two or three smaller but still enticing ones in the first half, and then a kind of grand finale of surprises toward the end, like the conclusion to a firework show. And that’s nothing unique to me; that’s just something I’ve picked up from the kinds of thrillers and domestic suspense novels I love to read.

You’ve been publishing almost yearly since 2019—four books in five years. Many writers create their manuscripts in the dark and submit them to an agent or editor only after they’re fully drafted. You are on the faster track—one of those amazing authors who submit a few chapters and a synopsis, correct? The benefit, I imagine, is that you know if your editor is truly excited, but the cost is that they might weigh in and quash an idea. (More on this in our next question.) Can you share with us how you got onto that track? Were you always someone who works best with early input and collaboration, or is this something you adapted to because it’s what the publisher prefers as a way to build an audience and name recognition?

I do think I benefit from early feedback. Even when I was writing what became my debut, I was sending it to my agent chapter by chapter because it was helpful for me to receive her notes along the way. I’ve had some really good experiences getting early input from my publisher and editor—they’ve been able to steer me away from making certain storytelling choices that might have been difficult to untangle later on. At the same time, that does mean they’ve been able to quash certain ideas I was excited about, which has happened a couple of times now.

In terms of the process, the only thing I’m contractually obligated to do is submit to them a synopsis and first chapter of whatever it is I’m hoping will be my next book. But for my own sanity and tentative peace of mind, I usually start by sending a one-page pitch of the idea to see if it’s even something they’re interested in, so I don’t spend time and effort on a story they were always going to reject. I’ve had a project shot down at this phase before, and while it was disappointing, it wasn’t as devastating as another time when they gave a thumbs-up to the pitch and then passed on the actual sample pages.

If I do get that thumbs-up, though (which often includes some editorial notes), I don’t always stick to writing just the single chapter my contract requires. If I think they’ll get a better sense of the story through multiple chapters, I’ll write those first before submitting. That was the case in the most recent project I submitted (and then received an offer on). I’m doing something with the structure and storytelling in this book that I’ve never done before, so I knew I needed to sort of “prove myself” and demonstrate how I planned to execute what is kind of a bonkers idea. That meant writing and submitting the first 70 pages. When I submitted materials for THE FAMILY PLOT, however, I felt the first chapter did a good enough job of setting up the characters and tone of the story that the submission felt complete with only 15 pages. So it really varies from project to project.

In the case of THICKER THAN WATER (launching July 11), I submitted a synopsis and the first three chapters. I expected to then either receive an offer or a rejection, but instead, I got something in the middle. My editor said she loved the premise but felt the story itself kind of went off the rails (she was absolutely right) and she’d like me to revise the synopsis. I ended up having a call with her where we homed in on the true core of the story and brainstormed the type of plot that might best bring that out. After that, I completely rewrote the synopsis, revised the sample chapters to fit the new story, and waited once again for an offer or rejection. Luckily, it ended in an offer, but my editor did have more feedback for me at that stage that helped shape the story early on. In fact, each time my publisher has bought a book from me, my editor has included some early notes to consider, so often the story has had to shift quite a bit from what I originally submitted. Even though this can be pretty overwhelming at times, I do think it works best for my overall process, since I’m such a planner and plotter in the first place.

Megan, one of my favorite TikToks is the one where you talk about your next book, #5, currently titled CROSS MY HEART. You explain how you submitted your “book of the heart,” written to exorcise some of your demons and celebrate your joys, but your publisher rejected it. You moved on with another book and in the end, you tell TikTok viewers, you’re glad you did. What can you tell us here about revision, resilience, and making the hard decision of when to set aside a book?

I love the phrase “rejection is redirection,” because I think it’s really true. Whether the “redirection” means you submit a query letter to another literary agent after one rejected you, or you pivot to another book idea after the one you loved was shot down, I do think there’s always opportunity in rejection. That said, it’s definitely not easy, and one of the most difficult things to reconcile as an author is the difference between writing and publishing. Writing is deeply personal, but by its nature, publishing is incredibly public, and sometimes, the story that lights you up inside might get completely lost in—or be lost on—an industry that is first and foremost a business. That’s what happened with the book my publisher rejected, and from there, I had two choices: (1) write the book anyway and hope that another publisher felt differently, or (2) find another story that both my publisher and I could get excited about. The truth is, if I didn’t need to worry about money, I might have gone with the first option, but that was too much of a financial risk for me, so instead, I cried a bunch (wallowing is a very important step in the process)—and then I pivoted. I’m really lucky that, in doing so, I found another “book of my heart,” and that only showed me that there’s no single book of one’s heart, because our hearts are capable of feeling and knowing and experiencing so much.

You have an MFA, you’ve published poetry, you’ve taught creative writing and you are managing editor of a literary journal, 3Elements Review. Did you always plan to become a suspense writer writing for larger audiences or did that path open up unexpectedly?

Even though my MFA was in poetry, I always knew I wanted to write novels, too. I didn’t start out writing suspense, though; the first two novels I wrote—which were never published—were more family dramas, which is, of course, similar to what I do now, but without the murder. It wasn’t until I wrote the book that became my debut, THE WINTER SISTER, that I delved into thriller territory—and even then, I didn’t realize that’s what I’d done until I saw my publisher market it as a thriller! I only knew that I had written the story I wanted to tell, and that that story happened to include a murder mystery. But once I found myself in that genre, I was so happy to be there. I love exploring the darkness of humanity—and the unexpected beauty that comes out of that, too.

One TikTok question. You seem to be enjoying yourself on the platform, and I think the reason you get lots of likes is because you come across as honest, funny, and vulnerable—for example, willing to admit that some reader comments sting. What would you say to other authors who are trying to figure out if they should embrace or run away from TikTok?

I resisted TikTok for the longest time. I thought I’d be the last author to ever join, mostly because I thought joining meant I’d have to put on makeup every time I posted something, and I am much too lazy for that. I also thought I had nothing to offer in that space. On Instagram, I can post pictures of my dog and whatever book(s) I’ve read that week. On Twitter, I can share the random thoughts I have—or the hilarious things my husband says—that make me laugh. But what would I do on TikTok? If you look at the first post I ever made there, you’ll see I actually ended up joining only because I didn’t get tickets to Taylor Swift’s Eras Tour and I knew people would be posting videos of it once it started (“and IIII want to seeeeee them,” I said in a truly unhinged voice). (Important note: I later DID get tickets, but I still stalk everyone else’s Eras Tour videos.)

Once I had officially joined, I was like, “Well, I guess I should talk about my books. And about writing. And about reading. And keep talking about Taylor Swift.” So that’s what I did, and I was shocked to find that it was really fun for me. And that’s the key—and this is the point where I finally answer your question: If it’s not fun for you, DO NOT DO IT.

Give it a shot if you’re interested, but if it’s pure torture, if it pains you to brainstorm ideas for videos, then flee and never look back. When content is forced, it feels inauthentic and awkward to watch, which means people won’t watch it, which means you’re wasting your time anyway. And we all have enough distractions from our writing; there’s no need to add something to the list that you’re not actively enjoying.

But if you do enjoy it, then I’d encourage you to experiment with different kinds of content until you find what gets you the most engagement. Or do it just because it’s fun and don’t worry about engagement. The truth is, while some authors (Colleen Hoover and Jeneva Rose to name a couple) have blown up because of their own TikTok videos, most books that find popularity on TikTok do so because readers have made videos about them—not the writers themselves.

This isn’t a question, it’s a suggestion, but I’d love your comment on it. Megan, you are one of the biggest Taylor Swift fans around. You know how Louise Penny wrote a thriller, State of Terror, with Hilary Clinton? Do you see where I’m going with this?

I will drop everything now to write a book with Taylor Swift. (And yes, I slid a reference to one of her lyrics into that twelve-word sentence.)

And now, an embedded TikTok, which we fully realize means we could lose your attention as you fall down the TikTok rabbit hole. Please share/like/leave a comment before you go!

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@megancollinswriter“This character was so anxious all the time, it was SO annoying” “This character annoyed me because she was always so stuck in the past” “This character was so non-confrontational it was annoying” #booktok #bookcommunity #maincharacter

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Today we’ve got an interview with Melissa Adelman, whose debut novel, WHAT THE NEIGHBORS SAW, dropped two days ago, on June 20.

I had the chance to read it early and I’ve already been enthusiastically recommending it to friends who love domestic suspense. Below is our interview, which starts with my quick description of the book.

Caitlin: Since WHAT THE NEIGHBORS SAW only came out two days ago, I’m going to assume people haven’t had the chance to read it yet. So here’s the brief description: a couple of young-professional parents overextend themselves to buy the worst house in a super wealthy neighborhood outside DC, only to have the neighborhood promptly go to shit when a neighbor is murdered on the trail behind their house. Main character Alexis, who’s on an extended maternity leave, finds herself watching her neighbors from the window above the sink where she scrubs bottles at all hours of the night. As she discovers neighbor after neighbor engaging in bad behavior, she grapples with her old expectations of feeling safer here than in her last home, or the one before that.

First question: do you absolutely loathe having to describe what your book is about? (It’s why I wrote a summary rather than asking you to say it! I hate that question!!!!) 

Melissa: Yes and thank you!!! Since it’s publication week, I’ve been sweating over a witty way to pitch the book, but truly I am a horrible salesperson and deeply appreciate you not throwing me what should be such a softball question but absolutely is not.

Caitlin: Okay. Let’s get down to business. Just like you did, I’m gonna start with the house itself. I love how you opened the book with the description of a house for sale that ends with “Please note, property offered AS IS.” I thought that was such a clever way to hint at disaster ahead for whoever buys the house, right from the opening page. 

Melissa: Opening with the listing description was a last-minute addition that my agent (and yours) came up with, and one of the most fun paragraphs to write. Too bad AI has already taken that job, otherwise I’d totally write real estate listings for a living.

[After-the-fact addition by Caitlin: that crafty Helen.1]

Caitlin: For the buyers, Alexis and Sam, the old house was such a thorn in their sides, to increasingly dramatic proportions. I laughed out loud when I finished the book and looked you up online, only to see that you live in an old house. How many of the house headaches in this book are based on real life?

Melissa: So many! I live in a county where people joke all the time about renovation being the official local pastime, because a lot of the housing stock is well over 50 years old. When we first bought our house, I rewatched that 80s movie, The Money Pit with Shelley Long and Tom Hanks, in a futile effort to understand our own questionable choices. That’s where the spark for this book came from really, watching that movie and thinking “I’d love a story with all these outrageous home reno issues plus neighbor drama plus murder. Could I write that book?” 

Caitlin: I also thought you might be a realtor or interior designer or something. The descriptions of the houses, inside and out, were so decadent! Now that I know you’re an economist, was it all just well-done research, or are homes your passion? And importantly: do you stalk the market as a hobby? (If yes, my husband will also want to know your favorite site. He’s a Coldwell Banker enthusiast.)

Melissa: I take that as a compliment, so thank you! I am very much an enthusiastic amateur, no professional background in real estate or home design. And yes, it’s like you already know me – when I’m in bed at night and should be sleeping, I browse home listings instead of social media. I think searching for a house years ago clicked on some obsessive switch in my brain that makes me always need to know what is out there, zooming in on cabinet hardware and contemplating other people’s layout choices like it’s my job. I’m pretty basic though in my app preferences – Redfin and Zillow and Houzz – so I’m going to be checking out Coldwell Banker…

Caitlin: I’d definitely call WHAT THE NEIGHBORS SAW “domestic suspense,” where a lot of the tension is drawn from the familial relationship, the conditions of everyday life, and the suburban urge to spy on our neighbors. Do you call it domestic suspense (or a domestic thriller), or something else? (Andromeda and I love discussing genres, like the good nerds we are.) 

Melissa: Much to my husband’s consternation, I jump in to correct him with “domestic suspense” every time he tells someone I wrote a mystery. Genre designations are not clear to me, but in my mind, “thriller” promises a rollercoaster ride and often a palpable sense of danger, while “suspense” is all about the tension – all those things that are not quite right. And following all the threads that make up that tight knot of tension over the course of the book. But maybe I’m completely wrong, so please write more posts about this to enlighten us all!

[Addition by Caitlin: I completely agree with your distinctions between thriller and suspense and that “mystery” is not the umbrella term that many think it is!]

Caitlin: And now an unfair question, one I am not willing to definitively answer myself: do you aim to write something in a similar vein for your second novel? Is this going to be your bread and butter? Are we fools if we try to plan anything when it comes to writing?

Melissa: Much to my agent and editor’s consternation, over the past few months I ended up writing something that was going in the direction of…a suspenseful romance? (That’s probably not a thing, and they think it just doesn’t work). So a few weeks ago I put that draft aside and started again from scratch, trying to focus squarely on an idea that fits the domestic suspense mold a little better. 

To be honest, I feel torn on this - the artistic naive side of me thinks that genre blending makes for more interesting stories and who wants to be stuck in a box, but another side thinks that I have no real clue how the author-audience relationship works and maybe unpredictably wandering from genre to genre is a recipe for driving away readers? 

But for now, I’m trying to push that all out of my mind and just focus on the new new idea. I’m more excited about it every day because it delves into identity/origin/family drama which, as you point out below, I’m really into. 

[Late addition by Caitlin because I can’t stop talking to you Melissa - romantic suspense is so a thing!! And yet I completely understand what you’re saying and grappling with. Such similar thoughts running through my head at all hours. I’m happy for you that you have a new project that’s got you excited. Thematicallly, I’m ALL IN ON IT!]

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Caitlin: I think a hallmark of domestic suspense is marital tension and conflict, which you wrote really effectively. There’s a page where I made a note that I was having a running fight with Alexis’s husband Sam in my head. This is when she’s reflecting back on having their first child, and she changes jobs because work has become miserable and she wants to spend more time with their son. He wants her to “focus on figuring out how to do that well again,” and, when she says her own mother was never around, he says she “shouldn’t let [her] own past weigh so much on the present.” I was ready to slap him! How does your husband feel about you writing domestic suspense (once or maybe again), where romantic partners are inevitably antagonistic forces of drama and discord? And do you ever write a fight scene and leave your computer all wound up at your real-life husband, who has nothing to do with what you’re writing?

Melissa: I love imagining fights, because in real life I’m conflict averse to a fault. The scenario you describe, of getting all worked up at my real husband after writing an entirely fictional husband’s awful attitude has definitely happened to me. Sometimes when I’m writing and feeling so excited and engrossed by the story, it’s like there’s a tiny tear in the fabric of the universe and I’m living in different realities...These different people I could be, these other, terrible relationships I could have…It’s such a neat feeling but also disorienting, and I have to do things like remind myself that my real husband is a great, normal guy…As far as I know! 

Caitlin: Something that isn’t always (or even often?) present in domestic suspense is open discussion of characters’ experiences based on their race and/or ethnicity. I loved how this was part of the fabric of the book, because it was part of Alexis’s identity and life experience as the daughter of a Black Honduran woman and a white man. So much domestic suspense takes place in wealthy white neighborhoods, with lots of discussion of the wealth but little of the whiteness. But in your book, I felt like you didn’t shy away from that. Neighbors repeatedly assume Alexis isn’t the homeowner and make racist comments about her appearance. Other neighbors witness many of these instances but say nothing. With whatever degree of detail or intimacy you feel like sharing, what was your experience like writing this aspect of the book?

Melissa: Making race - and not just class - an integral part of the tension was really important to me, because it is central to the American suburban experience (and my own life experience). I gave Alexis a racial background similar to my own, with a Black mother and a White father, because I felt like that would be an interesting perspective (and contribute to the story). Side note – questions about who can write what are very interesting, I hope you wade into that thorny issue and do a post on it some day! [2 ]

The book is not about race per se, but I tried to weave in what feel to me like compelling facets of family life and rich sources of tension for domestic suspense – from the stress of navigating a block or even a whole community where almost no one else looks like you, to the slippery questions of identity that many mixed-race people grapple with, to the loss of cultural connection many first and second generation Americans feel. These are all things to me that are just as relevant as questions of class (and of course the two are often wrapped up with each other), and I hope that readers will find them just as resonant, even if they haven’t read as much about them before in this genre.  

Caitlin: I loved how much of the book came back to family origin. One of my favorite details was her relationship with her Honduran nanny, Elena, who took her on as a “cultural education project” when she learned Alexis’s mother had been Honduran as well. But there was plenty of family drama as well! The secrets the last generation of mothers kept; the family mysteries that were only a mystery because something went unspoken. What intrigues you about family secrets and where we come from? And why do you think so many of us love stories of family drama?

Melissa: I always guiltily bypass global economic news and go straight to the “dear therapist” advice column in whatever newspaper app I open. Also my all-time favorite books are epic family sagas, everything from The Poisonwood Bible to Middlesex to Pachinko to The House of the Spirits. There’s just something about family drama that I can’t get enough of, maybe because I grew up in a family where crazy drama was hastily swept under a very lumpy rug, so I need to vicariously work through it? My first guess would be along those lines. That we all love family drama, big and small, because we all have it. It’s just such a common aspect of the human experience. 

As you said, much of the family drama in this book revolves specifically around family origin secrets, which I find fascinatingly destructive. Keeping that type of secret can be understandable. Maybe the truth is so intimate and ugly that you can’t even look yourself in the mirror and say it. But the secret isn’t much of a reprieve – instead it’s like an invisible mass, distorting everything within its reach beyond recognition – self-perceptions, life choices, entire relationships for generations. I just find that phenomenon so interesting. The idea that depriving a person of a true understanding of where they’ve come from can have awful consequences. 

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Caitlin: I loved when Alexis found herself feeling comfortable at one of the glitzy neighborhood bashes, to her surprise. She reflects on “upscale parties” of the past and how she felt an unspoken but clear message that she “should be grateful for the opportunity” to view others’ wealth and privilege. Now, she feels an unexpected sense of belonging. In another, earlier scene, Alexis is looking at a cobweb and thinks, “Our cleaning ladies are getting lazy.” And I thought…she fits right in! Do we all have some elitist-jerk energy lurking in us? Do you think anyone could be at home with the uber wealthy, or do you think this was specific to Alexis’s character?

Melissa: I think, in certain respects, Alexis is a shell of a person. She’s inherited that loss, that emptiness from her mother, and spent her life keeping busy with what she’s good at – being smart, working hard – and that led her into this upper-class world. So even though she doesn’t feel fully at home there, she’s absorbed a lot of its attitudes and values, because she didn’t have anything else. Yet, I do think any of us, given enough time around the residents of River Forest, could slip into that same mode – isn’t there an old adage along the lines of “you are the company you keep”?      

Caitlin: This question is going to be annoyingly nonspecific because I don’t want to spoil anything for readers. I loved one of the big surprises at the end of the book. It was there from the beginning but I hadn’t understood what I’d seen. And throughout, you had great foreshadowing about this surprise and others, and some red herrings. What was your writing process like when it came to these elements of the story? Did you have any of the book’s big questions answered before you started putting it to paper, or did you discover things as you went?

Melissa: I had the sort of pulsing vein of the main plot line from the beginning, and the work for me was in fleshing it out to do it justice. Like how to foreshadow without giving it away, how to weave in side plots that are interesting and relevant enough to carry the story forward, how to make it all play out plausibly. I’m a very heavy self-editor, in the sense that only a small percentage of the words that run through my head actually make it onto my laptop screen. So for me the writing process is like…sand art? As in, layer by layer, where I’ll write the core of the story through to the end, then go back and add, over and over again, until it’s complete.    

Caitlin: And my last question: any books you’re excited about right now? (Suspense or not.)

I just finished reading Yellow Wife by Sadeqa Johnson, which is a historical fiction novel that was sparked by the author’s visit to the site of a slave jail in Richmond, VA where she learned that the white jail owner’s wife was a former slave herself. It’s a great book, and honestly I still find it thrilling every time I read a richly told story about Black women and the mixed race experience in America. It was only 10 years ago, in 2013, when the Cheerios commercial with a mixed-race (Black-White) family caused a huge uproar! Hard to wrap my mind around that, because things have changed so much for the better since. And I think the more we see and understand each other through good stories, the more positive change there will be. 

I hope you enjoyed reading Melissa’s answers as much as I did (I had to text her mid-way through reading to tell her she had me grinning and LOLing at my computer in public).

For our die-hards who read this far, any of Melissa’s answers resonate or surprise you?

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The account is run by an anonymous woman: the Her behind By Herself Travel is a working professional, a mom of two, and a wife. She travels alone and, while she's away from many of life's obligations, she eats out, explores, sleeps in, and reads voraciously. Something about the account felt like an invitation to do the same. Following her and seeing the occasional post on my feed has been a pleasant reminder of that initial feeling of permission.

Knowing I had a trip of my own in store and selfishly wanting to pick her brain, I reached out to see if she'd let me interview her for Present Tense, and when she responded, there was a twist: I knew her in real life. But I take secrets deadly seriously, I'm keeping my trap shut. If you're curious, you should probably just follow her account and try to piece it together for yourself.

Caitlin: I was so into your account from minute one. This idea that you're married with kids but love to take time, even a weekend, to run off to a new place, spread out in an empty bed, binge read something great, eat out, and generally take time to yourself...what's not to love? Looking at your account made me feel like you were giving me permission to do that myself. 

Have you always been a reader and a traveler? When did you first travel alone? 

By Herself Travel: Growing up I was an only child and I spent a LOT of time reading novels. The habit has stuck with me ever since. About 10 years ago I became a parent and also started a job that required occasional travel. I grew to look forward to, and even depend on, sporadic short getaways to attend work meetings and conferences. The experience of early motherhood was so consuming that these breaks served as an important pressure valve and a time to remember who I was, outside of being a mom. When the pandemic hit, most of my work travel stopped. When it became safe to do so again, I worked to create opportunities to take brief trips alone—apart from work. 

Has reading always been a big part of how you enjoy seeing new places and getting away? 

Yes! I can't imagine a good vacation without books. Again, it's that escape element. Reading fiction offers a travel element in and of itself because I find it so transporting. 

As I mentioned to you, my family is going on a vacation soon and I'm really looking forward to some R&R. Wait, there is definitely something there you should do with your account...a play on rest and relaxation, but one of the Rs is "reading." R&R&R, maybe. The ole Triple R.

Triple R! I think that says it all. Maybe we trademark it?1 

So the question I have most wanted to ask you is: how do you choose what to read on vacation? Oh! And have you ever picked a location based on a book you'd read or wanted to read there? 

Like a lot of readers, I keep a running list of books I want to read. When a friend recommends a novel, when I read a good book review, when something catches my eye in a bookstore, I jot it down in the notes section of my phone and add a little annotation. The best part of preparing for a getaway is picking reading material! I usually review my (lengthy) list to see if anything feels like a fit with a particular trip. I typically bring more books than I can actually read because having choice is so important. And as much as I am committed to supporting independent booksellers, I travel with a Kindle. This allows me to download a varied selection of books for a vacation without all the weight. It's like having a small personal library with me wherever I go, which I love. 

Sometimes I gravitate toward novels that are set in the location I'm traveling to, but not always. Author and plot are paramount to me. When I review my list of to-read books, it's just a matter of what resonates. Often I'll bypass a book on my list, only to give it a try a few months later and find myself completely absorbed. So reading, I think, is very much about timing. There's a dynamic between the moment the reader is in, and the reading material, that needs to align.   

I don't think I've ever picked a travel destination based solely on a book, but novels have certainly informed my understanding of locations and my desire to travel to certain parts of the world. Also, when I really fall in love with a place, I'll seek out books set in that location just to try to feel like I'm still there after a great trip. 

Looking at your instagram, I'd say you read broadly, with a tendency to choose upmarket stories, but plenty of suspense and drama in there. Do you agree with that? (Do you know what upmarket means? Because I don't, but it is my favorite genre word. Let's go with commercial books that skew a bit literary. Book club!)

Yes! Sounds spot on. Mostly, I gravitate toward family drama and suspense written by women. And I have a habit of abandoning books that don't capture me by the end of the first chapter.2 At this moment in my life, I read books almost entirely for enjoyment. I spent a good number of years (English major, law student, etc.) reading and analyzing what someone else decided to assign to me. Now, I take pleasure in getting to read exactly what I want. Up market books! 

When it comes to going on vacation to take time to yourself, how are you impacted by reading something tense and/or emotionally taxing?

That's such an important consideration. You have to know yourself as a reader and what will absorb you on vacation but not ruin you. I love reading thrillers when I travel alone but I also know to steer clear of stories that involve child victimization, for example. Because of the work I do in the trauma field, and because I have young children, those stories cut too deeply for a vacation. At the same time, a solo trip allows me sacred and unfettered access to reading so I tend to want books that are at least a little meaty and dark. Beach reads and romance never do it for me.

Besides thinking about reading material, is there anything you do before you leave for a trip to prepare for maximum Triple R? 

Prepping to maximize Triple R is most important. Unfortunately, it's hard to wing Triple R. I like to research the location I'm going to and make a Triple R game plan. I plan a few low-key activities (spa if possible), decide what I'll do for exercise, request a late checkout in advance, and maybe most importantly -  figure out whether I need to bring my own coffee. (One of my favorite reading times is first thing in the AM, in bed, with a cup of coffee in hand—so the coffee has to be good). I also scope out the restaurant scene and try to anticipate where it might be most comfortable to dine alone.

As a parent, I can't fully enjoy Triple R unless I know things are relatively under control at home and that my absence is not putting an undue burden on my partner. So timing is key and also not leaving for too long. Most important is the consent and support of your partner/co-parent, who should be able to be honest with you about what works and what doesn't. And it's always extra helpful if extended family or friends can be on hand for back up support when you're gone. 

While you're away, is there a balance you try to strike between reading and the other things you like to do while you're traveling? 

The best thing about traveling solo is that you don't have to strike any balance! That's the beauty of a trip alone. RRR means shedding expectations and turning inward to decide what sounds good in the moment.

I saw you recently went on a family vacation. When I first saw the post, I saw your instagram handle, and then I saw it was a Disney Fantasy cruise, and I was like, okay, would not have been my first choice for solo travel, but you do you. It was only when I started in on the caption that I saw it was a family vacation, and I cracked up at how quickly I'd accepted that you'd left your husband and kids behind to go on a Disney cruise alone!

Ha! I think my kids would disown me. Actually I just listened to a travel podcast episode where a woman spoke about taking a cruise by herself (not Disney). She works in the navigation field and noted that she chose the specific cruise ship because it had a female captain (rare in the industry). She talked about dining by herself for a whole week, reading, and how she slept outside on her private balcony one night. It did sound kind of great now that I think about it! 

How did you carve out alone time on a family vacation with your kids? I mean this both in terms of time/schedule but also mentally. 

If time alone is important to you in the context of family travel, communication with your co-parent is key. Talking as far in advance as possible about your aspirations and the childcare logistics of blocking out solo time is key. Part of this conversation also needs to be an inquiry into what your partner or co-traveler would like for themselves in order to have a satisfying travel experience. Figuring out how best to meet everyone's needs is a bit of a jigsaw puzzle but the payoff is worth the strategizing. Honestly, one of the reasons why my husband and I chose a Disney Cruise for our last family vacation was the option of (fun!) on-board childcare/kids programming that is available all day, as-needed. It was a very helpful piece of the vacation puzzle that allowed us to spend some time alone, and together, without kids. 

What would you say to someone reading this who feels guilt or worry about leaving their kids or even just their adult travel partner to take some alone time?

First, there's no prize for being the perfect mother. Feeling guilty about spending time away from your children implies that it's detrimental to the people we love. So the first step is to reframe solo travel from a selfish act to one that offers a benefit, not only to us as solo travelers, but also to our spouses and kids. Especially for introverts like myself, time alone is the single most powerful and efficient way to restore energy. This time allows me to be a more capable partner and caregiver. Everybody wins. Prioritizing occasional time for yourself gives everyone in the family permission to do the same for themselves—so there is an element of example setting as well.

Also I think it's really important to acknowledge that Triple R via solo travel, like we're discussing here, requires resources that most women do not have. And the many mothers who lack the support, time, and money to engage in this kind of escape are the very ones who deserve a break the most. So while I don't think "by herself" travel is necessarily an indulgence, it is certainly a privilege. And it's an experience I'd love to see more women be able to have without barriers. 

When you come home from time away to yourself, how do you feel? Are there any parallels between finishing a great vacation and finishing a great book?

When I come home, I feel more myself—more centered and rested. And always, always so excited to be reunited with my family!

Oh my goodness—yes—there are parallels between travel and books. Maybe that's why I love them so much. A good book, like a worthwhile trip, reveals something new about the outside world while also reconnecting me to myself. Both have the power to shape and sharpen perspective in numerous ways. And the best trips and books stick with me long after they end. 

Hoo boy did I love Her answers. I completely agree that reading is all about timing. On two different days, the same book might just hit different, as the kids say. Speaking of timing, I’m on a family trip with a pile of books that aren’t gonna read themselves, so I’m off. For more of this amazing energy, you can follow By Herself Travel here!

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Granted, the mystery aspects of Shutter’s plot make it a compelling and more commercial read. But even had those parts been excised, I still would have been drawn in by alternating chapters that bring us into the childhood and adolescent years of Rita Todacheene, an indigenous woman who has the ability to see ghosts (much to the disappointment of her community members) long before she becomes a forensic photographer tangled up in corruption and crime.

As a book that combines a gripping plot with authentic cultural context, this seems like a story bound to be snapped up by editors without delay. Not so, the author tells us.

Only days before she was nominated for a 2023 Edgar Award (Best First Novel category), which followed her nomination for the National Book Award, Ramona Emerson spent a few minutes telling us her novel’s origin story.

ARL: For many writers, “Write what you know” is debatable and possibly limiting advice. But in your case, what you know—from your identity as a member of the Navajo Nation to your sixteen years documenting crime scenes as a forensic photographer—makes for an absolutely fascinating novel. In your Fresh Air interview, you mentioned that this book started out as a potential memoir. Can you tell us how you decided to write a suspense novel partly based on personal experiences and how you came to the conclusion that a novel format would serve you better than nonfiction?

RE: When I started to write the short stories that became Shutter, most of the stories were about my experiences with my grandmother, mixed with some stories about mysterious or strange things on the Navajo reservation. When I began my MFA program, I realized that I really didn’t want to write about myself or be a memoirist. So, I had to find a way to tell the story fictionally so I wouldn’t have to tell anyone about what was real and what was not. Rita is who I would be if I was more exciting and cooler. Ha-ha. But then I really began to think about death and how we as Navajos deal with death – a very taboo subject – and what would happen if a Navajo could see the dead!? Oh, there would likely be hell to play. That was it. Shutter was born. I had the title immediately.

ARL: In the acknowledgments, you thank Soho Press VP Juliet Grames for “being so patient and supportive” and mentioning that she “waited years for me to come back.” Many writers take a while to sell their stories, but I have a feeling you experienced the opposite—years of editors urging you to write. Am I far off?

RE: Juliet was the first editor to ever see Shutter after my MFA program, so she literally saw the first draft, read it over the weekend and called me and talked for an hour and a half. It was exciting. Then I got an agent, who didn’t see the novel at a smaller press and Juliet was pushed out of the bidding process. After 28 rejections from every big publishing house and more rewrites, I was let go by my agent. It was a traumatic time for me, but I sat with my re-edits for a few months then called Juliet again and asked her if she was still interested. It was like we just got off of that phone call… three years later. We never looked back.

ARL: Magical realism is often associated with Latin America, but it seems to me that every culture in the world has some form of respect for and relationship with the supernatural. Ghosts are one example we see cropping up in lots of strong literary novels lately, from yours to The Sentence by Louise Erdrich and Hell of a Book by Jason Mott. Do you have any ideas about what function ghosts serve in literature, and why we are seeing a lot of them lately in award-winning books, including many written by people of color?

RE: Ghosts have been a part of literature for a long time, but you’re right that they have made a bit of a resurgence. I think there is some real reckoning going on about our histories, our pasts and our roles in changing the mistakes of the past. Ghosts serve as a reminder of our own consciousness and our connection to who we are and what we believe. Maybe that is why we are all connecting with ghosts – to see where we have gone wrong and how we can remedy our own histories.

ARL: Given your involvement in film, how do you decide which story ideas will work best in which formats, and how do the two worlds interact? I’m curious if you applied any lessons from one to the other, and how they speak to you differently, if they do.

RE: Great question. For me, fiction has been a very liberating artform. When you work in film, the overlying constant cloud is funding. So even writing a screenplay was never a free and limitless exercise in storytelling because I was constantly concerned about how I was going to pay for it. I originally thought of Shutter as a screenplay, but my mentor Joan Tewekesbury encouraged me to move into fiction since she had been hearing me read at her workshop, and wrote a letter of recommendation for my MFA under the stipulation I move to fiction. I’m so happy she did that because fiction has been a real blessing to me.

These days most of my work is in documentary film. As I write book number two, I am also involved in four different documentary film projects at various stages of production, which are completely separate from the fictional projects. My documentary work aims to bring awareness and change to Native/Navajo communities or to introduce audiences to Native communities and individuals that they otherwise would have never met. I guess they are very similar to each other in that sense, introducing people to characters/events/locations that they would never be able to experience otherwise. I guess that is what all of this work does – bring understanding.

BIO:

Ramona Emerson is a Diné writer and filmmaker originally from Tohatchi, New Mexico. She has a bachelor’s in Media Arts from the University of New Mexico and an MFA in Creative Writing from the Institute of American Indian Arts. After starting in forensic videography, she embarked upon a career as a photographer, writer and editor. She is an Emmy nominee, a Sundance Native Lab Fellow, a Time-Warner Storyteller Fellow, a Tribeca All-Access Grantee, and a WGBH Producer Fellow. She currently resides in Albuquerque, New Mexico, where she and her husband, the producer Kelly Byars, run their production company Reel Indian Pictures.