Interviews: Recent Episodes

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Kristen is joined by author Kelly J. Ford to discuss her new Southern noir novel Real Bad Things, the maddeningly minefield of apologizing as a woman, and why we’re in a golden age for writing weird queer shit.

Real Bad Things is available now wherever books are sold!

Also mentioned in the episode:

• Kelly’s debut novel Cottonmouths
• Crime fiction author Cheryl A. Head (who Kristen interviewed back in 2020)
• Powers and Thrones: A New History of the Middle Ages by Dan Jones
• Siren Queen by Nghi Vo
• The Strange Love of Martha Ivers
• Midsommar
• Pachinko by Min Jin Lee (and the Apple TV+ adaptation)

Find out more about Kelly on her website, Instagram, and Twitter.

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Layne welcomes Courtney Summers to the show for a chat about her harrowing new novel I'm the Girl, the significance of writing about girls who are super gay for each other, and how to hype yourself (and your work) without apology.

You can buy I’m the Girl now, as well as Courtney’s previous books The Project, Sadie, All the Rage, This is Not a Test, Fall for Anything, Some Girls Are, and Cracked Up to Be.

Find out more about Courtney on her website, Instagram, and Twitter.

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Layne talks with Ashley Winstead about her absolutely badass new novel The Last Housewife, the problem of female pleasure under the patriarchy, and how she stays sane by toggling between thrillers and romantic comedies.

The Last Housewife is available now!

Also mentioned in the episode:

• Ashley’s other books In My Dreams I Hold a Knife and Fool Me Once
• The Cut’s exposé on the Sarah Lawrence sex cult
• Oryx and Crake by Margaret Atwood
• Justine by the Marquis de Sade and the movie Quills

Find out more about Ashley on her website, Instagram, or Twitter.

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Layne’s celebrating spooky season early with feminist horror author Gwendolyn Kiste! Tune in for their chat about Gwendolyn’s feminist as hell Dracula meets Jane Eyre mashup Reluctant Immortals, why women are so good at controlling our murderous urges, and what makes horror the ideal genre for rule-breaking, rage-fueled fiction.

Reluctant Immortals is out now, as are Gwendolyn’s previous books Boneset & Feathers, The Rust Maidens, Pretty Marys All in a Row, and And Her Smile Will Untether the Universe.

Also mentioned in the episode:

• Dracula by Bram Stoker
• Jane Eyre by Charlotte Brontë
• Wuthering Heights by Emily Brontë
• Shirley Jackson, author of The Haunting of Hill House
• Angela Carter, author of The Bloody Chamber
• The Babadook
• Something Borrowed, Something Blood-Soaked by Christa Carmen
• To Be Devoured by Sara Tantlinger
• Yellowjackets

Find out more about Gwendolyn on her website, Instagram, or Twitter.

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Layne interviews Sarah Zachrich Jeng about her speculative feminist thriller The Other Me, why selfishness is necessary to make art, and the men we should all watch out for.

Sarah’s debut The Other Me is available now in both paperback and hardcover.

Also mentioned in this episode:

• Black Mirror
• Russian Doll
• “Once in a Lifetime” by Talking Heads
• The Time Traveler’s Wife by Audrey Niffenegger

Find out more about Sarah on her website, Instagram, or Twitter.

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Layne welcomes Amina Akhtar (and her celebrity pup Bean!) back to the show to talk about her new novel Kismet, the Christopher Columbusing of wellness culture, and why we’re all getting weirder.

Kismet is out now! Also mentioned in the episode:

• Amina’s first book #FashionVictim
• Our previous interview with Amina
• Beanie the Coyote Vest Pup’s official Insta
• Bean on The Late Late Show with James Corden (eff you James Corden, Beanie looks fabulous)

Find out more about Amina on her website, Instagram, and Twitter.

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Layne celebrates Hot Goth Summer with Isabel Cañas, author of The Hacienda (remember that Hot Priest book from our summer reads episode? This is it, bitches!). Plus: how the hell Isabel completed this book while also getting her PhD, why we all love a forbidden romance, and which classic Gothic heroine drove her so batshit crazy she had to rage-write about it.

Isabel’s debut The Hacienda is out now wherever books are sold!

Also mentioned in the episode:

• Episode 86: Queen Shit with Hannah Whitten
• Rebecca by Daphne Du Maurier
• Fleabag
• Quills
• Story Genius by Lisa Cron
• Save the Cat! Writes a Novel by Jessica Brody

Find out more about Isabel on her website, Instagram, or Twitter.

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Layne chats with author Margarita Montimore about her new novel Acts of Violet, writing stories based on your personal obsessions rather than what’s popular, and why success comes to those who stay stubborn as hell.

Pick up your copy of Acts of Violet from Bookshop.org or your favorite local indie bookstore.

Also mentioned in this episode:

• Margarita’s first two books Oona Out of Order and Asleep From Day
• Macmillan Audio’s EPIC Acts of Violet audiobook
• The Girl With the Dragon Tattoo by Stieg Larsson
• The Echo Wife by Sarah Gailey
• Daisy Jones and the Six by Taylor Jenkins Reid

Find out more about Margarita on her website, Instagram, or Twitter.

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Layne talks to legendary thriller author Tess Gerritsen about the unlikeable female character she just couldn’t kill off, the secret to keeping a long-running series feeling fresh, and why older women make the best spies (and serial killers).

Listen to Me, the 13th book in her popular Rizzoli & Isles series is out now (and click here for a complete list of the books in order, if you want to start from the beginning).

Also mentioned in this episode:

• Blood Water Paint by Joy McCullough
• Tess’s medical thriller Harvest
• Choose Me co-written by Tess and Gary Braver

Find out more about Tess on her website, Instagram, or Twitter.

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Kristen and Layne welcome multi-talented multi-genre author Sandra SG Wong for a chat about her new suspense novel IN THE DARK WE FORGET, the challenges of crafting a main character who has no idea who she is, and what it’s really like to road trip with a thriller writer.

Mentioned in this episode:

• In the Dark We Forget by Sandra SG Wong
• The Lola Starke series and Crescent City short stories by SG Wong
• I've Pet That Dog Twitter account

Find out more about Sandra on her website, Instagram, or Twitter

Episode Transcript

LAYNE: Welcome to Unlikeable Female Characters, the podcast about women who don't give a damn if you like them. I'm Layne Fargo, and I'm here with Kristen Lepionka.

KRISTEN: Hello!

LAYNE: And our guest today is Sandra SG Wong. Sandra writes in multiple genres, including the cross-genre Lola Starke novels and Crescent City short stories. She has been a finalist for the Crime Writers of Canada Awards of Excellence, and longlisted for the Whistler Independent Book Awards. She also used to be the President of Sisters in Crime, and is now the Immediate Past President, which is still sounds very fancy. And her new book In the Dark We Forget comes out June 21st. So welcome, Sandra!

SANDRA: Thank you. Very fancy welcome.

LAYNE: We're so excited to have you here. We actually were putting together our list of people we wanted to talk this summer, looking at the books that were coming out, and you were very high on our list. And then your agent reached out to me. She's with the same agency that my agent is. And I was like, what a coincidence! We were literally just talking about this.

SANDRA: That is so great. Yes, we're agency sibs. I just love that. Yeah. So I was stalking you on Twitter ages ago, as soon as I found that out. And I was like, when will Layne Fargo follow me back? I don't know, but I'm praying.

LAYNE: Oh my God, I, when did I follow? I just followed you on Instagram. And I thought I was following you for a long time. That happens to me all the time, like I'm sure that I'm following someone, cause I'll see their tweets cause like other people that I follow follow them.

KRISTEN: Yes, same with me.

LAYNE: Oh, internet. Well, I apologize for not following you back right away.

SANDRA: Don't even worry about it. Like, that's going to be the top of your list? I don't think so.

LAYNE: I get really overwhelmed by Twitter. It's like, I look at it, and I'll engage with it a little bit, and then I just get overwhelmed and have to hide from it. I have a really love/hate relationship.

SANDRA: Yeah, no, that's healthy, though. It's healthy to hide from Twitter, I think.

LAYNE: I think it would be healthier to just delete it.

SANDRA: Well, I don't know. I can't quit it. I'm sorry. You know, there's the otter videos, and the I Pet That Dog, and foxes. Yeah, I just can't, I can't quit Twitter. I'm sorry.

LAYNE: Ugh, yeah, I can't quit it either. I want to believe that I could, but I can't.

KRISTEN: Yeah. I want to believe that I could just stop using it without having to take the drastic step of deleting it. But for some reason, that's impossible.

SANDRA: Yep. Yeah, I know. I know. I hear you, sister.

LAYNE: So your new book, In the Dark We Forget, comes out June 21st. Could you tell us a little bit about the book, and also the main character, Cleo?

SANDRA: Sure. I'm always torn about whether or not I should use her name, because the book starts out with her waking up with amnesia at the side of a highway. But, yeah, in the course of her recovering her identity and trying to recover her memory, she discovers that her parents have vanished. And she discovers there's a $47.3 million jackpot in the mix, just for kicks and giggles.

So it's told from my protagonist's point of view. And she's not too sure what's happened with her parents, let alone herself, but she does find a really loving, supportive younger brother along the way. And they just try and piece everything together themselves. So in the manner of a kind of domestic suspense, I guess could be the genre? Though some people are calling it a psychological thriller, and I don't really know what the difference is.

LAYNE: Yeah. I don't know either. I mean, I guess domestic, I think definitely family, usually it's husbands and wives. So it's really interesting to see a brother/sister relationship at the heart of a book like that. If it is indeed domestic. We can call it whatever we want.

SANDRA: Yeah, exactly. It's just a great book, people. I'm just going to call it that. Okay. I mean, I hope!

LAYNE: Yes, it is!

KRISTEN: Yes, it’s great.

LAYNE: And so how did you come up with this concept of amnesia and a lottery ticket? There's so much going on, I love it.

SANDRA: I was in the Canadian Rockies on a road trip with my husband. We were there for an anniversary trip away, and we came around this bend in the highway—the Trans-Canada is what it's called, the Number 1, which cuts across Canada, west to east. And we came around a bend just east of Lake Louise, and there's a patch of flat-ish grass next to the highway. I'm like, what would it be like if someone just woke up there, and had no idea how they got there or who the hell they were? And that's when it started.

LAYNE: That's what it's like to travel with a thriller writer. We're always like, someone could get murdered there, and then some horrible thing could happen over there.

SANDRA: Absolutely.

LAYNE: We can't turn it off.

SANDRA: We cannot turn it off. It's just who we are. So, yeah. And for anyone who's listening, if you've ever been to the Canadian Rockies, they're immense. They're amazing. They just make you feel so insignificant.

KRISTEN: So beautiful.

SANDRA: So I thought let's add that into the mix, right? Because you stare at the mountains, at the tops, it's like a carpet of trees, and you're like, well, how could you possibly find your way if you got lost? What would you do? For me as a city person, you know, would I have my phone with me? Could I use the compass? I don't even know what that means. Like, what would I do?

So yeah, that was the spark. And then I just kept thinking about the character and like, who is she? What is she like? What's her relationship with her family? I love thinking about families, and my favorite kind are the totally fucked up families. Those are the best ones I find to really ruminate on. And like, why do people do what they do? Why do they keep coming back? If they keep coming back. Like, what is that about families that make someone do that?

That's probably why I did siblings, brother and sister, rather than husband and wife. Plus there's a lot of really great books of domestic suspense that are husbands and wives. So I thought, you know, someone else can take care of that part, and we'll just focus on this story and see where it takes me.

KRISTEN: I love how as the reader is getting to know the protagonist, she's getting to know herself. We're meeting her, and she's meeting her at the same time, really, because she doesn't know who she is. And I think that's a really fun way to launch yourself into a story because anything is fair game. But I bet as a writer, that was pretty challenging, because not having a real sense of your character's identity can probably make it a little tricky to get the story rolling.

SANDRA: Well, thank you. Thanks for saying it worked for you. Cause, you know, for some people that doesn't work, right? They're like, who is this person? I want to know right away. But I like to do things that are interesting for myself as a writer, and then hope that other people find it interesting as well.

I am a person who likes to have an outline as just a touchstone, a lodestone. So I can return to it, if I write myself into this total tangent where I'm completely lost, at least I come back to the outline and see, well, what was I originally thinking?

But for this character, I did have a sense, you know, she started out on one end of a certain spectrum. And then I actually had to pull her back from the edge because she was a little too much. Too obvious. She was too straightforward. And I thought, well, let's have a little mystery—no pun intended—to this character, because she's a mystery to herself.

And I thought, well, what would that look like? What if you really wanted to know who you were? And then from there, from a writing perspective, what would the stakes need to be so that she really needed to find out who she was pretty damn quickly.

So I think I had a fairly good idea of who she was at the beginning, cause I do a lot of work on character before I start drafting. But she really did surprise me. And I know it's such a cliché, and just to be really honest, sometimes I hear writers talk about their characters like, “they're real people and they speak to me,” and I'm like, okay, that does not happen to me. But in this case, she took me some places I didn't really know that I was going to go. So that was actually a lot of fun.

KRISTEN: Well, I also really love how as she begins to discover who she is, she realizes that she is a bit of an unlikeable female character in her past life. Like, she's known for being blunt and sarcastic and sometimes rubbing people the wrong way. She's like, who am I? Oh, I might be a bitch.

SANDRA: Yes.

KRISTEN: That's wonderful.

LAYNE: And that her amnesia somehow made her nicer.

KRISTEN: Yeah.

LAYNE: I was telling my partner about this book. He was like, wow, what would it be like if you got a bump on the head and then you were like, nice? I wouldn't know what to do. I'd be so freaked out. I'm like, I know, right? It's crazy!

SANDRA: Yeah, I think that's totally true with any of us. If we have no memory of our family or any of the experiences that made us who we are in this moment, then are we going to be the same person? Are we not going to be different? Aren’t we going to take a look at who we are?

We're going to hear all these stories from other people about who we were. And then there's sort of a freedom to saying, well, do I want to keep doing that? Do I want to keep going down that road? Do I want to slip back into those clothes? Cause you know, they're going to feel a little bit uncomfortable, right? And I find that fascinating, the idea of identity, personalities, character, like how much of that is the choices we make along the way? And if that's true, then what are the factors that come into our choice? Like I'm a total nerd about lots of stuff. And human beings are definitely fascinating study for me.

LAYNE: Yeah. I wrote down this quote when her brother's telling her stuff about herself, from before. And he's like, oh no, you're not—I mean, you're just like, kind of abrasive and sarcastic. And she says, “I may have amnesia, but I remember enough to know that's what gets a woman called a bitch.” I love that line.

SANDRA: Oh, I'm so glad. Yeah, I really liked this character. She was a lot of fun to write. So I was so glad that you connected with her.

LAYNE: Yeah, totally. And it was really interesting as well, how she unconsciously—and then it sounds like, in her past life, consciously—used her status as a petite Asian woman so people wouldn't find her threatening. That was really interesting commentary on how people perceive Asian women, throughout the book.

SANDRA: It's also a comment on what do you do with that, as a petite East Asian woman? What do you want to do with that? This perception that's put on you, how do you want to use it? Do you want to use it? Do you want to spend your life fighting against it, and saying I'm not like that at all? Or do you want to exploit it to your advantage? Because you know that the world is just not fair.

So I wanted to play with that cause, you know, in my experience, I've met all sorts of East Asian women, Chinese-Canadian women, Chinese-American women, Chinese-Australian women, etc., who just navigate all that in all different ways.

So I think that in terms of immigrant stories that many of us have read or seen on the screen, there's definitely that, you know, dragon lady versus the demure—what's that one movie? Flower Drum Song? Like we're not all gonna break into song, but this sort of filial piety, following an obedient daughter. There's these two extremes. The East Asian version of the Madonna/whore, I guess.

But we have like people all over the spectrum between that. So I wanted to see what could a person be like if they were the kind of person who decided they'd want to exploit it instead. And that's definitely something Cleo discovers about her previous self. There's a point in there where she's like, well, if I have to decide, who am I going to be from here? What am I going to do now? And that question fascinates me, for sure.

LAYNE: We had a similar discussion with Amanda Jayatissa, the author of My Sweet Girl, when we interviewed her last year. Her main character does a similar thing where it's like, the white people around her are seeing her in a certain way. And this character is choosing very much to exploit that and use it. And it's kind of like, why not? It's the white people's fault for having these preconceived notions, and it should be used against them. Why not?

SANDRA: Yeah. I think too, it goes beyond ethnic boundaries. Like, just women in a patriarchal society, we all get that, right? That, you know, “hey little lady.” I mean, how many women do you know who've been called that? Little lady.

LAYNE: Oh, Yeah.

SANDRA: Right? So then, do you want to lean into that? I hate that phrase, but sorry, I used it. Do you want to use that, or do you want to set your boundaries and say, don't call me that. It's kind of moment to moment, right? Right now in this situation we're thinking to ourselves, like, is it worth it to draw that line right now with this person? No, it's a five-minute interaction, I don't care. Never going to see this person again.

But if this is my boss, my supervisor, then it's probably a line I should be drawing, you know, for that person to understand not to cross. So I think we all have that as women, and any kind of marginalized group. If you're from a marginalized community, you're going to have to deal with that in some way, shape, or form.

LAYNE: Yeah, it's a really good point.

KRISTEN: And it's exhausting, because you have to constantly reevaluate where that line is. And does it need to be reinforced? It's not like, well, there's the line, and things will fall where they are. You have to evaluate every single interaction differently based on whether or not that's a boundary you need to assert, and it’s very tiring.

SANDRA: Yeah. Yes, it is. I'm always saying, like, if I didn't have to deal with all that shit, just think of what I could accomplish.

LAYNE: Yeah, is this why the mediocre white men do so much? Because they don't have to think about these things. It just, like, frees up the bandwidth in their brains?

SANDRA: That's right. That's right. Yeah. We would rule the world, I think, otherwise. Which is the point. That's the point, right? That's why we're exhausted dealing with this stuff, and they are not.

KRISTEN: So do you want to talk a little bit about how this book is different from your other books?

SANDRA: Oh, wow. Thanks. Yeah, so you mentioned Lola Starke novels and Crescent City short stories. So that was the series that I started publishing with. I signed my first book contract like 10 years ago, and it was for the first of the Lola Starke novels. And those are alternate history, hard-boiled detective, with ghost and magic. So this is very different.

Those are set in a 1930s-era Chinese Los Angeles, and Lola Starke is the series protagonist. She's a trust fund baby, but she's my femme fatale as a hard-boiled PI. She goes around digging into other people's secrets, pretty much cause she just feels like it. So she has an interesting background, and I created a whole world for her. I have a number of short stories published that I write in that world that I call Crescent City. I really was taken by that idea, and so I ran with it.

And then, in 2018, I got the idea for this book, as I mentioned on a road trip. And I thought, you know, maybe I can try writing something contemporary and see where that takes me. I also write romance, so.

LAYNE: Oh, you do? That's so cool.

SANDRA: Yeah, I do. I'm a massive romance fan from a very early age. Romance and mystery are the two genres I grew up reading. But I was a late reader because my parents, as typical immigrants, they didn't really think that fiction was worthwhile. They always caught me reading books, and they're like, why are you always reading books? And I'm like, why wouldn't I be reading books? Life sucks, and I hate school. So yeah, I'm reading books, man.

But yeah, so, that's the difference. The Lola Starke and Crescent City stuff, those are fun, but they take a certain mindset, right? I have to be in like, the 1930s ethos, and trying to remember all the slang. And so when I go back to writing those, I'll have to do a deep dive back into all of my noir films, be bingeing noir films so I can get all the vocabulary back and all the slang.

Those are fun too, because there's no technology in them. There's no cell phones, you know, there's magic and stuff. And I have my own magic system, which is fun. But magic systems are only fun when you put limits on them. So I sometimes write myself into corners where I'm like, I have no idea what I was supposed to do now. But I think that happens with any genre. It really matters if you're creating a whole world, or you're just writing it about your own neighborhood.

KRISTEN: Yeah. There's so many corners to write yourself into.

SANDRA: Yep.

LAYNE: My big weak spot is all the, like, forensic and detective work kind of stuff. And so I was really impressed with how—I mean, I'm just assuming everything was correct, because I'm not going to go look it up, cause I'm bad at that stuff. But so much of this book is dealing with the police in their investigation, and really the step-by-step process. What kind of research did you do?

SANDRA: Yeah. So for other nerds like me, who like to read acknowledgements, you'll see that I do thank a few people. And then I say, all errors are either by mistake or by design. So I freely admit that I did not deep dive into procedure because, like, that's not this book, right? And other writers do a way better job of going step-by-step in a really great, suspenseful way through procedurals, and that wasn't what the focus for this book was.

So I did basic due diligence. I did speak to someone who works for the RCMP. He was just, like, a personal friend, so not in an official capacity. And I was like, so what would happen if this, what would happen if she woke up on the side, and she went to the detachment, the closest one, and then what? And so he just said, well, then it would do this, and then if there's that, and if there's drugging involved, then it would have to be this. I'm like, okay, great. And then I just went with it after that.

LAYNE: It all seemed very official to me.

SANDRA: Thank you. Thank you so much. I mean, of course I did some internet research. And thank you to the RCMP site. Thank you, government of Canada. But I mostly just pieced together, like what would make sense? And then I just double-checked some stuff to make sure it wasn't completely out of bounds How their detectives would act with a victim, and how would that go?

So I'm really glad that came across as plausible, and I'm totally open. I'm sure someone's gonna email me at some point and say, you know, that was totally wrong, and I'll say, okay, thanks.

LAYNE: People love to do that, don't they?

KRISTEN: Oh, they sure do.

LAYNE: It's like, wow, great. I'll go fix the book, that's already been printed, right now.

SANDRA: Yeah. Of course, in my fantasies, I have a certain rejoinder, which I probably will never say out loud because that would be really rude. And I don't like being rude to people to their faces.

I think in our fantasies, the best response I could come up with would be like, thanks for letting me know, but did you keep reading? Because if you kept reading, it doesn't really matter.

LAYNE: That’s not that rude.

SANDRA: Like, it doesn't really matter.

LAYNE: Is Canada like the Midwest in this way, that we're just like really, really subtly rude and passive aggressive?

SANDRA: Oh, yes.

LAYNE: I feel like we have that in common.

SANDRA: Yeah. Yeah, that's the whole country. Like, I live on the prairies, which is like our version of the Midwest, but it's the whole country. Yeah. Super passive aggressive.

LAYNE: That's so interesting.

KRISTEN: We’d fit right in.

LAYNE: We would fit right in. We could move to Canada, Kristen!

KRISTEN: Great!

SANDRA: Yes, please do! Come. Come visit.

LAYNE: Oh man. I think about it a lot. Things are not going so great down here.

KRISTEN: They are not.

LAYNE: I also wanted to talk a little bit about Cleo's relationship with Naomi, the Japanese-Canadian police constable, who is kind of on her case, and then not on her case, but is, like, an ally to her throughout this. I thought their relationship was fascinating.

SANDRA: Oh, good. Yeah. What do you think about it? Tell me more.

LAYNE: Well, obviously Naomi cares about her and doesn't want anything bad to happen to her and feels a sense of responsibility, cause she was one of the first people that had contact with her after this incident. But also, they both know that Naomi is being put on this case basically because she's an Asian woman and like, not even—like, Cleo is of Chinese descent, and Naomi is of Japanese descent, but other people are just like, oh, you're both Asian, you'll get along. So they feel that pressure, but they do actually have a lot in common as well. It's that interesting tension.

SANDRA: I'm glad you picked up on that. I mean, that's a kind of a weird circumstance, in my actual lived experience, I guess, when you see other people of color. For me, as a Chinese-Canadian woman, seeing other East Asian women in a white space, then it's like, is that a friend or is that going to be someone who wants to compete with me?

Because that happens, right, with nonwhite people in white spaces. It could be like, who wants to be closer to whiteness? Who wants to go through the motions and the processes and be in the system of whiteness and benefit, and who wants to just be themselves? And everything in between along that spectrum.

So I wanted to explore that just a little bit. And I felt like Cleo would—as a character, it would make sense for her to cling to this person who through her actions has proven that she understands a little bit better where Cleo is situated, you know?

So there's comments about big strapping white guys and stuff like that, right? And it's well-known in Canada, the RCMP is not super inclusive. So I figured I couldn't not mention that either, cause that's the reality of the world that they're in. And so what is that like for an East Asian woman who's an RCMP officer? Cause you don't see many of those. In all of my life, I've ever only seen one, personally. So I'm like, okay, what would that be like? And how would that affect how Naomi approaches, you know, a quote-unquote victim that looks like Cleo?

At one point, my editor was like, so is there a romantic thing happening between them? I'm like, no, because I don't want to go in that direction. I wanted to make it focused on Cleo's little family, and the sibling relationship, and the parents. And I just didn't feel, bandwidth-wise for myself, like I was equipped to also put in a romantic storyline. So I didn't deal with that. But I mean, who knows, right? If they had become closer friends, who knows?

LAYNE: I was shipping them a little bit.

KRISTEN: Yeah, me too.

LAYNE: I was kind of like, hmm, I know it's not the time, we're going through a crisis. But like, maybe later.

SANDRA: Yeah. Yeah.

LAYNE: But Naomi is such a great character, cause, at least in speaking to Cleo, she's so straightforward. She's like, look, we both know this is bullshit, and here's why. But then she has to be different with the detectives and the other people that she's dealing with, the tension between who she really is and the role that she has to play professionally.

SANDRA: That’s right. Thank you. That is that whole phenomenon of code switching, which we all do, right? Whether we're women in a patriarchy or nonwhite people with white supremacy. You learn to code switch, depending on who you're around.

And that's also about that line. How much do you say, how much you keep on the other side of the line? So yeah, I'm glad that came through too. Cause I find that I can't write characters or a story with characters like these, if I don't deal with that, because that's the reality of life.

LAYNE: Well, thank you so much for coming on the show today, Sandra. It was great to talk to you. Could you tell us a little bit about what's up next for you and where people can find you on the internet?

SANDRA: Sure. Unfortunately, I am still on Twitter and handle is @s_g_wong. I'm a lot on Twitter, so you will probably find me there. I'm also on Instagram @sgwong8. And then there's just my website, sgwong.com. So that's me.

What I'm working on is, a couple of things. One is, I mentioned that I write romance, so I have a romance novel out on submission right now. So I'm hoping to see that published at some point in the next few years. And what I'm writing is a second suspense novel. Don't want to say too much about it, because I don't want to jinx myself, but this one will be different for sure. There's going to be more than one narrator, so that should be interesting. So I’m going through the challenge of coming up with those multiple narrator voices that are distinct, you know, that are really clearly different people. So that's fun. That's interesting.

KRISTEN: Yeah, that's always a challenge, especially having written a series character for awhile, to try to move into the multiple points of view. I'm working on that myself right now. And it's interesting.

SANDRA: Yes. Yeah. You can call me anytime, Kristen, and we will commiserate over how freaking hard it is.

KRISTEN: Wonderful!

LAYNE: See, I think it's hard to write a book in just one voice. I get bored. I've always had multiple POV.

SANDRA: Yeah.

LAYNE: I tried to write just one voice and I was like, oh my God, you again? I gotta switch it up.

SANDRA: I will DM you when I need to remember that. You can just tell me, like, listen, lady.

LAYNE: It's so fun with multiple POV, cause you can play with the things that they say differently. Like, it's one person's perspective, then the other person's perspective, and the truth is somewhere in the middle, and the reader has to figure it out. That's what I think is so fun about it.

SANDRA: Yes. And that actually speaks to the heart of this book that I'm working on. It’s like, what is the truth? And does it actually change depending on who's telling the story? So I'm definitely in that.

LAYNE: Well, that sounds awesome. We will look out for that in the future, and your romance novel, and anything else you're up to. And everybody, you can go get In the Dark We Forget, it is out now at the time this episode airs. Thank you so much, Sandra!

SANDRA: Thank you, Layne and Kristen! I had so much fun, thank you so much.

View Details

Kristen and Layne chat with author Juno Dawson about her new novel HER MAJESTY’S ROYAL COVEN, how to create a truly inclusive magical world, and the eternal power of the Spice Girls.

Mentioned in this episode:

• Her Majesty’s Royal Coven by Juno Dawson
• This Book is Gay by Juno Dawson
• Clean by Juno Dawson
• Detransition, Baby by Torrey Peters
• The Golden Compass by Philip Pullman
• The Circle on Netflix
• And of course, the Spice Girls

Find out more about Juno on her website, Instagram, or Twitter

Episode Transcript

LAYNE: Welcome to Unlikeable Female Characters, the podcast about women who don't give a damn if you like them. I'm Layne Fargo, and I'm here with Kristen Lepionka.

KRISTEN: Hello!

LAYNE: And today we are speaking with Juno Dawson, who is a bestselling novelist, screenwriter, and journalist. Her books include the global bestsellers This Book is Gay and Clean. She also writes for television, and has multiple shows in development, both in the UK and the U.S. An occasional actress and model, Juno appeared in HBO's I May Destroy You—which we fucking loved, we've talked about that on this show before. Her adult debut, Her Majesty's Royal Coven, is out May 31st. Welcome, Juno!

JUNO: Hello! Thank you for having me.

KRISTEN: We are so excited. This book is fire.

JUNO: Oh, thank you.

LAYNE: Oh my God.

JUNO: Thank you so much!

LAYNE: Yeah, we're fucking obsessed. We're going to fangirl pretty hard today, I think.

KRISTEN: Yeah.

JUNO: I'm ready. I'm ready.

LAYNE: Okay. I have to say, your publicist sent out the pitch for this, and I don't think I've ever responded to an email so fast. It was like, it's Spice Girls, but with witches. And I was like, I need to know nothing else. Like, that's it, I'm sold, I'm in.

KRISTEN: Give to me.

JUNO: Do you know what? People always think I'm kidding. It really was that, when I sat down to write this book, it was beginning of lockdown. I was having the worst writer's block, I never used to write from home. And my husband was just like, look, what do you want to write about? And I was like, Spice Girls, but they're witches. And he was like, well, then you should write Spice Girls but they're witches. And then here we are two years later, so.

LAYNE: The best books come out of that. Like, just writing what you want to write, and not what you think other people want you to write or what the market wants. So tell us about Her Majesty's Royal Coven.

JUNO: I will. So it is about five very powerful witches, who have been friends since they were children in the 90s. And they have now grown up, their lives have gone in very different directions, but they are about to be brought back together when a prophecy foresees the end of witchkind. And needless to say, these witches have very different ideological ideas about this prophecy, which involves a young transgender witch. And the division within the coven threatens not just their friendship, but also all of reality. Quite high stakes, you know?

LAYNE: Yeah, it's so epic and cinematic and… oh my God, I could not put it down. I was like, I wanted to savor it, but it was one of those books that you can't savor, you just have to keep flipping the pages so fast.

JUNO: Well, I think that was born out of lockdown as well. You know, we couldn't go to the cinema. We could stream stuff, but I wanted something to do during my days that felt cinematic. As big as Wonder Woman, or as big as an X-Men movie. And that was something I couldn't find in any of the books at that point. I'm a big fan of Leigh Bardugo and Samantha Shannon, and I wanted to really do something that was on as big a canvas as what they do.

LAYNE: You absolutely did, yeah.

JUNO: Thank you.

LAYNE: So let's talk about the women who are the main characters here, and the differences between them. I thought you did such a great job at capturing that tension of when you're friends with someone when you're a girl, and then you grow up and like, there's love there, but you are not compatible people anymore.

KRISTEN: Yes, you would not be friends if you met now.

JUNO: I'm not going to throw any of my friends under a bus… however. I mean, I'm in more than one WhatsApp group where you do wonder if we would be friends now. There is a line in the book where Neve says, "all we have is years." And that's not nothing, though.

With some of my friends, yeah, maybe we wouldn't make friends now, our lives have gone in very different directions, but we will always have those years. We have shared joy and shared trauma, and there is enough there that even nostalgia can keep you going so far. And that is something that I really wanted to explore with these women. You know, I think they're women first, and then witches second.

KRISTEN: And there's something really beautiful about the way that people who've known you forever, they know you in such a specific, deep way, and they can relate to you the way no one else can, they can make you laugh like no one else can. And that's something that I feel like we don't really see a ton of in fiction, and I love it.

JUNO: It goes deeper, I think, sometimes than friendship. It does feel like a kind of sisterhood. The word I use in the book is sororia, like a Latin phrase. And it does feel like that. And especially complicated by, you know, my oldest girlfriends knew me before my transition as well. So there's some real photos that can hold over me. They can blackmail me so effectively. So there's another reason to be nice to your oldest friends.

LAYNE: Yeah, that's true. They know everything. Like, too much sometimes.

I thought too, there's such a great, and so richly deserved, critique of white feminism in this book, especially through the character of Leoni. And, when she's talking about their friendship, she says the other women look at it through these rose-colored glasses, that they were like the Spice Girls, they were like a Taylor Swift girl squad, Sex in the City. It's all these very white references, obviously. And for her, it was... not that.

JUNO: Yeah. So that was a choice. Allegorically, I was exploring the coven as kind of a metaphor for feminism. And, you know, previously I've been a YA author, and I know those conversations about white authors including characters of color. But if the theme of Her Majesty's Royal Coven is who gets to be included and who gets to be excluded, and then if I was to exclude a Black viewpoint, I mean what would that say about inclusion and exclusion, and the role that white feminists have of considering the lived experience of women of color?

And that was why I thought, right, this book is in the third person. So I'm not trying to climb inside a person of color. But what I wanted to do is, I wanted to explore feminism. And so it was important to me that one-fifth of this coven was a woman of color, and more than that as well. So, obviously I'm white and Leoni is Black, but some of our life experience is very similar, in that actually we are the two working class characters, so—I stress, I'm not character, I'm a real human—but Leoni grew up on a council estate in Leeds, I grew up on a council estate in Bradford. You know, I was sent off to a grammar school, Leoni was sent off to the coven, where we didn't really fit. So there is some overlap, and I think that's a good place to start with characters who are from outside of your demographic. Actually look to the similarities before you consider the differences.

But yeah, it was really important to me to include Leoni, and she offers a very different perspective on the history of the coven as well. When Neve talks about the history of the coven, she starts with Anne Boleyn. When Leoni starts with the history of the coven, she goes way, way further back to the African diaspora, and the way that their magic system originated, like hundreds and hundreds of years before Anne Boleyn put on a crinoline. That was really important for me because the way I was taught history in the United Kingdom was white, and it was flawed, and it was wrong. And it pretended Britain had no role in the slave trade, when of course it very much did.

And so Leoni, she's a character, and I hope she sings, but she is also a way for myself as a white author to reflect on my whiteness. And I felt it would be really cowardly to not do that in this novel.

LAYNE: It's so interesting that you come from YA, cause we're always talking on this show—specifically in crime fiction, but I would say across genre—in YA, there's so much more intersectionality, representation, and adult has so much catching up to do.

KRISTEN: So much.

LAYNE: So much. So I'm really glad that authors like you are bringing that YA sensibility into adult, because adult readers really fucking need it.

JUNO: And especially genre as well. It's really interesting, cause obviously I'm a huge fan of Torrey Peters, who did Detransition, Baby. So there are examples. Very often the onus falls on somebody from within that demographic to do the heavy lifting. But I think whether it's crime fiction or science fiction or fantasy, I think now is the time to diversify the characters. Like, I see no excuse for not doing—Game of Thrones, I see no excuse, is what I'm saying.

KRISTEN: I just love that readers of young adult, like actual young adult readers, are going to eventually become adult readers who expect to see that kind of inclusivity and intersectionality in books. I can't wait for that to happen fast enough, because for them, that's what books are. And for the sort of stodgy adult market, there's this real disconnect. But when young adult readers eventually become readers of adult fiction, they're going to be like, what the fuck?

LAYNE: I mean, we're definitely coming from the crime fiction perspective. We're both thriller authors, and it's a lot of, like, white cishet couples in the suburbs, and like dad thrillers with only one white man can save the world, that kind of thing. So I know in literary fiction, there's more happening, but yeah. I totally agree, Kristen, I'm looking forward to that day, too.

Why don't we talk about Helena a little bit?

JUNO: Ah, Helena.

LAYNE: She is like the ultimate gaslight, gatekeep, girlboss character. That's what I kept thinking when I was reading about her. And it was interesting when we first meet her, she's like a boss bitch, right? So as a reader, especially a white woman reader, I think you're like, yeah, she's awesome, she's in charge, she's the head of the coven. And then as the book goes on, you're like, oh no. No, no, no, no, no, no, no, no.

JUNO: So Helena was by far the hardest character to write, but also I very much enjoyed her chapters. When I knew a Helena chapter was coming up, I got quite excited.

So I am a trans writer, and I live in the UK.

LAYNE: Yeah.

JUNO: It's been an interesting couple of years over here. And you know, I always say when I speak to Americans or Australians or Spanish or Italian people, that there is something uniquely transphobic about the UK at the moment. We were not called TERF Island for nothing.

And, you know, I have to live here, and during the pandemic, I was trapped here, I couldn't even leave. And of course that influenced my writing. I couldn't write any more journalism in which I had to explain why I wasn't a threat. Editors approach you in the litany of different ways, but they all want you to say the same thing. “Could you just come on and explain why you're not a rapist?” And I'm like, I'd really rather not. That doesn't sound fun.

And so I wanted to write my book, Spice Girls with witches. But also I was dealing with all this noise, and all this kind of stuff in the press. I remember even at the height of the pandemic, we were still getting daily, scary fearmongering headlines on the front of some of the papers, including some very liberal—like air quotes, “liberal”—publications as well.

And it just seems that, unlike maybe anywhere else in the world, there's kind of like a weird legitimacy to this fearmongering in the UK. You know, when you've got outlets like The Guardian saying trans rights cannot come at the cost of women's rights.

So, you know, it was a scary time. And so that did influence my thinking, and I did want to explore, where's this coming from? I didn't want to sympathize or empathize, because I don't think we should sympathize or empathize with prejudice, but I did want to see if I could understand.

And so I was like a little archaeologist. I got my little dusting brush out, and I was digging at these bones. And the big discovery that I made was, oh, it's just prejudice. Like all this time I was thinking, am I the problem? Is my existence causing a schism in womanhood or in feminism?

But then I thought, even if this fear is real, even if women like Helena are genuinely fearful of trans people, there is a word for an unfounded fear of a minority group—and it's bigotry! That's the word. So I was like, oh.

And so actually, some of those chapters from Helena, were difficult, really horrible, ugly things that she says, and the things she comes out with are despicable. But at the end of that novel, I got something out of that, which is: this isn't on you, it's on her. And the rest of the women in this book are like my friends. I came out ten years ago, and my mum, my sister, my publicist, my editor, my friends did nothing but support me through what was the most turbulent five years of my life.

But, you know, there are unfortunately also women like Helena, who seem to be scapegoating trans women for patriarchal trauma.

LAYNE: Yeah, that was interesting—I don't want to spoil anything, but Helena definitely has this mistrust of and fear of men, which I can relate to. But it's like, instead of focusing on men, she's attacking other women. And I thought you made the point really well, which is what I have been saying about She Who Shall Not Be Named, which is just like, all you have to do is say nothing and live your life. It doesn't affect you. Like, why are you continuing to push this?

And you made that point really well about Helena. Some of the other characters, like Neve at one point is like, all she had to do was leave Theo alone. Let Theo live her life. It's not harming her. That's it. And she just can't do that. She has to get involved, in a very epic way.

KRISTEN: Yes.

JUNO: Yeah. This book is about division between women. The word that I've been using a lot is coalition. I don't think all women need to be friends. It isn't a Taylor Swift girl squad. We don't always have to agree on everything. But I do think there is a conversation, an urgent conversation, to be had around coalition because women are under threat. Look at abortion, look at bathroom bills. You know, there is an obvious need for women to work together.

And just before we started recording this podcast, a story broke into the UK about a butch lesbian, who was barred from entering a toilet in Marks and Spencer's, which is a department store. So, you know, this transphobic rhetoric is already having a knock-on effect for gay cisgender women. That's what I'm hoping Her Majesty's Royal Coven does. I'm hoping it's a real argument for, not blind friendship between all women, but actually just coalition.

LAYNE: Let's talk about Theo, the transgender witch character, who for most of the book, she is only communicating—

JUNO: Telepathically.

LAYNE: Telepathically. I was curious why you made that choice.

JUNO: I mean, the telepathy is not the subtlest metaphor that I've ever written, which is what really—am I allowed to say boils my piss? What really boils my piss is that, so much, on both sides of the Atlantic, so much is written about trans youth. Nobody ever speaks to trans youth. So much chat about being silenced, but when do you ever see a young trans person on the news, on television, in the press, talking about, “this is why I want hormone blockers.” “This is why I've made the choices I've made.” It's all with these adults around them. We're always listening to someone else, we're listening to a politician or a sort of feminist expert academic. We never hear from the trans people themselves. And that's why Theo is silent, because I truly believe that trans youth have been silenced. It's not a subtle metaphor.

LAYNE: I mean, it works, though. Then it just makes—again, no spoilers—but when Theo is able to speak ultimately, in the way that she does, it's even more impactful.

JUNO: Yes. Thank you.

KRISTEN: So this book ends with quite a gasp. There are more books coming. Please tell me they are coming quickly.

LAYNE: Yeah, when's the next one out? I need it immediately. Did you write it yet? Hurry up.

JUNO: There are two more, and the second one is finished. I sent it to my editor at Penguin last week. The plan is that it will come out this time next year. So we're going to release them one a year. That's partly to do with the release schedule in the UK. So if Book One deals with division among women, Book Two looks at men and women. And I think about two men speak in HMRC.

LAYNE: I loved that. I love a book where the men are, like, these very sidelined characters.

JUNO: Yeah. I mean, bless Luke, Luke is very attractive to myself. But it's like in any film in the 80s, you know, there was a woman, and she was just there to be the girlfriend. Like I watched Predator for the first time a couple of weeks ago, and they literally just find a woman, and she kind of follows them, and then they send her away.

LAYNE: She had nothing better to do.

JUNO: Yeah. And she's not, like, a commander. She's just a woman, a forest woman. And so there's something quite deliberate about the fact that Luke is just there to be the love interest. Cause I think it's about time, actually, that men are serving this quite decorative role.

But in Book Two, men are much more present. Cause obviously there is the mysterious character of Dabney Hale, who is a warlock who is kind of a men's rights activist. He's a warlock rights activist. And Dabney Hale in Book Two takes on a much more significant role, as does Luke, the boyfriend.

And then Book Three, I haven't written yet. So who knows? I know where it's heading. The third one more looking at the role of women under patriarchy, when it all gets apocalyptic. But yeah, there's definitely going to be three books. And then after that, we shall see if there is a desperate hunger for more.

LAYNE: I would read like 50 books set in this world. I'm in.

I mean, the worldbuilding was so incredible too. A lot of it is related to a world that's familiar, but you just plunge us into the magic system and don't really overexplain it. I love that kind of worldbuilding in fantasy. It's like, just figure it out. You're here now.

JUNO: I mean, that goes back to, I grew up on Phillip Pullman's His Dark Materials books. I know Pullman has become a bit of a grumpy granddad, but those books, they blew my mind. I mean, I will never forget, I think I was about 16 when I read Golden Compass, and yeah, just mind blowing that, you know, page one, there's this girl called Lyra, and she has a daemon. And you're like, what? A little talking animal just follows her around?

And then you are either with it, or put the book away. You can either choose to accept that we all have a little talking daemon, or you need to go read Sweet Valley High or something. Something where nobody has a fantastical animal spirit. And I wanted the same thing with Her Majesty's Royal Coven. You know, from page one, you either accept these women are witches, or you're welcome to go find something else to read.

And there's such a lot of history to play with as well. There have been questions about, will we go back and spend some time in Anne Boleyn's court? Will we see that first ever coven? Will we see Queen Victoria's coven? So there are endless directions that you could go in. It's whether or not there is an appetite to explore the world further.

LAYNE: Yeah, I'm here for it. Like full cinematic universe, prequels, sequels, merch.

JUNO: The Juno-verse. Let's get into the Juno-verse, yeah.

LAYNE: Yes. I'd love to talk to you about the research that you did on witchcraft, and what your personal experience with that is. I always say I'm witchy, but I'm not super serious about it. I want to know more.

JUNO: I think I'm right there with you, would definitely score myself as witchy. And I think there is something about the feminine divine. When I come together in female-only groups, whether it's on my hen do—bachelorette party, for the American audience—or whether it's when I'm at Trans Pride or Brighton Pride, there is a certain kind of magic that comes from when women come together.

I can't really put my finger on it. I can't describe it. I'm not so arrogant as to think that I know the infinite mystery of the universe. I truly believe that we all need to respect and be more in awe of the natural world. Like last night in West Sussex, we had the most extraordinary thunderstorms. And so I kind of turned my pillow around and slept at the other end of the bed so I could see straight out of the window. And I just watched the lightning and I was like, how could you not feel dwarfed by this and not feel like we're part of something much more powerful and something that we're never going to fully understand?

My husband was just asleep. And I kept pointing, “Max, Max, look at the lightning!” And he's like, oh. And I was wide awake watching the storm. And so I think I don't want to sign up to anything organized, you know, that's the reason that I never got on board with Christianity either, which is, I didn't want somebody to tell me I was doing it wrong.

So I'm always kind of mindful of anyone who's telling me I'm doing witchcraft wrong. That's not what I'm doing with this novel. Yes, it suggests a magic system, but I'm not saying it's the magic system. Goodness me, I'm not trying to start a cult. There's enough of that on Instagram. Like, there is enough. There is the wellness-to-crazy pipeline. I'm not participating in that.

LAYNE: Yeah, for me witchcraft is—I was raised evangelical Christian, and I'm still dealing with that. And I went really hard for a few years, like I'm an atheist, I don't believe in anything, kind of nihilistic almost. And then it is through community with other women, like people I've met in creative circles, that I've gotten more involved in the witchy side of things.

And there is something really, like, healing and empowering about it. But I definitely don't have any particular rituals or practices. I don't know, I'm like somewhere between really believing it and being in it for the aesthetic, and I think that's okay.

JUNO: All about the vibes.

KRISTEN: Vibes, yes.

JUNO: It's all this shit, and it should be about the vibe. How are you feeling, yeah.

KRISTEN: Yeah, for sure. I was raised Catholic and went to Catholic school for 12 years, which definitely did a lot of damage that I'm still sorting out as well. But it's like, you know, you sort of grow up thinking, these things, these types of beliefs are evil and bad because everything gets sort of lumped together, like believing in the power of nature is the same thing as worshiping Satan. It's wild the way these generalizations get made. So it is very empowering to realize, oh, you can actually find what works for you, take it with you, and that's enough.

JUNO: Yeah, I fully, fully agree. I think that would be a nice way for a lot more people to think. That's putting it mildly, isn't it? But yeah.

LAYNE: A little less conflict in society. But speaking of empowering, we're getting towards the end of our time here, but I would be remiss if we did not ask you more about the Spice Girls. We gotta talk about the Spice Girls. Because that pitch was incredible, but then I thought it was just like, okay, they're a group of friends, but there are so many deep cut Spice Girls references in this book. It's delightful.

JUNO: For me, a lot of it made sense when—speaking of deep cuts—when Adele went on James Corden's Carpool Karaoke, and I will never forget what she said. She said, “there were these five working class girls who got out.” And Adele said, “I don't even know what it was that I wanted to get out of, but I knew I wanted to get out.” And I feel exactly the same.

When “Wannabe” dropped, I think I was 14, and I didn't know what a trans person was. I felt so sad that I wasn't going to grow into a woman like all my girlfriends were doing. And I knew I wanted to get out, I wanted to get out of Bingley, I wanted to get out of West Yorkshire. I wanted to make it in the way that they made it, in that, you know, they were briefly the most famous women in the world.

And if you weren't inside that bubble in 1996, you're not gonna understand it. My mum didn't understand it then. Like she would look at them and be like, “what, these? This is what you want to build your life around?” And then, you know, and I saw it again with One Direction, and I understood that. I understood that it wasn't for me, and that was okay, and that this wasn't my bubble, but because I'd had the Spice Girls, I completely understood the hysteria. In the same way that some people got really into BTS, or are really into YouTube celebrities, you know? And so fandom, you need to have been in one to understand one, I think.

And so, you know, I say very earnestly, yeah, the Spice Girls massively changed my life. And I feel very lucky that I'm at a position now where people calling the shots in film, television, and publishing were in that bubble as well. And so when you write a book like Her Majesty's Royal Coven, my editor, who is also in her late thirties, it's like, “Yes! This is what I was like!” And so now the good news is that decision-makers came from my bubble. We don't have to pretend like the Beatles anymore, it's fine. We'll just say we like the Spice Girls. It's okay.

LAYNE: Who's your favorite Spice Girl? Or can you not choose, because they're all so magnificent.

JUNO: Oh no, I absolutely can, it's Victoria. Without a second of hesitation. And that's because she was the outsider within the outsiders. My favorite meme ever is from the reunion at the 2012 Olympics where the other four are kind of like jumping around and climbing all over each other, and about five meters to their left is just Victoria standing. And I'm like, yes, hello, my childhood. Four meters away from anyone else, standing.

LAYNE: The resting bitch face. That's why I always liked her.

KRISTEN: Yeah.

LAYNE: I'm like, this is what I relate to. What about you, Kristen?

KRISTEN: Oh my gosh, can a person choose? That is the question.

I've just finished watching—well, not finished, but—the show The Circle is very Spice Girls-focused this season. And I absolutely love Mel B so much. It's very top of mindm because her personality is just so glorious on that show.

LAYNE: Like, her little dog that she dyes pink?

KRISTEN: Oh, yes. Her little dog.

LAYNE: That surprised me watching The Circle, because a lot of the contestants are pretty young, mid/early twenties. And I would have thought they wouldn't really even know who the Spice Girls were, but they were all really excited. I don't know, it surprised me. I thought that was kind of just our generation. I'm glad they're enduring.

KRISTEN: Yes. They changed the world.

JUNO: And you know, what blows my mind about the Spice Girls is they had 18 months that they did all this. In 18 months.

LAYNE: Wait, what really?

JUNO: So "Wannabe" landed in July '96. Geri left, I want to say, February '98?

LAYNE: Whoa!

JUNO: So Geri was active in that band for less than two years, you know? And then obviously when she left it fell apart. Well, it did. You need five for the Power of Spice, they said it themselves. I'm sorry. They said it, and it's true. And that's something that's true of this book as well, which is each witch brings something to the summoning circle. So yeah. Spice Girls forever.

LAYNE: Forever. Absolutely. Well, thank you so much for chatting with us today. If we could just end by you telling everyone where they can find you on the internet, if they want to know more about your book, and wait for the sequel with bated breath like the rest of us.

JUNO: So Her Majesty's Royal Coven comes out on the 31st of May—2022, cause obviously podcasts last forever. And I am @junodawson on Instagram and, for now, Twitter. Let's see what happens, shall we?

LAYNE: Elon Musk's Twitter. We may all have to leave.

JUNO: Well, that's when we're all leaving, right? We've all decided that's the step too far.

KRISTEN: Yeah.

LAYNE: Alright, thank you so much!

JUNO: Thank you for having me. Thank you!

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Layne welcomes Hannah Whitten for a chat about her new sisterhood-centric fantasy novel FOR THE THRONE, the power of being your own biggest fan, and how Adam Driver brings people together.

Shop Hannah’s books in the official Unlikeable Female Characters Bookshop (or here’s the B&N link if you want to get your hands on that sweet sweet special edition).

Episode Transcript

LAYNE: Welcome to Unlikeable Female Characters, the podcast about women who don't give a damn if you like them. I'm Layne Fargo, and today I have a guest that I've been wanting to have on the show literally since our very first episode, Hannah Whitten.

So Hannah has been writing to amuse herself since she could hold a pen, and sometime in high school figured out that what amused her might also amuse others. When she's not writing, she's reading, making music, or attempting to bake. She lives in an old farmhouse in Tennessee with her husband, children, two cats, a dog, and probably some ghosts. And if you don't follow Hannah on Instagram, what are you doing with your life? You can see her beautiful farmhouse there.

So her latest book For the Throne, which is the sequel to the New York Times bestselling For the Wolf, is out June 7th. And we are going to fangirl all about it today. Welcome, Hannah!

HANNAH: Yay! I’m so excited.

LAYNE: I'm so excited too. So we know each other from Pitch Wars 2017, way back in the day. We've been internet friends that whole time, but we have never spoken to each other until now.

HANNAH: That's so bizarre to me still. It didn't even occur to me until you mentioned it, because I feel like I keep up on internet friends with so many of my friends that I'm like, what do you mean, I've never actually seen this person in real life?

LAYNE: Yeah. Yeah, totally sure. Yeah. It feels like it, but no, this is the first time, so it's very exciting. But yeah, we go all the way back to—am I remembering this right? Our first like real interaction on Twitter, I forget who posted. One of us posted something about Adam Driver, Kylo Ren, and then the other one was like, oh my God, I love Adam Driver! And the rest is history.

HANNAH: I think it was one of those games that people used to play whenever they were applying for things like Pitch Wars. So it's like, post a GIF of the facecast for your main character or whatever. And I posted Adam Driver, and you were like, hello?

LAYNE: Adam Driver brings people together. That's what I'm saying.

HANNAH: He sure does.

LAYNE: Yeah. So you had a character in For the Wolf, and also For the Throne, who was somewhat inspired by Mr. Driver. And then the character of Rob in my Pitch Wars book Temper was inspired by him. And I just kept trying to put him in books. I don't know. He's very inspiring.

HANNAH: That is one way to phrase it, yes.

LAYNE: So inspiring. One of the highlights of my life so far was when I went to see him in Burn This, Rainbow Rowell was there sitting, like, a row ahead of me.

HANNAH: I would have combusted.

LAYNE: Yeah, it was a lot. I had a lot of feelings. But so at intermission I went up and fangirled at her, and then we ended up in the bathroom line talking about Adam Driver and how many characters in books he's inspired, and how he's basically our modern-day Heathcliff. It just seems like he's muddy and will throw you over his shoulder. That was really a highlight of my life.

HANNAH: There’s more than one. There's many people that are like, yeah, there's lots of Adam Driver photos on my Pinterest.

LAYNE: There's enough of him to go around. He's a very large man.

HANNAH: Did you see the Buzzfeed article—I think it was Buzzfeed—whenever Burn This was happening, that was just like critics talking about how overwhelmed they were by the size of Adam Driver? “I was so flustered by the size of his quads that I spilled my purse everywhere.”

LAYNE: Seriously. I saw that show, and I was in the third row, and he is so much larger even than you would think.

HANNAH: I mean, that’s just information I don't need to know. My peace is so fragile.

LAYNE: Okay. Okay. But we should talk about your book, not just Adam Driver for 40 minutes. So we've talked about For the Wolf many times on the show, I'm like always beating that drum. Love that book, one of my all time faves. And I've read like 10 different versions of it.

HANNAH: You have, wow.

LAYNE: And they're, like, all my faves.

HANNAH: I was thinking about that today. I was like, yeah. it's changed so much, the first time you read it to the final form.

LAYNE: The first time I read it, he turned into an actual wolf, right?

HANNAH: He was a werewolf at one point, yes.

LAYNE: But he's not now.

HANNAH: There's still people that are like, what the fuck? He's not even a werewolf?

LAYNE: You need to write that werewolf AU fanfiction of your own work.

HANNAH: I've already written the college AU, so.

LAYNE: I know.

HANNAH: That was so much fun. I want to do it again, but I can't think of the setting for Solmir and Neve. I don't feel like they would fit the college one.

LAYNE: I feel like a company where she's, like, his boss or something, or he's this guy brought in. So I don't know, like they're like thrown together, and they're both very dominant. That's a free idea. Feel free to take that.

HANNAH: Thank you.

LAYNE: Maybe a little James Spader Secretary thing, but Neve is James Spader.

HANNAH: Like the full spice AU.

LAYNE: Yeah. Yeah. This is why I told Kristen not to come to this interview because I'm like, Kristen, it's going to be unhinged fangirling for the entire time.

HANNAH: Yeah.

LAYNE: Yeah. Yeah. Okay, okay, okay, but tell us about your books, please.

HANNAH: Yes, I can do that. Okay.

For the Wolf is an adult romantic fantasy that follows Red, who is the Second Daughter of a cold, wintry kingdom on the border of the Wilderwood, which is this magic forest that is guarded over by the Wolf of the Wood. And also maybe some monsters, people don't really know. But anytime that a Second Daughter is born, she gets sent into the woods, never to be seen again. Nobody knows what happens to her, nobody really cares. It's mostly just to maintain the status quo and make sure everybody's cool. So Red has grown up resigned to this fate, but once she finally enters the Wood and meets Eammon, who is the Wolf, nothing is what she thought it was.

And For the Throne follows Neve, who is Red's twin sister. While Red was supposed to be a sacrifice, Neve was always raised to be the queen. Neve makes some extremely questionable decisions over the course of Wolf, attempting to get her sister back, attempting to exert some sort of control over her life. And Throne is essentially that meme where it's like, me sowing—fuck yeah! Me reaping—what the fuck??

LAYNE: Yes, she does make some choices. My perfect little control freak. I love her.

HANNAH: I've told people before that writing Red made me be like, huh, I think I have depression. And then writing Neve made me be like, huh, I think I have control issues.

LAYNE: Why do our books have to call us out like this? They teach us so much, and we don't want to know it.

HANNAH: Yeah, I could have done without that, actually. Thank you.

LAYNE: So since this is Unlikeable Female Characters, I definitely want to talk about the ways in which our girls are, uh... I mean, I love these characters, because they're messy, and they make bad choices, but they're still very relatable. Like we talk a lot on the show about how, even if someone's not quote unquote "likeable”—which is some patriarchal bullshit in the first place—they can still be relatable. And you do such a good job of setting up, like even when they're making these choices where you're like, no, sweetie, no! Like, you understand.

HANNAH: Something that I've always really gravitated toward whatever I'm reading, and writing is wanting every decision that someone makes, regardless of the space that they're filling in the plot—like whether it's your antagonist or your main character or a side character or whatever—like every decision that they make, I want to be something that you can understand how they got. So even if it is an objectively bad decision, you can trace how they came to make it. And just from the jump, both Red and Neve were very flawed characters, and I wanted that. I didn't want to write those characters, like, oh my flaw is that I'm just too pretty.

LAYNE: I'm clumsy, whoops.

HANNAH: Yeah, I wanted real deep flaws. I wanted to give myself the challenge of maybe writing people that might be hard to root for and seeing if I could make you do it. Which with me, I definitely kinda felt that pressure—and with Solmir too—of tangling yourself up in a knot and then having to see how you're going to undo it. It's both the plot of the book and the experience of writing it.

LAYNE: Yeah. So Solmir is a very bad, very sexy man.

HANNAH: Truly the worst. Just awful.

LAYNE: I got one of my friends, who's also obsessed with Adam Driver, hooked on For the Wolf. And I was telling her that the next book was about Neve and Solmir and, like, how hot Solmir was. And she was like, but he's evil. And I was like, have you met me? Come on, girl.

HANNAH: Yeah, he’s like—I feel like his evil is not so much a world-shattering evil and more like a very personal kind of evil.

LAYNE: Yeah. Just makes him hotter, honestly.

HANNAH: Like, selfish. And that I feel like is something that I wanted to give most of the main characters. Like I feel like of the—oh, we'll call Red and Eammon and Neve and Solmir main characters for purposes of discussion— but selfishness is a trait that all of them have. Eammon, not so much in Wolf, but you see it more in Throne. I wanted them to have that and be able to use it in a way that is not inherently bad, because caring for yourself and making that a top priority isn't a bad thing.

LAYNE: That seems like a good segue to talk about our religious trauma. Let's do it.

HANNAH: Oh boy.

LAYNE: So I was raised evangelical, as I know you were as well. And there are a lot of those themes in your books, about good versus evil and purity and all that stuff and how it's bullshit. So I love that. I love that.

HANNAH: Yeah. The spark of the original idea that became Wolf was about taking fairytales that do have a lot of emphasis on purity and messing with that. And I wanted to make it clear too—Wolf is very much more romance than Throne is like, they both have romance in them that are very central parts of the plot, but I would argue that Wolf's central plot is the romance, whereas that's not necessarily the case in Throne. But since I was writing a romance, I wanted to make it very clear that this was not like a first love situation. These people are adults that have had experiences, that have been with other people. And that's not, like, a weird thing to overcome, i's just expected because they're people.

LAYNE: I always loved that about Wolf, that Red is not this, like, blushing virgin. She's got some experience, including with her sister's betrothed.

HANNAH: Correct me if I'm wrong, I think that in the first version of Wolf that you read, Neve was in love with Arick at the beginning, and Red was still—they were still sleeping together. That was one of my biggest notes as far as unlikeableness goes. And I do think it was a good editorial note, because since it was literally thrown at you in the first couple of pages, like I totally understand how that can make her hard to root for, for some people.

But I was really glad whenever I was working with my agent in particular, she was like, I want Red and Arick to be together, but I feel like you are shooting the sisterly bond in the foot by starting out this way. So that was a very good editorial note, and I'm glad that I changed it. But definitely from the beginning, Red was not written to be likeable. Red was extremely traumatized, and she acted in a way that someone who was traumatized would.

LAYNE: Yeah, cause she's grown up knowing that she's going to be a sacrifice, like that's her purpose. Which would definitely give you a certain fuck everything, nothing matters vibe.

HANNAH: She lives her life, even though as the book goes on, she is given a second chance at having a life. That's not the way that she would operate were that not her reality. Like, she is someone who actually cares very deeply, but at the beginning of the book, she chooses not to let that part of herself be known, cause what's the point?

LAYNE: Yeah.

HANNAH: Whereas Neve cares very deeply about literally everything.

LAYNE: Yeah, too many things. You need care less, babe.

HANNAH: Everything she has ever been presented with, she has had big feelings about it.

LAYNE: What other notes have you gotten that were about their likeability or root-ability? I'm so curious.

HANNAH: I never necessarily got notes on Neve's likeability. More notes on how to, like I was saying before, make it more clear how exactly she got to where she is. There were some earlier drafts where—the way that the story came out and, obviously the way that the published books came out as the way that they're best and the way that I'm happiest with them. But earlier in the process, Neve's storyline in Wolf particularly was less about being manipulated and more about just being like, fuck it.

And again I think that was a good change to make where yes, she knows that she's being manipulated, but she is allowing it to happen because it furthers her own ends. So it was nice to be able to massage that storyline and get to a good middle ground of being able to keep that element of, she does not give a fuck, and also she is being fed wrong information on purpose.

LAYNE: I think that's something readers forget sometimes, because they have way more information than she does. Like they're getting Red's POV in the woods.

HANNAH: It's so funny. There's people who love that and people who hate that. Like watching The Office or something and you get secondhand embarrassment? Watching people do just the wrong thing. And some people love that, and some people cannot stand it, and both are valid. And I feel like you can have both of those reactions and still enjoy the book.

LAYNE: Yeah. I just see, female characters in particular, they get judged for not being fucking clairvoyant and knowing everything. It's like, she doesn't know! You're reading both these POVs, but people would be like, oh, why did she do that? And it's cause she didn't fucking know.

HANNAH: And even if she did know, she has dug herself so deep into what she believes is right, and what she thinks should be the way that things are, that nothing—and you see it later in the book, nothing Red tells her is going to make her think that she's wrong. She has gone so far in legitimizing everything in her own brain that she's able to turn aside anything that Red tells her about how she might be wrong. So that was a big thing to interrogate and overcome in Throne, is Neve realizing her own inability to ever accept when she is wrong, both about Red and about other stuff.

LAYNE: What if she's always right? No.

HANNAH: What if she’s never actually done anything wrong in her life?

LAYNE: What if she's never done anything wrong in her life, that's what I'm saying. I love her.

Let's talk a little bit about your publishing journey, which I know has been winding, cause I've been around for most of it.

HANNAH: Yeah. Okay, so, I drafted Wolf in late 2016. And at the time I knew nothing about publishing at all, and I wrote it as New Adult, was the intention of the original draft.

LAYNE: Just like still not a thing, unfortunately.

HANNAH: Still not a thing. That was right around the time that all of the ACOTAR books had been reissued as New Adult. So I was like, oh, okay, that's the level of readership that I'm going for, somewhere in between that upper YA and adult space.

So I wrote it as New Adult, and once I figured out how publishing worked and started looking to query, I was given the advice that, hey, New Adult's not actually going to be a thing, you should age this down to YA. So I was like, okay.

So I did, but I never felt like the book fit there very easily. It was always a struggle to shave it down into the parameters of YA. But that's what I queried with, that's what I got into Pitch Wars with. So I queried and signed with my agent as YA. We edited it, and we went on a sub round as YA. And we had a bunch of really close calls. I failed four acquisitions. And all of the feedback that we got from them was that it did not fit in the YA market because it was either too complex, it was too long, the characters read too old. So I was like, oh yeah, that tracks.

So my agent and I talked, and I was like, hey, I actually originally wrote this as New Adult. How would you feel about me just going fully adult? Because now that crossover fantasy is getting to be more of a thing, we see more of these books that are meant to hit in that space that New Adult was supposed to, but they're being published as adult. So I edited it, which ended up adding back in a lot of original stuff that I had cut and giving myself more space. And once we did that and subbed it as adult, it sold in like a month.

LAYNE: To an amazing editor.

HANNAH: Brit Hvide at Orbit, who also edits N.K. Jemisin.

LAYNE: No big deal.

HANNAH: I still fangirl over that, and have a hard time believing it. I try not to think about it too much, especially whenever I'm turning in drafts, because I'm like, what if N.K. Jemisin right before I did? Going from that to reading—that’s terrifying.

LAYNE: Yeah, that would be intimidating. Oh my God.

But yeah, I've been watching this whole time, since Pitch Wars and I just—

HANNAH: Yeah, hearing me whine.

LAYNE: No! I, look—I loved this book so much in the beginning. Like I read the—I think the werewolf draft, I read it on a plane. I was like on a business trip for my old job, and I was flying from Chicago to San Francisco, and I read the whole thing on the plane. And then I'm like waiting for the shuttle at the airport, just like screaming at you in Twitter DMS, like embarrassing.

HANNAH: Oh, I remember that!

LAYNE: But I've loved every version that I read of it, honestly. It's been really cool to see the development of it. And I remember being in your DMs too, being like what if it was adult? And you were like, I'm thinking about it.

HANNAH: It's been one of those things that was literally always in the back of my mind, because even whenever we were categorizing it as YA, like whenever I was querying and stuff, it was like, okay, but after this, I think I want to do adult fantasy. So that's always kind of been the end goal. It worked out really, really cool that that's where I ended up. And it’s where I intend to stay.

LAYNE: Yes. Yes. I did want to talk also about your kind of like branding and marketing as an author, because I'm constantly in awe of your online presence. I know you hate Twitter right now, as we all do. And once it becomes Elon Musk’s Twitter, we’re all gonna fuck off into the sun. But you have so much joy and confidence in your world and your characters, like from way back.

HANNAH: Thank you.

LAYNE: Way back when we were in Pitch Wars and all through this, the way that you talked about your work online, it was just so clear that you were your own biggest fan. And so by the time your book came—

HANNAH: That’s probably still true!

LAYNE: Yeah! But I think that's incredible. Cause by the time your book came out, it was like you had this built-in fanbase and you hit the—you were an instant New York Times bestseller. People were so excited about it, and so invested in it, myself included.

And I think it's really hard, for women especially, but just like artists in general to talk about their work with that much confidence and joy and just fucking enjoy it. So like, how do you do it? Tell me.

HANNAH: Well, it's funny, because I feel like I'm trying to relearn that now. You get the peek behind the curtain, and it's so weird whenever you're on a publishing schedule too. If you're doing a book a year, which is what I'm doing right now. Right now, I am promoting Throne, editing The Foxglove King, and drafting book two in the Nightshade Crown trilogy. So my focus is very scattered.

Before, whenever I was querying and editing Wolf, it was my focus. I lived and breathed those characters, especially because I had no idea how writing a book worked. So it took me forever to revise, and I was doing it so intensely that it just took up all my brain space. So it just felt very natural that's what I talked about online. Especially since the entire reason that I joined Twitter is because whenever I Googled, how does publishing work? It was like, you should join Twitter.

LAYNE: How does publishing work? Twitter.

HANNAH: Yeah, unfortunately. So I am trying to learn how to recapture that joy. And I think that being your own biggest fan is pretty essential to being able to survive.

LAYNE: Yeah.

HANNAH: If you're lucky, you get a really good agent as an advocate, and you have people within your publishing house that are advocating for your work and who hopefully love it just as much as you do. But at the end of the day, you're the one who's sitting down to work, and you're the one who's owning the product that you put out. So you have to really believe in it.

And part of believing in it is being willing to learn and to change it. And not being precious about not wanting to edit things, cause you know if you're trying to serve the story, sometimes serving the story means you throw out 10,000 words, even if they have really clever turns of phrase that you want to use. I reuse stuff all the time, cause I had to throw it out in the other drafts.

But yeah, I think using social media and online branding in a way that is joyful for you is the key, and not forcing yourself to do stuff that you don't enjoy. So like, I enjoy being unhinged online. Making Canva graphics. Those are fun things for me. So I continue to do those things. Meanwhile, if I had to get on TikTok, I would take a long walk off a short pier. That's not going to be fun, so I don't try to do it.

LAYNE: Yeah, I keep hearing more and more about how we're all supposed to be on TikTok, and I'm like, I quit. I'm going to be 40 in a few years. I can't do this. I can't do it.

HANNAH: I do like to do reels for Instagram, but even that I'm like… this is too much.

LAYNE: It's a lot. It's a lot. Yeah. But you have such a strong aesthetic. It just seems like you live your brand, like your cute farmhouse with all your like kind of witchy, like woodsy decor. And I don't know, I just love your aesthetic.

HANNAH: I think, too, that so many people are trying to create an aesthetic that is not actually something that you enjoy and something that you live, for lack of a better term. It's always gonna feel like work. And it's usually not going to come across as authentic. Just lean into the stuff that you like, regardless of whether it seems like that's what's trendy or whatever. I feel like that's good advice, both for branding and for your own writing. Don't force yourself to write something that you personally are not enjoying, because if there is no joy in it, people can tell.

LAYNE: Yeah, I've been struggling with that over the past few years. My Pitch Wars book, I got an agent right away, and it sold really fast. And then the book came out, and it just didn't hit. Like, there were a few people who liked it, but it didn't sell very well. And I loved that book.

HANNAH: That is so bizarre to me because I still think about Temper all the time.

LAYNE: Oh, thank you. I think it just—I don't know, I didn't really know how to market it.

HANNAH: It's just like luck and timing and stuff that is completely out of anyone’s control.

LAYNE: Yeah. But that was really weird for me, cause it was something that I did love and believe in so much. And then my second book, They Never Learn, there are things I love about that book, but I was fucking miserable the whole time I was writing it, and it came out and my publisher didn't market it at all. But I've had the opposite experience, where people online really got ahold of it and it’s been like a good word of mouth success. And it was really confusing to me for a long time. I was just like, okay, so, this book that I loved with all my heart flopped, and then this book that I was ambivalent about and didn't think was as good, people love. So what does that mean?

I'm finally getting back into a place where I'm really joyful about what I'm working on. But I had a lot of false starts because, if I was enjoying something too much, I was almost like, oh this means it's going to flop. Like, I have to be miserable. And then, you know, the fucking pandemic and all that shit.

HANNAH: The world falling into flames.

LAYNE: It’s no big deal. No big deal. Yeah.

HANNAH: It doesn't help anybody. I have been really lucky, in that I had a similar experience with Wolf where I really believed in that book. There were so many places in my publishing journey where it made sense to give up on it, but I never could make myself do that.

And I think that some of it is because of the place that I was at whenever I drafted it. I was drafting Wolf right after I had my first kid and was really deep in postpartum depression and anxiety and OCD, like just a delightful cocktail of mental illness and, you know, sleep deprivation also. So I quite literally needed something to distract my brain long enough to keep myself alive. And Wolf was that thing for me. It provided an outlet for me to both have some fun and an escape. But also through the process of writing it and revising, it made me realize that I needed help. So I went to therapy and I got medicated and now I'm good. I still struggle with those things, but not nearly to the point where I did.

And I think because, like Wolf itself, the story and the characters had become such a talismanic thing for me, I had a very difficult time letting go of it, when all advice would have told me that's what I should be doing. And I got really lucky in that when it was published, people really latched onto it, in ways that me or my publisher were not expecting. It was a shock for everybody, I think how much people really took to it.

But publishing is one of those things, like the pendulum can swing at any point. So I get nervous sometimes about putting that much of myself into something else that I'm working on because it's like, okay, what if this is the thing that flops?

LAYNE: I have to say as someone who's known you, even though this is the first time we're speaking, but who's known you for many years now, I wasn't surprised at all when it came out. That was what I expected to happen. Because it's so impressive how, even though you changed the category, you changed a lot of plot elements, that emotional authenticity and the core of those characters stayed the same through all of these different drafts. And that's what people are responding to, I think.

HANNAH: Yeah. Yeah. And I try to just write that way generally. And so that's what I'm clinging to is, okay, if I can stick the emotional landing on all these other things, like all the other balls that I have in here, then it'll find the people who it needs to.

LAYNE: Yeah. Do you want to tell us a little bit about what's next for you? I know you've mentioned you're writing a trilogy. Very exciting.

HANNAH: So my next project is the Nightshade Crown trilogy, which starts next March. Which is earlier than I thought it was going to be. I just found out like last week, cause I was thinking it was gonna be summer because Wolf and Throne have both been June. But no, this one's March!

The Foxglove King is the first book. It's a completely different world from the Wilderwood books. It is about a girl named Lore, who is a poison runner in this bustling, opulent harbor city that has, like, very Versailles vibes. And she can channel the magic of death, which is something that she has kept hidden because that is illegal.

But she gets caught, by accidentally raising a horse from the dead. And she thinks okay, this is it. And she gets taken to the castle, but the king is like, hey, listen, I actually need you to work for me, because there's an empire that is about to invade, there's something mysterious that is killing all these villages that they can't figure out what it is. So they want her to like, raise these bodies and ask them what is going on. But nothing is as it seems, there are plots afoot. And there's a love triangle.

LAYNE: Yes. Okay. Which problematic boy will I be obsessed with in this book?

HANNAH: They're all so problematic and just very calibrated to my taste. So I feel like you'll have a very hard time.

LAYNE: Oh, no!

HANNAH: There's Gabe, who is a monk. He's a celibate monk with one eye, who was a duke, but his father basically gave their duchy over to the emperor of this encroaching empire. And so he was like cast out after that, because in the religious system of the Nightshade Crown, it's very much like the sons bearing the sins of the father kind of thing.

So now he's a monk. He's one of the Presque Mort, who are this cadre of monks that can channel death magic. They're the only people that are allowed to do it. But because he is technically a duke, he becomes Lore's guardian within the court. Like he has to escort her to stuff.

LAYNE: Oh, no.

HANNAH: They tell everybody that she is his cousin, but people are like, I don't think he is her cousin.

LAYNE: The vibes are too strong.

HANNAH: The vibes are too strong. But there's an only one apartment situation. Not only one bed, there's two beds, but they have to live in like the same suite of apartments. So there's that.

And then there's also Bastian, who is the prince, who is our suspect that Lore has been brought into the Citadel to stay close to him, watch him, because they think that he is feeding information to the empire. And he is just a bisexual menace, he is the worst.

LAYNE: I love him already. I think he’s going to be my boyfriend.

HANNAH: He is so much fun. I love writing him so much. He's very funny, very dry. He's here for a good time, not a long time.

I've had the most fun writing this book, cause like thematically, it's probably darker than the Wilderwood books, dealing with some really heavy stuff like heavy theology in this one. We're talking a lot about evangelicalism in this book. We're going all in. But also I have had more room to be, like, funny. And have more bantery characters and stuff, even as this super heavy stuff is going on around them. And it's very different, cause there's a huge cast of characters. But I think it's going to be good. And I think if you like the Wilderwood books, you'll like this one.

LAYNE: I'm very excited, and I'm excited that it's coming out sooner. Though that's two books in one calendar year. That's intense. I'm sorry.

HANNAH: I am hoping to be able to move into doing two books a year soonish, because Wilderwood just earned out.

LAYNE: Congrats! That's amazing.

HANNAH: So hopefully I can write full time very soon. And once I do that, I have a whole Google Doc of ideas that I'm just going to throw at my agent and be like, here's all the things that I would like to write.

LAYNE: I'm very here for it. Okay. So could you tell everyone where to find you on the Internet if they want to look at all your beautiful aesthetic photos?

HANNAH: I am @hwhittenwrites on both Instagram and Twitter.

LAYNE: But mostly Instagram.

HANNAH: But mostly Instagram, like I'm around on Twitter, but I'm trying not to be.

LAYNE: Same. It just keeps pulling me back in. Ugh.

HANNAH: I feel like I just need something else that I can mindlessly scroll.

LAYNE: Yeah.

HANNAH: And I’ve been trying to train my brain to go to Pinterest to do that instead of Twitter.

LAYNE: It doesn't make you filled with rage and anxiety at least.

HANNAH: Yeah. It doesn't make me feel like what's it all about, is there any point?

LAYNE: Yeah, that's good. That's good. That's like the least we ask of our social media.

HANNAH: I would look at pretty kitchens instead, please.

LAYNE: Thank you so much, Hannah. It's so great to finally speak to you.

HANNAH: Yes, it’s so exciting!

LAYNE: And by the time this airs, For the Throne will be out. There is an amazing special edition from Barnes & Noble, if you want extra features, and I know that you do. There's like a short story, and—what else is in that one?

HANNAH: There's a short story, there's an interview, and there's interior art, like on the inside flaps.

LAYNE: Okay. So yeah, go get that from Barnes & Noble, or you can buy the regular version. Or just buy both. Like, just fucking buy both! That’s fine.

All right, thank you so much.

HANNAH: Thank you!

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Badass author (and actual ninja) Tori Eldridge returns to the show to discuss her new globe-trotting, century-spanning dark fantasy novel DANCE AMONG THE FLAMES, writing fiction that doesn’t give a damn about genre, and why power-hungry female characters can be so empowering.

DANCE AMONG THE FLAMES is out now, so pick up your copy (or any of Tori’s previous books) in the official Unlikeable Female Characters Bookshop.

Episode Transcript

LAYNE: Welcome to Unlikeable Female Characters, the podcast featuring feminist thriller writers in conversation about women who don't give a damn if you like them. I'm Layne Fargo, and I'm here with Kristen Lepionka.

KRISTEN: Hello!

LAYNE: And we are also joined today by Tori Eldridge, who I believe is our first two-time guest on the show, I want to say that's true? She was on a few years ago talking about her Lily Wong books, which include The Ninja Daughter, The Ninja's Blade, and The Ninja Betrayed. She is the national bestselling author, and Anthony, Lefty, and Macavity award finalist author of those books. And now her new one, Dance Among the Flames, is coming out on May 24th. So welcome, Tori. Welcome back!

TORI: Hey Layne, Kristen, thanks for having me. I feel so special.

LAYNE: We're excited to talk to you again. And we were trying to remember, we think just Wendy interviewed you last time, but what is time and who can remember anything?

TORI: All I know is I love Wendy.

LAYNE: We do too, and we're trying to get her to come back. She's super busy and important, but we're harassing her daily. I still text her all the time, and she's one of my favorite people in the world. She's awesome. Wendy, if you're listening to this: we miss you, bitch.

KRISTEN: Get back here.

TORI: And you owe me a hike. Just saying.

LAYNE: Yeah.

TORI: Throwing it out there, honey.

LAYNE: Oh, that's right. You guys go hiking in LA, don't you, with the rattlesnakes and the heat. She likes to send me pictures of the rattlesnake crossing signs to horrify me since I'm terrified of snakes.

Okay, so Dance Among the Flames is very different from your previous books, very much a departure in terms of genre. So could you tell us a little about what it's about and how you came up with the idea? It's really fascinating, especially in comparison to your first books, which are a little more, like, anchored in the real world, and this is like a dark fantasy? Would we say that?

TORI: Oh, yeah. Dark fantasy, literary, horror, throw it all in there. Dance Among the Flames is about a desperate mother who rises from the slums of Bahia, Brazil, to become a fearsome wielder of Quimbanda magic. And this story takes place over 40 years, three continents, a past incident in 1560 France. There's passion, betrayal, horror, Brazilian gods, sex, dark. It's got all of that going on. I have to warn my Lily Wong readers. So whenever I talk to one of them, I always make sure to insert the word "dark" at least twice.

LAYNE: That's smart. Yeah. Cause this is just completely different. It's always fascinating to me, authors who can have that span in terms of genre and subject and tone and everything. Like a lot of authors, myself included, I just stick to one thing, at least so far. And it's amazing that you can do such different books.

TORI: I appreciate that. I think the running theme over everything I tend to write, is there's always going to be this extraordinary female protagonist going on. And Serafina Olegario is most definitely extraordinary. And I like to look at feminism and empowerment from all different angles, sometimes from the light, sometimes from the dark. So that's something that's in there. And of course I do tend to dive into culture, whether it's my own or one that has captivated my fascination.

KRISTEN: I love the absolute sweeping span of this book. As you said in the beginning, it opens with that 16th century France element. What inspired you to write something so sweeping?

TORI: Oh, goodness. It all came from a screenplay that I was writing that was set in Brazil. And the first run of this screenplay didn't work. And so I had to dive into my research for Brazil and find out what really was intriguing me. And that's when I discovered the spiritualism, this amalgamation of African Yoruba and Brazilian traditions and Portuguese Catholicism. And all of that just opened a rabbit hole for me. And I don't even know where my crazy imagination went, but I just saw these three main characters tied over centuries. And this culmination in this exciting story in more contemporary Brazil, and I guess that's where it came from.

LAYNE: I assume you had to—had to? Got to—travel, to Brazil and do research. This is the thing, I keep setting my books in like Chicago or Pennsylvania, and I know Kristen, a lot of yours are set in Ohio. Why do we do this to ourselves? Why are we not setting our books in like Paris or like Italy? You have the right idea, Tori.

TORI: I don't know. Because it's expensive to get there?

LAYNE: But it's tax deductible. It's research.

TORI: Yeah. I had a great opportunity when I was coming up with this, like I said, back in those days. This story has been haunting me for over two decades. I am so relieved to get it out in the world. But when I was first researching this, my insider connection, in addition to all my crazy research, which back then took place in libraries with actual books and newspaper clippings.

LAYNE: Wow.

TORI: Yeah. Yeah. Old school. But my insider track was my son's preschool teacher, who was from Rio de Janeiro. That's where she was born and raised. And so I always was hitting her up with questions and interviews and all this stuff. And one day I called her on the phone. I had a question, don't remember what it was. And she was like, oh, I'm so sorry, but I have to get on a plane. I'm going home to Rio. Oh, you should come!

So keep in mind. I had a son who was like four, another son who was one. I hadn't been on a plane in years. In 10 days, I got a passport, a visa, left the kids with the poor hubby, hopped on a plane, and zipped down to Brazil. For four days. I made it just at the end of her trip. But it was so amazing because I got to stay with her and her aunt in their little apartment, in this sketchy area. And I got to hang around with her and her family and her parents. And I just had this whole insider local view of Rio de Janeiro, as well as them taking me around to show me the touristing sites. So it was nice to be able to see both aspects of that so that I could write the different characters that were in my story.

LAYNE: Yeah, that's true. Cause you have characters who grew up there, and then you have another character who's American who comes in, and is experiencing it through that outsider view. And you have people of all different social classes within Brazilian culture. It's a really interesting mix of characters.

But let's talk first about Serafina, who I loved. She is... problematic. I was reading this book and I was just like, oh yes, this is the unlikeable female character here.

TORI: Hey, hey, hey. Some people like her. You like her in the beginning. It's just an interesting tipping point. It's like, when do you start to have your doubts? I don't know.

LAYNE: Never! No, she's someone who is power hungry in a way that like—wanting any measure of power is considered unlikeable by most people. And she starts out trying to explore this power and not really understanding it. And then yeah, at a certain point, she's just like, I want more, I want all the power. I want to break powerful men and enjoy it, which I'm like, yes, queen.

TORI: Yeah, she is unforgivingly sexual.

LAYNE: Let's talk about that. So her power comes from—it's like sex magic, We interviewed Sara Gran a few months ago about her new book, which is all about sex magic. So fascinating, because it's something women in America, especially in the conservative Christian culture or whatever, we're taught that sex is something to protect ourselves from, or something that's done to us that we have to tolerate for the sake of what men want and the idea of women taking pleasure in sex, but also gaining power from it, or exerting power over someone else with it is so fascinating to read about. And fun.

KRISTEN: Yes. And I like that we're seeing maybe a mini trend of books about this.

LAYNE: All the sex magic books! Let's do it.

KRISTEN: Yeah. Maybe this will become a sex magic podcast, who knows.

TORI: That's so funny. I've never thought of this as a sex magic book, but that's so interesting because Quimbanda is the dark side of the Umbanda religion, or they call it Candomblé over in Bahia, but they call it Umbanda in Rio de Janeiro state. And Quimbanda, it's wound up in there, but it's also become its own religion. And it's very much a dark magic possession kind of thing. Yeah. Sex magic. Interesting.

LAYNE: It's like her specific expression of it is sex magic, right? There are some very memorable scenes between her and a certain Brazilian god that I will not spoil for the readers.

TORI: There were quite a few really memorable scenes.

LAYNE: Yes, yes.

TORI: Maybe scenes you can reread. I'm just saying. Maybe with a glass of wine or a shot of cachaça.

LAYNE: I could just feel you reveling in and, like, having fun writing this very dark, very power hungry, very shameless character. Did it feel empowering for you? Cause I know sometimes when I write characters who are quote unquote "unlikeable," it lets you do things that you wouldn't do in real life. It's fun.

TORI: It was glorious. And I got to say, my husband really liked it when I was writing certain scenes in this book. Not so much other scenes. It's really interesting. I have a tendency of taking on the characteristics, emotions, moods, personalities of characters that I write. So as you can imagine, all the different times in the last couple of decades when I was working on one rendition of this book or another, you can imagine how it might have influenced me, shall we say? And there were just some times where my husband was like, oh boy, I know who you're writing about today. And then other times where he's like, I know who you're writing about today.

So that was interesting. But yes, she is very empowering. No matter what she's doing, there's just an assertiveness and a core about her that is just extraordinary. And it's exhilarating. It's exhilarating to get into Serafina's head.

LAYNE: My partner should be grateful that I didn't get quite that into writing my last empowering female character, since she's a serial killer who kills men. That might've been bad for him., He would've been like, I know who you're writing today, and then I stab him in the face. I don't know.

TORI: I know who you're writing about, and I'm going on a trip.

LAYNE: Leaving. That would be smart of him, yeah.

KRISTEN: Yes. Did you always know that you wanted to write across genres like this?

TORI: I don't know. I don't think I really thought about genre. Honestly, when I started writing—and again, I started in screenplays. And this story, Dance Among the Flames, is inspired by a screenplay that was a semi-finalist for the Academy Nicholl Fellowship. And it just happened to be the first thing that was out of my head. And it is in and of itself a blend of genre, and kind of defies genre. I remember somebody doing coverage of it for a big studio, and they gave it all the stars, but they said we couldn't find coverage for this because we just don't know what it's like.

And so I think that kind of set the tone where I was like, genre schmenre, you know, just write what you want. So then I started writing other screenplays that were very different, that were rooted here in real earth, real world, and dealing with parents and all sorts of things, and adapting other people's novels.

So the first actual novel that I wrote was back then, and it was an early precursor to Dance Among the Flames. I put all that aside because I wanted to raise my kids, and I had just gotten addicted to the martial arts, and I didn't come back to it for like 13 years. But in the course of that, I wrote a short story that inspired the Lily Wong series. And all of a sudden I have this other thing in my head. And then from there I started getting invited to do other short stories, and each one was different, you know? I had one with this Balinese witch doctor, another one that was just dystopian, sci-fi, futuristic thing. And I was like, oh my gosh.

So when I wrote the Lily Wong series I knew I was writing a mystery thriller. I didn't really realize there was this thing called crime fiction, but I had already felt I was an author who just wrote in a wide variety of genre, because that's just what I was doing.

And so I think I just always embraced that and just knew that at the heart of it, me as a writer, there was always going to be these strong female protagonists. There were always going to be probably, cultural or family elements in there, vivid sense of place. But as far as genre, whatever I want to write, that's what I want to write.

LAYNE: Genre is a marketing thing. Where do we put it on the shelf at the bookstore, how do we tag it in the metadata on Amazon or whatever, but I do think, and I would include myself in this, a lot of authors can get super hung up on what genre is this before the thing even exists. And it can become really limiting to people's creativity, as opposed to just being like, I'm going to write what I want to write, and we'll see what it is when it's done and whatever, like, labels people want to slap on it to sell it, that's a separate issue. So I love that attitude. I want to embody this moving forward.

KRISTEN: What was it like getting this published, compared to the more easy to categorize Lily Wong books?

TORI: I got to say, it's a big book. Can you imagine coming out with Dance Among the Flames as your debut novel?

KRISTEN: I can see how that could be a challenge.

TORI: It is a big, expansive book, and it was a huge thing to take on. And the reason it sat with me for so many years is because there were so many ways in which to tell the story. From this point of view, from that point of view, chronologically, in flashbacks, in dueling timelines, in convergence. There were so many ways to do it, and I tried them all. So it was an interesting thing. The submission process for this was a real learning experience for me, because this project became the project on which I learned my craft. And in doing so, I also learned the business, and I made tremendous friends, editors and agents and authors who were incredibly generous with their feedback and their encouragement and their assistance.

So at different points in time, I had both Lily and a particular version of this story out in submission at the same time, and it was like, leaving it up to the gods. I'll go in whatever direction hits first. And so Lily Wong hits first, and I branded myself as this kind of ninja Hapa thriller writer, and came out in gangbusters with that.

And so as it came time for this, and I found the right publisher for it, then I just started opening up, you know, that brand to accommodate it. But I ended up with Running Wild Press because they actually specialize in books that don't fit neatly in a box. That's what they publish. And I went, oh my gosh, you are perfect for me. And this book.

LAYNE: That's really cool. I wasn't familiar with them. Now I want to look up other books they've done. That intersection of genre is so interesting to me.

KRISTEN: Yeah, I think really interesting storytelling can take place when you shuffle out of that, this is the genre, this is what you have to do, here is the convention. You can really get to some very good stuff.

LAYNE: But it's like, you need to know the rules to break them. And you know the rules, you've been working on this for a long time, and you've published in the crime fiction sphere and everything. It would be difficult to debut with this, I can see that, but where you are in your career now, and—Tori, I feel like your brand is just, you're a bad-ass. That's your brand. When I think of you, that's what I think.

TORI: I love that. I totally embrace that. Yeah. When I was writing this, structure-wise I just thought in terms of suspense, you know, or a thriller. The last quarter of it is as action packed thriller as anything that I've ever written. But it also has that deep literary and almost historical fiction quality about it that I really enjoyed diving into.

So it was blending that. Maintaining suspense right from the beginning and keeping that, all the way through. And of course, there's a very strong horror element about it, especially towards the end. But yeah, it's a tricky thing to name, cause you could say magical realism, you could say horror, you could say dark fantasy, you could say suspense. If you think in terms of the ending, you could almost think literary thriller. It's a blend. It's dark. It's dark fiction.

LAYNE: It is dark. And it had a lot of fairytale elements too. The relationship and conflict between Serafina and her granddaughter, Adriana, is a very like—and this is a compliment, but it's like a very Disney princess and evil stepmother, evil queen vibe, right? Like where there's this conflict between these two women who don't even really know each other. How did you think of their relationship when you were writing it? Cause it's like this conflict where they're not actually in contact with each other very much.

TORI: I love looking into family dynamics. Lily Wong's family is, of course, much healthier than Serafina's family. But with this book, I really wanted to examine the potential of love to corrupt. And how corruption can change love. So both of those two things, that was something that I really wanted to look at.

And Serafina's relationship with her son, with her granddaughter, it takes us down a path, and you're watching her perception change in the course of the book. That's something that I really wanted to explore was this changing a perception, not just with the characters, but for the readers. I want readers to be reading and change their opinion about a character constantly. And question, you know, their feelings about their change of perception and maybe how long it took them to change or why it took them to change or why it didn't change. I think these questions are really fascinating to me, and what I really wanted to look at.

We're looking at big themes in this book with colorism, and bigotry, and classism, and abuse.q Domestic, psychological and physical abuse. All these things are wrapped in their entrapment. What it is to enslave people and this corruption of love. There's a lot to bite off. So yeah, I enjoyed looking at her family and her perception of her family.

LAYNE: It made me think a lot too, about just in general, how if you're a part of an oppressive system—which, there's all sorts of overlapping marginalizations happening here, as you said—then sometimes people will just blame someone that they can have power over.

So like Serafina, a lot of the stuff that's happened in her life, or happened to her, it's not Adriana's fault, but she can blame Adriana and go after her and narrow it down to that because she can't take on all of these other systems of class and colorism and all of that stuff. Kind of a commentary on, under the patriarchy specifically, how women will tend to blame other women for things, instead of blaming who we should actually blame, which is the men and the systems.

TORI: Oh, I don't know. She blames a lot of men.

LAYNE: She does blame a lot of men. I do not want to downplay that, she blames so many men and she makes them suffer, and I applaud her.

TORI: You applaud her! That is hilarious. But it is true. Who we blame or what we blame as people changes based on our circumstance in life and what is safe for us to blame, and what is not safe, and perhaps what we have enough power over to take action and what we can't take action on. It's an interesting thing. I love these gray areas of the human condition. I live for that. That's where I like to write.

LAYNE: There's so much moral ambiguity in this, and it really comes out in the way that you write about all these different religious traditions as well and how they're all overlapping, and they all kind of have different ideas of what good and evil mean, but commonalities too. I'm not a religious person, but I always find all that stuff fascinating, how people from all these different traditions, like Catholicism, whatever, they're like, I know what's right and wrong, I have the answer. But then they have so many similarities with these other religions they're calling evil. It's a whole mess. That's why we fight all these wars.

TORI: I have that same fascination. I became just enthralled with the Umbanda religion, which is quite benevolent, and this ability for the mediums to channel God so that the congregation, the believers, can communicate directly with the spirits who can help them instead of having things translated, right? Through a priest, or what have you. And I thought it was very empowering, some of the messages and the lessons, and especially the way Serafina is introduced to Umbanda, I found to be just really benevolent and empowering.

KRISTEN: How did you learn so much about this religion?

TORI: Goodness. Libraries, libraries. So early on, that's where it was, you know, taking out books and hiding out in research rooms. And I wasn't able to talk to my friend about this, because like most Brazilians, she was raised Catholic. Which I thought was a very interesting thing, because so many of the traditions, especially New Year's Eve, are tied into this spiritualism, this Brazilian spiritualism, the Umbanda religions. And people follow it almost like superstitions. But when it comes down to it, that's not the box they check. It's like, what religion are you? Oh, Catholic. I go to church, I do the mass, I do all this kind of stuff. And so that was really interesting. Now, when I went back to this after my hiatus to get the fifth degree black belt in the ninja arts.

LAYNE: That little thing.

TORI: And raise my kids. But when I went back to this, then I was able to really dive even more deeply because I had the Internet. Ooh, such power.

LAYNE: That is the ultimate power. I can't even, I don't know. Kristen and I are both of the generation where we like, remember having to go to the library and looking at things on microfilm, but now it feels so far away.

KRISTEN: Cause now not only do you have access to every piece of information you could possibly want, but you can just basically ask the Internet a question and probably someone else has already asked that question.

TORI: Isn't that amazing? You just start typing a question in a search engine, and bam. Now you can walk the streets of a particular neighborhood, through Google Maps. I couldn't have done that. And that was huge for me, being able to walk, quote, "walk" through the Pelourinho in Bahia, that was so important for me.

LAYNE: I just use that when I don't want to leave my house in Chicago. I look up the Google street view of things that are like a mile away from me. I've definitely done that.

KRISTEN: I use street view to look at a place that I'm going so I can figure out if I like the looks of it or so I can figure out where the door is. It has really taken over

TORI: Yeah, it really has. It really has. Yeah. And so you can see what the building looks like from the front, so you don't just walk by it. Absolutely.

KRISTEN: I wanted to ask about writing in the horror genre. I know that we talked about how genre is just a marketing label and really, what you're doing is telling the stories that really interest you, which I think is amazing, but I feel like we're seeing a lot of books that are coming out that are overlapping between thriller and horror lately. We've got Cina Pelayo's Children of Chicago, Zoje Stage's books do that too. What do you think is the similarity between them that allows this overlap, but in what ways are they also different?

TORI: Yeah, horror and thriller, we really go hand in hand. I'm a long-time member of ITW and Horror Writers Association, and there are many of us who belong to both of these associations for that very reason.

The difference between a thriller and a mystery, is that a thriller you're in jeopardy, right? And, you know, a mystery, the protagonist is hunting down the clues, solving the crime, whatever, solving the mystery. But for it to be a thriller, there has to be jeopardy. There has to be danger. There has to be threat. So at the core of horror is dread and fear and danger and threat.

So all of those things exist. Some horror expands into the paranormal, the supernatural, monsters, cosmic, it could get into body horror, but not all horror does. Some horror could be domestic, contemporary fiction, could be a family-oriented, could be serial killer-oriented. It doesn't have to be fantastical. But there always is a sense of dread, where you're constantly keeping the reader connected with that fear. And that's one of the things that makes horror so amazing as a genre is that we can safely look into those dark places and connect with what it is that scares us and vicariously win over it. It's a very powerful genre.

LAYNE: It's so fascinating to me how this moment in time, as we're dealing with the pandemic and all these awful things happening in the world, there seems to be this resurgence of horror. And what I keep hearing from my agent and editors and other people is like, readers want horror. And then they want, like, light fluffy romance and nothing in between. And I am in that mood too. It's like I watched Yellowjackets, and it stressed me the fuck out, but I loved it. And then I've just been reading all of these fluffy romance novels that feel like a warm hug. And I don't know what that's about, but-

TORI: That is so funny. I didn't think about that. I tend to read as widely as I write, so I'm constantly switching up the kinds of books that I read. And even during the pandemic, I didn't find myself gravitating toward one or the other. It was just mixing it up and whatever presented itself, or perhaps friends were coming out with something really great that I just had to read.

KRISTEN: It's interesting what the pandemic situation has done to our consumption habits of media and pop culture and art. I've been on a kick of just watching disturbing documentaries, and it's like, why do I want to be more disturbed right now? I don't know.

TORI: That's so funny. It's an interesting thing. Sometimes watching or consuming disturbing media or literature has the opposite effect. Where we feel a little safer and a little better, a little more positive about where we're at in our own lives, in comparison. So it's a funny thing. It can go both directions. Or it can just depress you.

LAYNE: Yeah, I've been over here watching Is It Cake? On Netflix. And I'm like, is it cake?? I have to know. That's enough stress.

Tori, this was so great, such a great conversation. If you could tell us what you're working on now, or what's next for you, and then also where people can find you on the internet?

TORI: Absolutely. True to form, I just came out with a short story, "Missing on Kauai" in the Crime Hits Home anthology, which is the 2022 mystery writers of America anthology. And that short story inspired a novel that is diving into my own native Hawaiian roots. Yeah, so here I am, I'm on tour for this wild Brazilian, epic dark fiction.

And I'm writing about this Pahukula Ohana in Kauai, and diving into my native Hawaiian roots, and, bringing that Kanaka Maoli perception into mystery/thriller contemporary fiction, because a lot of the native Hawaiian authors have written amazing books in historical fiction or mythology, or, fantasy, things like that. But the mystery/thrillers that are set in Hawaii tend to be not necessarily written by native Hawaiians. So this is something that I wanted to bring, and I wanted to explore. So that's what I'm working on right now.

And you can find me at torieldridge.com. It's so great because there don't appear to be famous Tori Eldridges in the world. Spell my name correctly on Google, boy, you find me everywhere. And I love posting on Instagram, writer.tori. I'm also on Facebook and Twitter, Tori Eldridge. And I love putting out monthly newsletters. And I usually have these giveaways of amazing books by author friends, and people can subscribe on my website. And if you go to the upcoming events, you'll find all sorts of things going on for the book tour for Dance Among the Flames.

LAYNE: Thank you so much. And you're the famous Tori Eldridge. You're pushing everyone else down the rankings. It's you.

KRISTEN: Good luck to any other Tori Eldridges who might be out there. You're it. You're the one.

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This very special episode is an Unlikeable Female Characters first: a sneak peak at soon-to-be-premiered musical! Layne welcomes playwright and composer Hannah Gregory for a chat about her original folk musical based on WUTHERING HEIGHTS, classic unlikeable female character Cathy Earnshaw, and the perils of white feminism past and present.

If you’re in the Cincinnati area, you can buy tickets to WUTHERING: A MUSICAL ON THE MOORS here; the rest of us will have to content ourselves with the amazing demo tracks on Hannah’s Bandcamp.

Episode Transcript

LAYNE: Hello, and welcome to Unlikeable Female Characters, the podcast featuring feminist thriller writers in conversation about women who don't give a damn if you like them. I'm Layne Fargo., and usually we talk to novelists on the show, but we've got something a little bit different for you today.

I am here with Hannah Gregory, who is a playwright, songwriter, and actor based in Cincinnati, Ohio, whose work focuses on magical realism, women's issues and the theme of choice. Hannah has seen multiple premieres of her work at the Cincinnati Fringe Festival, and her latest musical Wuthering: A Musical on the Moors, which is based on Wuthering Heights, will be debuting as part of the 2022 primary lineup at the Fringe Festival. So welcome to the podcast, Hannah!

HANNAH: Thank you so much. I'm so excited to be here.

LAYNE: Really excited to talk to you because I'm obsessed with Wuthering Heights, to an unhealthy degree, and I'm actually working on a Wuthering Heights adaptation of my own right now.

HANNAH: Thank God.

LAYNE: I feel like there need to be so many. I feel like you could just set it in, like, any time, in any place. Could you just tell us a little bit about this musical and like how it came to be?

HANNAH: Yeah, totally. So I'm late to the game, as far as the Wuthering Heights party goes. I didn't read this book until 2020 when I was, like, in the throes of isolation. And this is a great book to read if you're in isolation, by the way. I feel like the environment of 1790s Yorkshire, England, like really captures that kind of smothered feeling of not being close to anyone and having to rely on the people that are within like a two-mile range from you.

But anyway, I read it, and I read it a few times since then, as one would, when they're adapting a piece. And I always get something different out of it a little bit every time, but I was struck so much by Emily Brontë's fearless leap into oppression regarding women's roles, and oppression regarding class and status. And the really upsetting thing was that all these issues are still so prevalent today. And so that, mixed with this electrical undercurrent of how isolation just like amps up your emotional intensity, I felt like this is a timely piece. And I feel like I've seen so many renditions of Wuthering Heights come about in the last couple of years. So I feel like it's a global theme. I think a lot of people are picking up on that.

LAYNE: Yeah, we're all in the mood for it, cause it's like isolation and also just really intense, messy emotions that you don't know what to do with. And I was reading your bio, and you say your work focuses on women's issues and the theme of choice—we're recording this on May 3rd, which is quite a day to be talking about women's issues and the theme of choice. I've just been like raging all morning. I don't know about you.

HANNAH: Yeah. It's just, every day is just am I going to start screaming? Am I going to stop screaming today?

LAYNE: Yeah. I always say, I think that we need to get together and have like, you know, in the movie Midsommar, if you’ve seen that, where all the women get in a circle and just scream in unison. We've needed that for a really long time. And if not, we're just going to have to start murdering people. That's where I'm at.

HANNAH: We need the catharsis one way or the other.

LAYNE: Yeah. It's like it's screaming or stabbing. That's your choice at this point.

HANNAH: Yeah. Yeah.

LAYNE: So your musical, it sounds like it focuses on the character of Cathy more so—like the original Cathy. Cause if people are familiar with Wuthering Heights, there's Catherine, and then her daughter, who's also named Catherine and like everyone has the same name and it's super confusing.

HANNAH: Yeah, so the Cincinnati Fringe Festival requires that shows be 60 minutes or less. And I was like, we can't cover two complete generations in that amount of time. So like most of the adaptions of the piece, it focuses on the original Heathcliff and Cathy and their relationship.

LAYNE: She's a very—talk about an unlikeable female character. Like she's a very controversial character. I read this book for the first time, I think I was assigned it in high school English, but I'd maybe already read it. I have a memory of rereading it and all of my classmates are like, I hate this. They're so annoying. She's so mean. And I was like, shut up. You don't understand this at all, but she is a very polarizing character. So what is your interpretation of Cathy?

HANNAH: Yeah, I feel like on different days I feel so many different ways about Cathy, because I feel like she really sits on this fulcrum of like where white feminism sits. Where she's like very cognizant of her options as a woman and she wants to reject those. And so I feel like her relationship with Heathcliff is really a way for her to reject those typical gender norms and even the class norms.

But in the same vein, she has this opportunity to really say, fuck you to the system that she's grown up in. And ultimately she doesn't do that. And ultimately she's a very passive character. I don't think she makes an active choice, pretty much the whole book. And I think that is also very typical of white feminism too, where they're just like, oh, I'm going to buck the status quo until it doesn't work for me. And so I think I can see varying sides of the coin with Cathy and why she makes the choices that she does, or the lack of choices that she makes. And it's frustrating.

LAYNE: In the time that she's living in, she did have somewhat limited choices, but also she has a lifestyle that she's accustomed to, and she doesn't want to give that up. She wants to have more and have a better life and ultimately chooses—if she does choose. She does just let men choose her in a way that's really frustrating. But she chooses ultimately to marry the man who can provide her financial security, which is understandable, but it's also like how much of a rebel are you really? If you're not willing to give up this lifestyle that you have.

What's your take on the relationship between Cathy and Heathcliff? Do you think it's really a romance? Do you think it's toxic? I mean, it's obviously a little toxic.

HANNAH: Oh, man. I, again, I think there are just like so many complexities to their relationship. It's totally toxic. I think there's an element of, they're both using each other in a way. I think that probably when they're young, it's a little bit more innocent and a little bit more pure. Like they just purely enjoy each other's company. And then of course, when they grow up - and when I say grow up, they're like 20 years old.

LAYNE: I know, that's the thing I always want to remind people of, too. They're all pretty young still. They're not, like, forty-five and making these decisions.

HANNAH: So young. But part of me does wonder, especially when Edgar's engagement comes around, at that point, like how much does Cathy really love Heathcliff because of the nature of their relationship, and how much does she love Heathcliff because it's an act of rebellion? I think about that quite often.

And I also feel the same way about Edgar. I don't think her love for Edgar is pure at all. As you can read in the scene with Nellie, where she's like, yeah, but you love him, right? And she's like, well, he's really rich. And she's like, yeah, but do you love him? And she's like, well, he's also really handsome. And she's like, yeah, okay. But do you love him? And she's like, I, um, I don't. I don't. So I honestly, I don't to this day, think I really know what Cathy wants. I think Cathy wants both worlds and I think she can't have them both and one doesn't outweigh the other. And she obviously is very indecisive. It's tragic really.

LAYNE: Yeah. And both of these men have a really strong opinion about who she should be or who she is. They project a lot onto her. Like I think there are some interpretations of the story where it's, Heathcliff knows the real, like pure Cathy. And I don't think that's true either. He has her on this pedestal in his own mind. It's just really different than what Edgar thinks of her, so.

HANNAH: Yeah, I agree.

LAYNE: They're both limiting her in that way. And she's trying to figure out who she is, but caught between these two men, and never really does. I re-read the book recently to work on my adaptation. And when she starts to get sick and die, it's like, she's just really upset. And she's like, guess I'll die now. And I'm like, wow, you used to be able to do that. That's awesome.

HANNAH: Yeah. I love how dramatic she is. That when she just like, has any heightened emotion, she'll just faint. It's great.

LAYNE: We've really lost that as a culture. But she is—and I think Emily Brontë was too—like a very outspoken, unruly woman who had a lot of wants and desires in a time when women really weren't supposed to. And we still aren't, which is—it is frustrating how relevant it still is. I wish it wasn't.

HANNAH: And I feel bad for Emily Brontë, because I have read a couple of different versions and there's always an intro in there that talks about how Charlotte was like, oh, I don't really think this is what Emily meant to put out. And I'm like, no, don't be saying that. And I think Charlotte said that about Anne too. I'm like, Charlotte, what are you doing? Throwing your sisters under the bus like this.

LAYNE: I know.

HANNAH: I know! Just let them say what they're going to say. It's so important. And Tenant of Wildfell Hall too, I don't know if you've read that. I just finished that. Oh, man. It's basically about a woman who leaves an abusive husband, and people were all up in arms about it. And Charlotte again, came in and was like, I don't think this is what Anne meant to say. And I was like, I bet it was, so back off.

LAYNE: She was being a tool of the patriarchy for real.

HANNAH: Disappointing. Disappointing.

LAYNE: Very disappointing. I've seen a lot of discussion online, like on Twitter, like, you're either a Wuthering Heights person or a Jane Eyre person. And I definitely identify as a Wuthering Heights person and always have, but do you like Jane Eyre also?

HANNAH: I do like Jane Eyre. I definitely would say Wuthering all the way, though. I tried to read it a couple of times and just couldn't get into it, but then once you get into it, you're like, oh my God.

LAYNE: The drama.

HANNAH: I remember flipping through the pages and like gasping every few pages because I just couldn't believe the antics that were happening, and I love high drama.

LAYNE: I have a theater background too. So it's like theater people, I think like Wuthering Heights, cause it's very dramatic. And also with Jane Eyre, Rochester is a piece of shit, but he wants us to believe that he's a hero. Like he's presented a little bit more like he's heroic, but he's a liar. Heathcliff is more straightforward. He's a jerk, but he's more straightforward about it. And I can respect that.

HANNAH: Yeah. Heathcliff is like, I know that I'm doing bad things. It is what it is. Yeah, I killed your dog, whatever.

LAYNE: I have to, like, ignore the puppy murder. That's the one thing for me. When they put that in the adaptations, I'm like, okay yeah, now I have to deal with this.

HANNAH: Yeah. That's like the first thing I think about anytime someone talks to me about Wuthering Heights.

LAYNE: That's fair. That's probably good. I'm like in denial about it. I don't know. In my adaptation, I'm making sure no one has a dog. Like we won't mention any dogs cause people will immediately assume.

HANNAH: I know. Yeah. Goodreads will get you for that.

LAYNE: I know. I've had people tell me if you have a dog in the book, you should have a disclaimer, like the dog will be fine or whatever. And I write really dark crime thrillers where a lot of people die, but like the dog can't. Absolutely not.

HANNAH: No. No dogs, no babies.

LAYNE: So what is your favorite adaptation of Wuthering Heights? Film, theater?

HANNAH: I watched a couple. There was one that—oh man, the director's name is escaping me right now, but the girl from Skins played Cathy.

LAYNE: Oh, Andrea Arnold's version, yeah.

HANNAH: Yes, Andrea Arnold's. I thought that was the closest to what I had envisioned it being, except there's not a lot of dialogue. And I feel like in the book, Nelly—for those of you who are not familiar with Wuthering Heights, is our intrepid narrator and Cathy's nurse/maid later on in the novel—is always describing Cathy as like really bright and really sprightly and like really chatty and charming. And Andrea Arnold leaned into, like, the sparse nature of the moors in that one. So I felt like environmentally, she nailed it. But as far as the dialogue went, I was not a big fan.

You know, a theater called Wise Children has a touring production going on in the UK right now. And I have only seen clips of it. I haven't seen the whole thing because it's touring in the UK. And it's like a rock musical, and they use a lot of windows as symbolism, so like what you're seeing and what's the complete picture of what you're seeing through a lens of some sort. And so I can't speak to that all the way because I haven't seen it, but that's the one that I have been really mesmerized by.

And then the Royal Exchange Theater did a production of it a few years ago, too. They're also based in the UK, and I bought the script of that and read it and I was like, wow, I really wish that I would've gotten to see this because the language is so beautiful. And it really hits all the themes of Wuthering Heights without overtly lifting lines from the book, which I find pretty boring. If I wanted to do that, I would just read the book.

LAYNE: Those sound amazing. I've only seen film versions of it. And I've been trying to watch all of them, including some really bad ones. Like have you seen the MTV one from the early 2000s?

HANNAH: No, I read about it though. And I was like, oh man, I bet this is so good.

LAYNE: I wanted it to be like, so bad it was good, but it was really bad. But I feel like if you're a Wuthering Heights fan, it's worth watching. But I made my poor partner watch it with me. He was like, what is this? Heathcliff is a musician in that one too, and his songs are so bad, but then he becomes super famous.

Oh, but the best part of that one is Katherine Heigl from Grey's Anatomy is Isabella. And she like understands the assignment. She is in it. Everyone else is really bad, and she's like, I am going to treat this like an Oscar is waiting for me at the end of it. Like she is dedicated.

HANNAH: I love that so much. Yeah, I've watched clips from the Tom Hardy one, and I was like, I can't do this because, I just know Tom Hardy now and watching him in whatever year that was, I was like, this is too much. I can't do it. And then I started the Ralph Fiennes one and I was like, this is terrible, and they don't understand Wuthering Heights at all, and I cannot finish it.

LAYNE: Interesting. That one was always my favorite growing up, but I saw it—I was like 13 or 14. So what about that one do you think is like not understanding the source material? I'm so curious.

HANNAH: Oh, it's just so romantic, and I'm like, this is not a romance. You have misunderstood. The only thing I remember that I thought they nailed was the lapwing sequence when he was like, I just killed these lapwings cause you weren't around. Yeah. Okay.

LAYNE: Yeah, I think I just liked that one as a teenager, because he was all, like, dreamy, which is problematic.

HANNAH: Yeah. They're just like frolicking around, making out and I'm like, come on. I need some more substance here. I'm sure, like when I was 15, I would have been right there with you. Yeah. This is it. This is it.

LAYNE: Ralph Fiennes in the early 90s was real pretty. But the Andrea Arnold one is yeah, visually stunning, but I know everyone is very tortured with their obsessions in Wuthering Heights, but I feel like it should be like a little bit more fun than that? A little bit? Cause it's so dramatic.

HANNAH: Agreed.

LAYNE: I recently saw for the first time the Timothy Dalton one from the 70s. Have you seen that?

HANNAH: I haven’t, no.

LAYNE: It is like a full soap opera. I actually really loved it. Cause I like a Wuthering Heights adaptation that is like campy and messy and over the top. Cause I think that's another way to interpret it. Like they're just all so dramatic. And Timothy Dalton played Heathcliff like he knew that he was really hot and he was going to weaponize it and make it everyone's problem. It was incredible.

HANNAH: I'm going to have to check it out.

LAYNE: It's like a farce in some points. Like, I'm not arguing for its accuracy, but it's very enjoyable.

HANNAH: And sometimes that's all you need.

LAYNE: But that's what's so great about these classics is you can interpret them all different ways and see different sides of the text. And that's why we love them.

Okay. So this show is going up when, in June?

HANNAH: Yeah, June 4th is our first opening night.

LAYNE: And where are you in the rehearsal process? How's it going?

HANNAH: We just started on Sunday, which is pretty late for us. So I work with a director who, this is our third Fringe production that we're partnering together on. So I'll write, and then she directs. And typically we start about six to eight weeks in advance rehearsing, and then usually I'll have worked on a project for about a year before anyone else gets involved. So we're kind of getting a late start on things.

But we did a read-through with the cast, and a scene-through with the cast, and it's an extremely collaborative process. I feel like with Fringe, it just has to be that way by its nature, because the script is always changing, and your actors are bringing this to life and if something doesn't feel right, like coming out of their mouths, no one looks good.

So that has been very exciting. And then I've been working with our music arranger Cary since October. Seven months at this point. So I'll just like bang out chords on the piano, because I'm not great at music theory, but I have a basic knowledge what's happening. So I'll play chords underneath it, and then I'll sing it, and then I'll send it along, and he fills in really beautiful piano arrangement. And we have a viola that's going underneath it, and piano that's going underneath it, and the guitar. Yeah. I'm really excited.

LAYNE: That sounds amazing. I wish I could come see it. I'm like, how do I get to Ohio? My co-host Kristen's in Ohio, but in Columbus, but I'm like, go see it. I think she's a Jane Eyre person, though. I think she is. I'd have to ask her, but that's my vibe on her is that she is a Jane Eyre person. I've started to categorize people now, when I meet them. I just think you can tell.

Okay. So we are gonna play a demo of one of the songs at the very end of the episode, so stick around for that for sure. But Hannah, if you could tell us where people can find you on the internet, if they want updates on your work and also how to get tickets for the show, if they are in fact in the Cincinnati area.

HANNAH: Absolutely. If you want to come check us out in person, please visit cincyfringe.com/wuthering. And that'll take you to our ticketing platform. If you want to follow along for the rehearsal process and the development process, you can find me on Facebook or Instagram @hmgwritesthings.

LAYNE: Thank you so much for joining us.

HANNAH: Thanks so much.

LAYNE: And everyone do not turn off your podcast, stay on and listen to the song. It's called "Let Me In," and it's the opening of the show.

View Details

Our own Wendy Heard returns to the show for a chat about her latest YA thriller DEAD END GIRLS, how to fake your own death for fun and profit, and what’s on her personal gay agenda.

Grab your copy of DEAD END GIRLS (or any of Wendy’s other books) in the official Unlikeable Female Characters Bookshop.

Episode Transcript

LAYNE: Hello, and welcome to Unlikeable Female Characters, the podcast featuring feminist thriller writers in conversation about women who don't give a damn if you like them. My guest today is someone you may remember. Hello, Wendy Heard!

WENDY: Hello! I'm back. Mwahahaha.

LAYNE: Kristen cannot join us today, because Kristen is—she's either there or on her way to this, like, luxurious shipping container Airbnb in Amish country with like no Internet. It sounds magnificent, honestly.

WENDY: What is she doing? Is she finishing a book, like drafting?

LAYNE: No, she went with her partner. It's vacation. She's on vacation. Can you believe?

WENDY: I didn't know that we were allowed to do that. I thought we just took, like, vacations, but they were actually work trips.

LAYNE: That's what I thought as well. But now that I know. Yeah, she told me it's three levels, and there's windows, so you can see the wildlife, but you don't have to actually, like, touch or interact with the wildlife. And there's no Internet. Bliss, pure bliss.

WENDY: But you're with someone—like, it would be blissful if you were alone.

LAYNE: You're the only person on the planet, and there's just you and the squirrels. Okay. I see what you’re saying.

WENDY: Pretty much. I'm just saying.

LAYNE: Okay. That's a good point.

WENDY: But you bring your family with you, that defeats the whole purpose.

LAYNE: It depends on your family, but okay.

WENDY: Here's the thing, I have a kid. So it's a little bit of a different—yeah.

LAYNE: Yeah, that's true. That's true. Kristen and I didn't make that mistake. We’re so glad to have you here, though, to talk about your new YA book Dead End Girls, which comes out on May 10th, right? Is that correct?

WENDY: May 10th.

LAYNE: All right. Tell us about Dead End Girls. What is this about?

WENDY: So Dead End Girls is my most unlikeable main character yet, a teenaged girl named Maude who is two years into a really over-the-top detailed plan to fake her own death. She's got, like, the whole thing organized. She's one of those Type A spreadsheets bitches who has applied her mind to faking her own death, to get revenge on her just horrible family. Her mom has married into this awful Orange County, real estate development company family. And so she's got this awful step-family, awful parents, and she just wants out.com. So she is ready to fake her own death by faking a boating accident on a family trip that she has to take with her step-family in Hawaii, and her step-cousin who she like barely knows, she's met her like four times, discovers or plan and demands to be brought along with.

So Maude has to decide whether to bring an unwilling partner, or to go ahead and cancel her plan. So she decides to bring Frankie, who's her same age, and they go on this kind of Thelma and Louise, Bonnie and Clyde vault into freedom and the unknown. But of course it ends up that accidental deaths, and maybe less accidental deaths, people start dropping, and suddenly the whole plan starts going very wrong, and they start falling in love along the way.

LAYNE: I was going to say: and it's gay, the most important part.

WENDY: Of course.

LAYNE: Please know that when I told my partner that I was interviewing you for the podcast about your new book, I just told him the title, and he was like, is it gay? That was like the only thing he asked me. Of course it's gay.

WENDY: Of course it is. My most monumental achievement with this book is that the Kirkus review—for those of you who are listening, who aren't authors, we get these trade reviews where it's like, librarians think this about your book, booksellers think that. You're holding your breath, waiting to see if the critics are going to like it or hate it. And this one review company is called Kirkus Reviews. They're mean.

LAYNE: They’re so mean.

WENDY: They're mean, and—but they've been nice to me. I don't know what I did. And then the review of my book, the highlight part that goes at the top that everyone sees, so like bold, says “be gay, do crime.”

LAYNE: Amazing.

WENDY: I was like, did I—Kirkus is like, like your mean grandma, or like a mean old librarian, like that's the vibe. So that I got Kirkus Reviews to say be gay, do crime, that's a huge accomplishment.

LAYNE: Who did you finger bang at Kirkus to get them to do that?

WENDY: I can't say. I cannot—you know I can't reveal that.

LAYNE: I'm sorry. I just had to ask. So this book—it was funny cause we were talking about you coming on the show, and we scheduled this, and then I was like, oh, I should read the book.

WENDY: Should probably read it.

LAYNE: I was your critique partner this whole time while you were working on it. So we talked about these characters, and we talked about every little plot twist in this, and I was there through the whole thing. And it was like I forgot I hadn't actually read the book.

WENDY: Yeah. Cause you basically had, in little tiny pieces.

LAYNE: Yeah, but it was still just incredible and gripping to read, even though I knew kind of everything that was going to happen. I love these characters and, you know I love Maude the most, my little baby criminal mastermind.

WENDY: Of course, you have to love her. She's mean, and so detailed.

LAYNE: The best. I look back at my high school days, and I'm like, I really fucked up. I could've done a lot more with my obsessive qualities and my intelligence. Instead I was just like in the marching band and had crushes on gay guys or whatever.

WENDY: Yikes.

LAYNE: What was I doing with my time? I could have been planning my own fake death.

WENDY: You could've.

LAYNE: I could’ve pulled off heists. I don't know, like I had these capabilities, too

WENDY: You do.

LAYNE: But I squandered them.

WENDY: There's this one thing that Maude says at the very beginning, when she's talking to her mom in the kitchen, that I thought of you when I was writing it, where her mom says something mean to her, just like a little side comment, and then Maude looks at her and she's like, “your tattoos are showing.” And it's like this trashy cherry tattoo that her mom has had since she was young and poor. And she's getting it removed with the lasers, but it hasn't come off yet. Do you remember that?

LAYNE: Yes. In fact, that was the moment in the book where I was just like, I fucking love her.

WENDY: I thought about you when I was writing that. I was like, I think Layne would like this one.

LAYNE: I did. Thank you. It was like you wrote her just to please me.

WENDY: Cause her mom's like, why don't you have a smoothie? And she was like, I will eat your children's chicken nuggets, and also: fuck your tramp stamp.

LAYNE: Yes. Yes. We had a lot of conversations about like, why is she running? I'm like, what's so bad about her family? And you did such a great job of showing how awful they were. By the time I met all of them, I was like, yeah, fuck this. Get out.

WENDY: That's what I was thinking. Like my editor kept asking me, does Maude have a good enough reason to leave? And I'm like, once you meet the family, you'll understand.

LAYNE: Yeah. Plus teenage girls, teenagers in general, are not like the most thoughtful decision-makers necessarily. Everything seems very dramatic back then. That's part of the fun.

WENDY: Exactly. I mean, that's the whole thing is—I would have done this, and my mom was pretty nice.

LAYNE: I might've considered this, if my parents hadn't gotten divorced. Like, if I still had to talk to my dad, this would have been very appealing to me, I think. So is this how you would have done it when you were a teenager? Would this have been your plan or did you have a different plan? I know you had a plan.

WENDY: Of course. Here's the thing. And I don't really talk about this very much—I don't know why I reveal things on this podcast, like this is a secret because now it's going on the fricking Internet. But like, when I was a teenager, I had a fake ID, and I got this fake ID in LA in not in exactly the way Maude gets her fake ID, but in the process of getting this fake ID, it sparked some imagination around—wow. Cause there's different types of ones you can get. And this is a long time ago, so things have changed a lot, but it's kind of like, what are you going to use this fake ID for? Are you going to just use it to buy alcohol? In that case, it doesn't need to be supported by like DMV records and a birth certificate. You know what I mean?

But you can get real identities that are supported by actual documentation. There are people in government offices who get paid off to boost birth certificates. It's a totally a thing. And so I became very fascinated with this, and I always knew I wanted to write about this, but that was so long ago. And so I had to resurrect it, but then do new research on—obviously the computerization of everything has increased so much that I had to really dive in anew.

LAYNE: Do you ever worry that you are going to be a bad influence on the youth, and teach them how to fake their own death? Or is that your goal? Tell us the truth.

WENDY: So I do worry about that sometimes. Sometimes I do worry. I worried about this with The Kill Club actually more, where I was like, I'm basically writing a book about how to run an underground murder club. Everything in this book is like, if you want to kill people and not got caught, here's an idea of how to do it, and like it's been vetted quite thoroughly.

LAYNE: Yeah. I learned so much from that book. I learned how you can like order poison on the Internet.

WENDY: Cyanide!

LAYNE: Yeah. I learned a lot. Like if I wanted to have an underground murder ring, I'm ready now. But I would get caught instantly because of our texts. They’re bad.

WENDY: Exactly. Exactly. Yeah.

LAYNE: Halley Sutton would go down with us. I'm sorry, Halley.

WENDY: Sorry. Yeah. Yeah. So I don't know. I don't think any teenagers are going to go out and start scouring the insides of Los Angeles’s cartels looking for fake IDs that would get them a new identity. But if they did, and they were willing to put that many years of effort in like Maude did, I just feel they earned it.

LAYNE: Plus that would be incredible publicity.

WENDY: It really would.

LAYNE: if they got caught, and everyone was like, they were inspired by this book by Wendy Heard. And then people tried to ban your book, but then everyone wanted it even more.

WENDY: Sounds great.

LAYNE: I feel like you could, like, fake someone faking their death for publicity. That would be—there's still time.

WENDY: Okay, cool. I've got a week and a half.

LAYNE: What could go wrong?

WENDY: What could go wrong. Should we talk about the love story?

LAYNE: Yeah. Let's talk about that. At first when you told me about this, I was like, wait, they're cousins? But no, no—stepcousins. Totally different. Not related.

WENDY: I'm waiting for the incest critiques still to come through. I feel like I've cued myself up for a number of pearl-clutching moms to talk about this online. So far, I've only gotten one incest critique, and I’m disappointed honestly.

LAYNE: What did it say, though? Did they just read it wrong and think they were actually cousins?

WENDY: No, it was like, I'm just not sure about the pseudo incest I'm seeing here. Something like that. I'm just not sure about it. I'm like, they're not related, so.

LAYNE: And they don't know each other. You do a good job of setting that up in the book quick. There are a couple of lines where she's just like, we're not related at all, by the way. I barely know her.

WENDY: There's a scene at the beginning where Maude is checking Frankie out in their bikini. And Maude’s like, we're not related, but this still makes me feel like I'm doing something wrong. I put that in there for all the people reading who might be like, but they're related. I just want to clarify, not at all. And they've only met like five times at the most. So it's fine. It's totally fine.

LAYNE: This isn't Game of Thrones. It's fine.

WENDY: I did want to talk a lot about stepfamilies. Cause I've had one, two—I've had three stepparents in my life and I've had two stepdads and one stepmother who's still my stepmom. The stepdads have both left the… left the vicinity.

LAYNE: I was like, left this mortal plane?

WENDY: I don't know. One of them, I don't know actually. But yeah. It's always a weird thing to me that your parent marries into a family, and then suddenly you're supposed to feel all close to them, and “this is your family!” It's like, no, they're not, It's weird. It's like this feeling that just because your parent got married to this person, you're supposed to feel things about them and their family. And you're like, I just got dumped here. Like I didn't meet and fall in love with this guy. I am just being dragged along for this ride.

LAYNE: I kind of feel that way about in-law relationships too. My in-laws are great, and I like them a lot, but there is almost this expectation that like, you're one big family now. And it's like, not really. Maybe cause I have a really small family. It's basically just me and my mom and my grandparents. So the idea of even sibling relationships is really foreign to me.

WENDY: Yeah. And so I think I wanted to write about that. And I wanted to write about things like custody, and the way Maude has to go back and forth between these two parents, neither one of them who like her very much. And there's even a line toward the end when Maude talks to her mom and they have it out, where her mom basically admits that, like Maude’s always been too difficult to love. Remember that part?

LAYNE: Yeah. I don’t know, from the time her mom left her alone to watch her bratty little half-brothers I was like, fuck this bitch.

WENDY: Yeah.

LAYNE: Not your babysitter. At least pay her, if you’re gonna make her babysit. Come on.

WENDY: I know, but yeah, I don't know. So I think I wanted to talk about that, having been through three step parents of my own. I think I had some, I don't know—I guess I wanted to talk about stepfamilies a little bit. Not that I've ever had one as bad as the Maxwells.

LAYNE: Yeah. I want to talk about the matriarch too—the grandma.

WENDY: Morticia!

LAYNE: She's a really interesting character. Morticia. What's her real name?

WENDY: Oh, she doesn't have one, I never even wrote her one. Cause Maude will only call her Morticia, and Frankie only calls her Grandma

LAYNE: Oh yeah, I guess that's why I don't remember.

WENDY: The only person who would say her name would be either Leah, or Maude’s mom, Anne. But neither of them ever actually say it on the page.

LAYNE: I was a little bit like, how could you call her Morticia? Cause that's a compliment.

WENDY: She just says it. She started saying it just to mess with her mom. Cause she thought it would fuck with her mom and it does. So that's why she does it, just to be mean.

LAYNE: Love it. She's so mean. But she's like this. I was picturing a very Emily Gilmore type, but like more of a boss bitch. Cause Emily Gilmore is like, I go to society luncheons, and this woman's running a business empire and—very, a little like femme Logan Roy, like disappointed in her children vibe.

WENDY: Yeah. Yeah. So the matriarch of the Maxwells is the grandma. The grandfather has passed away recently, like I think a couple of years ago. And he left her the company, and she took it over. They do real estate development. So they're totally like the douchebags in Orange County that level a field and turn it into 50 tract homes, like they build tract housing. So you know, they're very wealthy and have been since probably the sixties, I would guess. And yeah, the kids are two brothers who are different levels of useless. There's Maude’s stepfather, Todd, who's just, hey I like to play golf and I'm like in charge of—he has some, like, client relations job, like nothing.

LAYNE: So he just plays golf and drinks beer.

WENDY: And then his brother, who's Frankie's dad, is just a complete, like, party, frat boy all grown up, like completely useless. And they're in the middle of a family dispute where the grandma is going to stop supporting him. She's finally had enough. He married someone that she disapproved of, and she was like, that's it I'm out, I'm not supporting you anymore. And yeah, that kind of launches Frankie's whole plot, really.

LAYNE: So let's talk about Frankie's gender identity and queerness, because I thought that was really well-handled in this, and not something that I've seen—I don't read, like, the most YA, but it's not something I've seen a lot. I feel like it's starting to become more prevalent.

WENDY: Yeah. So you get some chapters from Frankie's point of view, back and forth. It catches you up with the present ultimately, but it's like, here's what Frankie's been going through for the last month. And I don't want to give too many spoilers, but Frankie's been going through a lot. And we’re learning why Frankie wanted to fake her/their own death.

So Frankie's pronouns are ultimately she/they, and Frankie struggles a lot with their gender identity throughout the story, but really in the month before the trip. Once she's away from her family, I think she gets to explore that a little bit more, and ultimately maybe come into their own a little bit, and come into a feeling of getting to know who they are. Maybe not like a final answer, but at least getting a chance to play around with it and get to, I don't know, become comfortable.

Ultimately, my theory is that Frankie will identify as genderfluid, because I think Frankie goes back and forth between feeling pretty comfortable with the idea of being a girl, but maybe just like a super queer girl, or like not an effeminate girl, but it doesn't feel horrible to be a girl. Feels fine, you know, identifies with idea of being a lesbian and stuff like that.

And then sometimes Frankie just feels super uncomfortable, and like, I am they/them, I do not identify with femininity at all. I actually feel masculine. So I think ultimately Frankie will develop like a fluid way of going between the type of gender expression that they like to do. But it's hard. It's hard to figure those things out, and their family’s completely unsupportive. I think the family of the Maxwell's, the grandma figure really isn't even comfortable with the idea of having a gay family member, much less someone struggling with their gender.

So it sucks, you know. I don't like to write about a lot of homophobia for teen readers. And so it was really hard for me to decide how much of that to put in. But at the same time, I think authors are allowed to write about their lived experiences too. And so there's like that striking a balance for teen readers where you're like, I don't want to burden you with this, but at the same time, I think this will make some people feel seen, and yeah. I don't know. You never know if you did it right, but that was what I was thinking as I was writing it.

LAYNE: And with the grandma, she just cares about appearances. She just wants people to seem proper and like they fit into her society, and she's kind of like, you can do whatever you want to do in private, but you're my granddaughter, so you will present yourself in a certain way.

WENDY: That’s right.

LAYNE: And it's not so much about sex as it is about actual physical appearance, like clothing and hair and all that stuff, and manners. And that's very true to that kind of character. I totally understand your hesitancy to write about homophobia for teen readers, but at the same time to write this like Orange County, rich, old white lady, and have her be like, of course I accept you, my gender queer grandchild. Maybe there's some cool grandma in Orange County, but there's, like, one. It's just not realistic.

WENDY: Yeah. And that's exactly what she says. In her mind, she's quite progressive, cause she's like, look, do whoever you want to, be whoever you want to be—behind closed doors. But when you're out in the world, and you're representing the Maxwells, and you're the heir to all of this, you need to present yourself in a certain way. And because you're going to be running this company someday. get ready to do what it takes. She's coming from like an old school feminism, like they will judge you based on your appearance. This will happen if you want to be a woman, successful. Here's what you gotta do. That's where she's coming from. From like the sixties and the seventies, trying to be a badass. Not easy, I get it. But that's where that kind of soured for her, I think.

LAYNE: Yeah, and I liked the way that you showed Frankie struggling with their gender identity, but also it's not, like, a crisis. It's just, they're kind of like, I'm thinking about this. I don't really know which way I'm going to go or how I feel. I'm considering all these different options, and like day to day seeing how I feel. And I think that's really true to—certainly even older people, but definitely at that age, it's like, whether you struggle with your gender or not, you're trying to figure out your identity, and who you are, and what you want to do with your life, and all of this stuff.

And the way you wrap it up too, as well. It's like they have come to a peace for the moment, but it's still an ongoing exploration. Which for queer people, no matter your sexual orientation, gender identity, it is this like lifelong, I don't know, just examination. I think that's such a hallmark of being queer. It's like, if you are hetero, and you don't question your gender identity, you can just buy into whatever society says. You're just like, this is what a man is. This is what a woman is. This is what a married couple is. This is, like, the role I'm supposed to fit. But if you're any flavor of queer at all, you are forced to question those things. And I think it makes for better relationships and a more interesting life, but it is this, like, ongoing thing.

WENDY: Yeah, exactly. And I think, that can be really agonizing, or it can be wonderful too, because you're not a static being, you're always growing and exploring and learning new things about yourself and about the people around you. And that's a good thing. But I think the way Frankie has experienced it for their whole life is like, there's no real point in coming to any conclusions right now, because I've got no one in my life who would do anything with that information anyway. Let's say Frankie decided, that's it, I'm non-binary, and I'm going to be they/them, and this is how I'm going to present that gender identity to the world. They don't have anyone in their life who would actually use those pronouns for them, or do anything resembling respecting that. So they've shelved it, you know? Like, I'll come to a final answer later, maybe when I'm like in college or something, and I have people around me who might actually listen or support.

LAYNE: Yeah, they're just in survival mode.

WENDY: That's right. Yeah.

LAYNE: Figuratively and literally.

WENDY: Get through high school. Cause they’re in this really douchey Orange County high school, super upscale private school for the richest of the rich in that part of Orange County. And it's not an environment where there's a lot of very forward-thinking, you know what I mean? And so I wanted to write about that a little bit too. How much kids are recycling what they're hearing at home sometimes, and how much we think that we've moved into a new chapter, but there's a lot of places, even in California where it's very still the same old way it's been.

LAYNE: There are a douche bags everywhere forever.

WENDY: And then there's even like a little thing in Frankie's high school where there's another queer kid, and he's in a few of her classes, but he always has to stay quiet when they start messing with them, because then it's going to target him too. And so there's a little bit of that too, like yes, there's other queer kids in this school, but it's not safe for them either.

LAYNE: Yeah. Yeah.

WENDY: Yeah.

LAYNE: Okay. Well, I would love to hear about what you're working on next, even though I, again, feel like I've read this book because I’m your critique partner, but I have not read a word of it. So do you want to tell people what your next YA is about?

WENDY: Okay. I have a newly-announced, a new project called We’ll Never Tell. And it's different. It's very different. I think Dead End Girls was really different from She’s Too Pretty to Burn, but We’ll Never Tell is different from both of them. It's about a group of urban explorers. So these four teenagers sneak into all these places around Los Angeles and give their YouTube subscribers a behind-the-scenes view of abandoned factories, or the zoo at night, or theme parks when they're closed or notorious, you know, old buildings. They sneak in all of these behind-the-scenes places, and they have a YouTube channel. That's what they do. And they go to Hollywood High, they're in Hollywood. So this book has me, like, in LA writing my hometown, which is so fun.

And in the book, the thing that happens is they decide for their final YouTube episode, they're going to explore the site of this notorious murder from the seventies. It's called the Silverlake Murder House, or the Silverlake Murder Mansion, and it's modeled after the Los Feliz Murder Mansion, which is like a real place here in LA, very similar. There was a murder, and the house was left untouched all the decades later. So they want to go in and show the untouched house and scene of this notorious crime. Like it still has cans in the cabinets, dishes in the sink, the whole nine yards. Blood on the carpet. But when they're there, one of them gets stabbed at the site of the original murder, and they get all wrapped up in this mystery, trying to figure out who did that, and it connects to the original murder in the house. So there's all these, like, interstitials of newspaper articles from 1972 and point of view chapters from back then. So it's just really crazy. I love that book.

LAYNE: It sounds so spooky, and I can't wait to read it.

WENDY: It is really spooky! I think it's actually my scariest one, because there's all these scenes in this terrifying old abandoned house. It is scary. It's spooky.

LAYNE: Halley drove me by the real one, the Los Feliz murder house. And she had told me about it, and she's like, yeah, it just has this like bad vibe, and you just feel sick when you look at it. And she's not like a woo-woo person like me, so.

WENDY: No, not at all.

LAYNE: No. So I was like, really? Okay. And she drove up to it, and I was just like, holy shit, that place has the worst vibe. It's just, there is something evil about that house. Like I'm not even really someone who believes in haunted or evil houses necessarily, but like that house is wrong.

WENDY: In real life, it was a murder-suicide of a husband/wife. Like he killed his wife and then himself. And he also messed up with his kids, which I didn't put in. I don't do that in my books. I don't do kids. I don't do, like, violence on children. So yeah. So he murdered his wife and then himself is the story of the Silverlake Murder Mansion. Or is that what happened? Dundundundun.

LAYNE: Well, I can't wait to read that one. I'm probably just going to go through my life thinking that I've read it until like a week before it comes out and I'll be like, oh shit.

WENDY: Oh God, we have to talk about this on the podcast.

LAYNE: So you haven't been on the show in a while, but you and I talk all the time, and we do FaceTimes all the time and talk about our works in progress, and I think that's been one of the best things to come out of the pandemic that we see each other on the Internet a lot. I want to see you in person again soon.

WENDY: I know.

LAYNE: But we did that Palm Springs writing retreat last year, and that was pretty amazing.

WENDY: Yeah, that was awesome. I want to do that again. I think about that all the time.

LAYNE: We need to just write in paradise.

WENDY: Yeah. I need to write, and I need a pool, and I need it be warm so that I can go in the pool. This isn't that much to ask.

LAYNE: No, it's not. It was really difficult to leave at the end of that weekend. I was just like, I have to go back to my normal life where I don't live in this beautiful house near Palm Springs with a pool and a hot tub. Like, what the fuck? This is the lifestyle that I've become accustomed to, and I'm not going back.

WENDY: So check this out really quick. So the Los Feliz Murder House.

LAYNE: Yeah?

WENDY: Okay. It's not only that the original guy killed his wife and then himself and attacked his children, but three other owners and tenants have died in the house as well.

LAYNE: It's fucked up. There's something wrong with that house.

WENDY: Yes.

LAYNE: I love that you're carving out this niche of, like, true crime, LA-based kind of stuff, and the youths need this, I think. I don’t know. I don’t know what the youths want.

WENDY: I know, I don't either. They wanted, I think they want—they want homosexuality, unfortunately, for many people. It's part of the gay agenda. That's what they want.

LAYNE: Yes, your books are definitely part of the gay agenda.

WENDY: I did get accused of that recently in a review.

LAYNE: Like it was a bad thing?

WENDY: Yeah, like it was like really pushing the gay agenda here. I was like, I am.

LAYNE: I'm like the gay agenda has won in some places. Like in our lives certainly. We just do it unconsciously now. That's just the way we are.

WENDY: So here's my question for you before you wrap, what is your gay agenda? Let's think about what's on our agenda. First of all, I think everyone has to learn certain songs, like the Rocky Horror soundtrack and they'll sing it instead of the Star-Spangled Banner.

LAYNE: The Star-Spangled Banner sucks. I'll stand by that. I mean, I definitely think the gay agenda should include men learning to do all sorts of housework and cooking and cleaning and all of that stuff. Like all these straight men have had it too easy for too long. Not in my house, but that's because we follow the gay agenda.

WENDY: Okay. And I'm also going to say that straight men from now on are going to be forced to wear Speedos.

LAYNE: Okay.

WENDY: It's part of the new laws governing the country.

LAYNE: Do they have to dance for our amusement covered in glitter while they wear them?

WENDY: They have to submit to glitter-covering if we so request or demand, yes.

LAYNE: Okay. Okay. Good. Just wanted to clarify.

WENDY: Oh, I've got another part of my gay agenda: at my request, any man must be forced to shave his back.

LAYNE: Now my partner is going to be scared. Nate is going to shake, listening to this.

WENDY: At any given moment, a cis het man can be made to shave his back. At any request.

LAYNE: But like, how can you shave his own back? Like you would have to do it for him, and that's disgusting.

WENDY: We will—you know, those drive-through car washes? We'll do those, but for shaving straight men. Okay. What else is part of my gay agenda?

LAYNE: I don't know. These seem like they're all for men. What do we want the straight women to do?

WENDY: Oh God. There's so much. First of all, everything to do with baby showers and pregnancy, there's a moratorium on all of it.

LAYNE: Bachelorette parties.

WENDY: Yes. Anything with, like, themes and decorations.

LAYNE: Gender reveal parties. Not allowed. No. People's gender will reveal itself in the fullness of time. You can't reveal it before they're born.

WENDY: You may decorate with plaid flannel only, from here on out only.

LAYNE: Only.

WENDY: If you must decorate, it must be only flannel plaid.

LAYNE: Yes. I'm wearing flannel plaid right now.

WENDY: So there you go. If you're going to comment on another cis het woman's appearance or body, you must then shave your head.

LAYNE: Okay. I like that.

WENDY: Okay.

LAYNE: A lot of women look really hot with shaved heads, so it's not even really a punishment. You might be, like, opening up to new experience of yourself. I'm just saying.

WENDY: The only brand of glasses that will be sold will be Ray-Bans.

LAYNE: I know you already replaced the Star-Spangled Banner with Rocky Horror, but I feel like Megan Thee Stallion should be involved in this somehow. She should be the President, maybe? I don’t know. Like the Empress of the World? Is that cool?

WENDY: Oh, yeah.

LAYNE: Yeah. I know she's straight, but like, we approve of her.

WENDY: How about this: at every Weight Watchers meeting, or diet culture thing, you must first watch a video of Megan Thee Stallion’s butt. It's like part of a brainwashing or initiation—but first, have you considered? And then we'll show her butt.

LAYNE: Yeah. It's the most inspirational butt of all time.

WENDY: Yeah. The thing I've been disappointed in with the others in our culture, in our movement, has been the lack of organization and unification toward the agenda. So we're going to need to put some of these terms in writing.

LAYNE: Yeah. Yeah. All we've really been doing is writing our super gay murder books, but we can't do it all on our own.

WENDY: Yeah. We have to come together, and there's gotta be certain things we can all agree on.

LAYNE: I think so. I think we can get there. Okay. Sounds like a plan. Let's get this started. The gay agenda, spreading across the earth.

WENDY: Cool. Yeah. And I guess my book is a big part of it. So there you go.

LAYNE: It is. You're pushing that gay agenda so hard.

WENDY: I’m very tired.

LAYNE: From pushing the gay agenda uphill?

WENDY: It's been a lot. It's been exhausting.

LAYNE: Oh my God. I love you. In a gay way, and also in a friendship way.

WENDY: Same thing, sister-wife. I miss our podcasting together.

LAYNE: Yes. I was so glad, the acknowledgements for Dead End Girls, you called me your work wife. And I was like, oh my God. Yes, I am.

WENDY: Yes.

LAYNE: I hate the word wife, but like, you can call me your wife.

WENDY: Same, yes, exactly.

LAYNE: Nate cannot call me his wife. I will punch him in the nutsack. But you can call me your wife whenever.

WENDY: Yeah. It's totally different. That's part of the gay agenda.

LAYNE: That's totally part of the gay agenda. Thank you. Oh my God.

Thank you Wendy so much for joining us. Everyone go buy Dead End Girls, which will be out by the time this episode airs. And tell us your plans for faking your death and/or furthering the gay agenda on all of our social media. Thank you.

WENDY: Yes, please. Thank you.

View Details

Kristen and Layne are joined by authors Kathleen Glasgow and Liz Lawson to chat about their new co-written YA mystery THE AGATHAS, why you should never underestimate a teenage girl, and the enduring cultural power of OG Plot Twist Queen Agatha Christie. Grab your copy of THE AGATHAs, or any of Kathleen and Liz’s solo books, in the official Unlikeable Female Characters Bookshop.

Episode Transcript

LAYNE: Welcome to Unlikeable Female Characters, the podcast featuring feminist thriller writers in conversation about women who don't give a damn if you like them. Today, I am very pleased to welcome the co-writing team of Kathleen Glasgow and Liz Lawson. Kathleen is the New York Times bestselling author of Girl in Pieces, You'd Be Home Now, and How to Make Friends with the Dark. Her books have been published in more than 24 countries. And Liz is the author of The Lucky Ones, which released on April 7th, 2020. We're so sorry.

LIZ: Yeah…

LAYNE: I had a book come out around that time too, I feel ya. The Lucky Ones received multiple glowing trade reviews, including a Kirkus star. Liz resides in the DC Metro region where she lives with an adorable toddler, a fantastic husband, and two very bratty cats (who I would love to hear more about). Their new co-written YA thriller, The Agathas, comes out May 3rd, which when you're listening to this, it will already be out, so you can go get it. Welcome, Kathleen and Liz!

KATHLEEN: Thank you for having us. It's great to be here.

KRISTEN: And I'm here too, nothing exciting, but you forgot to mention me.

LAYNE: Sorry!! Usually I mention Kristen, and then I introduce our guests and I got, yeah, I don't know, before this, we were having this whole conversation about the Oscars and Will Smith and Chris Rock. And that's all I can think about now. Cause we're recording this right after that happened. So people listening to this in May will be like, what? The news cycle moves quickly. But yes, Kristen is here as well, and you can't see her, but she's wearing little headphones with cat ears, and they're adorable.

KRISTEN: I am, it's true.

LIZ: They're awesome.

LAYNE: We're just going to be loopy today I think. I don't know what the energy, like the astrological energy is right now, but we're in a mood. But we're so happy to have both of you on the show! Do one or both of you, you can decide how you want to do this one, want to tell us a little bit about The Agathas?

LIZ: Sure. The Agathas is a YA murder mystery, in the vein of a cozy mystery. We wrote it with the intent of it being fun, a little bit lighter than some mysteries and thrillers that are out there. The tone is more, I would say One of Us is Lying or the first book in the Good Girl's Guide series. And it is about two girls who live in a small town called Castle Cove, and they are shoved together by circumstance. And then the most popular girl at their school goes missing and they decide, because one is obsessed with Agatha Christie and the other is obsessed with true crime, that they should be the ones to investigate the disappearance.

LAYNE: There are two main female characters in this, Alice and Iris. One of you wrote one and one wrote the other I'm guessing? Is that how you divided it up?

KATHLEEN: Yes.

LIZ: That is correct.

KATHLEEN: Liz wrote Alice Ogilvie, who starts the book fresh off house arrest for mimicking Agatha Christie's real-life disappearance. She took a page from Agatha Christie's book and disappeared early in the summer for five days, and no one knew where she was, who she was with, why she left. And she appeared with nary a scratch and saying nothing.

And she was promptly put on house arrest for costing the town so much money and time and resources, and Iris elected to serve as her tutor since Alice is not doing very well in school. Iris is the opposite of Alice. She's very reclusive. She hangs out with a group of, for lack of a better word, we'll call them like nerds at school, called the Zoners who are also into crime and things like that, and they're very funny and they have their own space in the cafeteria. And they're thrown together and form this unlikely friendship and bond through the process of looking for Brooke Donovan.

And I think that one of the things I loved about writing this book with Liz was that we have the mystery of the missing girl, which is a trope, but it's also a mystery about how the unlikeliest of people can become friends. So it's really a friendship story as well, how these two girls come together.

KRISTEN: I think that's a really interesting element of the mystery is that building of the friendship. In mysteries characters are majorly at odds with each other, but in this one, we get to see how they work through that, and come together to solve the crime, but also to figure out who they are themselves in the process.

KATHLEEN: They're both holding secrets from each other. And I like that what we do in the book that Alice might start off as like the popular snobby girl who's very elitist. She has a lot of money. But we turn that on its head a little bit, because she's not really that way. And Iris might actually be more of a snob than Alice, which we try to reflect in a few scenes where she's always coming down on Alice because Alice is a hottie and has this money and is always insulting people. And really it's Iris who might have a thing against people with more money, a class distinction.

LAYNE: I too was a judgmental nerd in high school. So I really related to Iris.

KRISTEN: Same.

KATHLEEN: That's exactly it. So Iris is very much, like, she can be a very judgmental nerd.

LAYNE: I thought it was an interesting choice to have Alice, the popular girl, be the one who's Agatha Christie-obsessed. Like she has all the paperbacks and is reading them, and like bringing up these things from all the different mysteries. And each of her chapters starts with a quote from an Agatha Christie book. Was that part of the concept from the beginning, that Alice was the one who was obsessed with Agatha Christie? Or did you decide that later on?

LIZ: I think it was pretty much from the get-go that we had Alice be the Agatha Christie fan. I think it worked well because she is, she's very neglected. She grew up her parents traveling all the time and working all the time, and she has Brenda, her like, house manager, nanny, but that's really her only stable person.

And so I think it worked really well to have her finally find something for herself in these books. And like you said, it does seem less likely to have that girl who's above it all find herself in books like that. But I think that a lot of lonely kids find themselves in books. It gives her something for herself for the first time.

KRISTEN: Were either of you obsessed with Agatha Christie in high school?

LIZ: I was.

KRISTEN: Yeah?

LIZ: Oh yeah. I read all the Agatha Christies. Any mystery, really. I have always been a huge fan of mysteries, and like the classic-style mysteries. Like, I do like a thriller, I read lots of thrillers, but there's something about that classic cozy mystery that is comforting in a way. Yeah, I grew up reading a lot of books like that.

KATHLEEN: When I was in high school, I discovered the books of—and I'll probably pronounce his last name wrong; he recently passed away—Andrew Vox. And those are intensely dark detective stories, basically about a character who's hunting down people who do bad things to kids. It's a whole series of books and he, the author, worked in Child Protective Services for a long time as an investigator. And so they are very difficult to read, but I latched on to those because, much like Iris, I was drawn to darker things and darker characters. And so I think that when Liz and I came together to write this book, our respective loves for different types of genre really blended well in terms of how we were going to write the characters and what their obsessions would be in their emotional core.

And I love that Alice—you would not expect, you watch all these things about like rich mean girls and they're always like "ick, school, yuck." And she is a little bit like that, but she's a big reader. She found her books. She found her people in the books, and she loves all the characters in Agatha Christie, and I think that through reading them, she's really discovering what and who she wants to be in life. But that's a conversation that Liz and I have in case we ever get to write more of these books.

LAYNE: Yeah, it felt like you left it open to be a series. Do you guys have ideas for future ones? I would love to read more.

KATHLEEN: Oh, absolutely.

LIZ: We definitely have ideas.

KATHLEEN: We have ideas. I hope that it takes off. I could write these forever.

KRISTEN: I like how Alice has latched on to the idea of people being underestimated through the Agatha Christie books, like through the character of Poirot. And she's picked up helpful life hacks from these books that are like, almost a hundred years old.

And I think that's a really fun way to loop in, not just the idea of the Agatha Christie books, but also to show why those books are still great. The classic mysteries, just because they're old doesn't mean they're not relevant to our lives. That's for sure.

LIZ: Absolutely.

LAYNE: It's so relevant to them as teenage girls, like cause teenage girls are often underestimated or just like looked down upon, and they fight against that through their investigation, but they also take advantage of it when it suits them, when it's helpful.

LIZ: It worked so well with Agatha Christie, cause really the Miss Marple series is all about how she's underestimated. There's the teenage girls being underestimated, but older women are so underestimated too. And so Miss Marple solves the mysteries by basically being like there, but nobody gives her any credit, nobody thinks that she's going to be smart or helpful or insightful. So like you said, Alice really does pull that from those books and parallel it to how teenage girls are often underestimated.

KATHLEEN: And Alice and Iris are very much, they don't specifically state it, but they do feel underestimated and victims of, particularly Detective Thompson's, misogyny and dismissal of teenage girls. Who do you think you are? And how do you think you can solve this? And you're mucking this whole thing up, and they take it upon themselves.

And when Liz and I were writing their characters too, we didn't want them to be like really good detectives from the get-go because they are teenagers and they are learning. So it was important to also have elements of they do things incorrectly a lot, cause they're just throwing everything at the wall and hoping something sticks. And they make a lot of mistakes, and also sometimes they can't stay on a stakeout very long because they have to do homework. Like, real life intercedes. It's not like they can just be out and about all the time, trying to solve this crime.

KRISTEN: So let's talk a little bit about what the actual process of writing it was like. Would one of you write a chapter and then send it off to the other to write the follow-up chapter? Or did you work off of an outline kind of separately at the same time?

LIZ: Yeah, so basically how we wrote it was to—we did outline a bit first, right, Kathleen? We like, we had our spreadsheet, we did some character bios for our different characters.

KATHLEEN: We did. The whole genesis of the book was it was after the lockdown, and after Liz's book came out, and we were both feeling very isolated, and we weren't working on anything. And we had become friends because we have the same editor and I had read Liz's book, The Lucky Ones. I just love book so much, everyone should go buy a copy of that book. And we had become friends, and we had messaged and we had met in person in DC once, and we just got along really well. And, we were messaging every day. And we just needed something new to do, to think about every day that would get us through that summer of lockdown.

And we were just talking about it, and one day just happened: what if we tried to write a mystery? Who would expect a mystery from Liz or me? Because we were really mostly emotionally intense books. What if we wrote a mystery, we made it kind of fun, with like little threads of real-life things that happen in there to teenagers, like parental neglect or domestic abuse?

But what if we made it, like, fun and they're not very good at it? What if we just did that, for the heck of it? Liz is very good. She's a plotter, and I'm a pantser and she said before we start this—she'll downplay it. She was really great about, we would need to outline this, and make a spreadsheet, because in mysteries, you need to hit these beats. You need to have your red herrings. You can't just go by the seat of your pants, Kathleen, and throw everything on the page. You have to follow this. And so we had a spreadsheet, we had an outline, we talked about our characters, and then one day we just started like trading a chapter.

And so she would write an Alice chapter and send it to me. And then I would respond and check the spreadsheet to see where we should be going and send my Iris chapter back. And we wrote it very quickly, and I have to say it was a really pleasant experience to write a book with someone else because you're not as alone in it, and they know exactly what's going on because they're in that plot with you. And so you're texting all the time. It was really great.

LAYNE: Yeah, I also co-wrote stuff during the pandemic, and I've been seeing more and more of these co-written projects coming about. Especially from female authors, actually. I feel like, I don't know, maybe men don't play well with others. I know they don't. But it is so much fun, and with the project that I worked on, it was something that was engineered to be more fun than a lot of the books that we'd written solo, like just a little bit more of a romp. But there's something about having someone to talk to you, especially when we're all locked in our houses, but just in general, that now when I'm trying to write my own books alone, I'm just like, this is a scam. Like, why do I have to write this by myself? I hate this. I don't know. What's it been like to go back to working on your own stuff? Or were you working on your own stuff while you were co-writing?

LIZ: Yeah. I actually had to write my own book at the same time we were drafting The Agathas. So I was writing two books simultaneously, and that was really hard.

KATHLEEN: I can't believe you did that, actually.

LIZ: I can't either. And no wonder that draft turned out so terribly, of my own book, because I was like, so confused. It was very hard because it was also like, I was trying to shift this book that I had written as like a sad, contemporary into more of a thriller.

And so it was almost like I was writing a murder mystery, but also a thriller at the same time. The Agathas was fine. I didn't have trouble with that, but my other book kept bleeding into it. So anyway, I had to rewrite that book again because my editor was like, no. And I was like, okay. I understand. So I actually wrote it again, after we finished writing The Agathas. So I wrote that last fall. And it was weird writing it by myself. Like I kept wanting to text Kathleen and be like, what should I do now? But I was like, Liz, you have to write this book by yourself. I did miss writing with somebody else while I was writing that solo.

LAYNE: Screenwriters really have it figured out, cause they co-write or they have the writers' room on a TV show. And it's so fun just to bounce ideas. If you have a good vibe between your collaborators, I know people can fight, too. When it's going well, it's just so much easier and like a more joyful process than this idea that we all have to be in our little garrets typing away alone. I want to leave that behind. I've even been taking, like for my solo projects, taking some of the lessons from co-writing into it, and having FaceTime calls with some of my writer friends, and we'll help each other out. We shouldn't be locked alone in rooms anymore.

LIZ: Agreed.

KRISTEN: I haven't tried co-writing anything yet, but I would like to at some point, it sounds fun.

KATHLEEN: I think it's a really good process, and it does strengthen you when you go back to, like Layne said, when you go back to writing your standalones, like you've learned some tips and tricks that help you a lot. I think that you have to be flexible, because you're not writing the whole book.

Like you have to be a team and you have to have rules. Liz can go into Iris chapters and revamp the dialogue that I gave Alice so that she sounds like Alice, or she can say, okay, I don't think that Alice would do this or feel this way in that chapter because she knows Alice. So you have to be very flexible and realize that 50% is you and 50% is this other person, and you're making a whole thing together. So you have to make sure that you're ready and open to do that.

LAYNE: I think having that ownership of a specific character helps. That's how it worked for my projects as well, where it was like we each had our own character, so we would trade off chapters and then say oh my character wouldn't say or do that. And we each were the final authority. I think that really helps settle potential conflicts.

LIZ: Yeah. Agreed. I don't know how people do it, who co-write from one single POV. It's just fascinating to me, to be able to do that. I think you have to be in the same place physically. That's the only way I feel like it would be possible. I don't know. I know a co-writing duo in LA, Jenni and Ted, they wrote Unpregnant, and they said that they're in the same place physically, but one of them mostly does the jokes, and one of them does more of I guess the scene builds and stuff like that, which is interesting.

KRISTEN: That is interesting.

LIZ: Yeah.

LAYNE: I like to write dialogue, and I hate writing descriptions. I need a co-writer who wants to describe everything, and I'll write all the dialogue.

KATHLEEN: It's me, it's me!

LIZ: I also am a dialogue person.

KATHLEEN: See, that's why it's good. Because Liz is like, "dialogue!" And I don't like dialogue a lot, but I'll be like, oh, I'll describe that. Give me that scene.

LIZ: It's always like, what kind of clothes are they wearing? I'm like, I don't know, why do they have to wear any clothes? They just exist in space.

LAYNE: Yeah.

KATHLEEN: But what is she wearing? What kind of fabric is it? What would she wear? What's her house look like? How many stairs does Alice have, like in her house? Is it really airy?

LAYNE: Yeah, my first drafts are like characters, just talking to each other in a void. They have no physical form.

LIZ: I have to describe two characters moving in a room, it takes me all day to write one scene. Cause I'm like, why do I have to do this?

KATHLEEN: And partly that's because our editor's really detailed and great. And this helped Liz and I writing, because since we have the same editor, when we would write things, we'd be like, she's going to say this. She's a big stickler for, if you have a character in a room and they're suddenly in a different spot of the room, you'll get this note: did they get up from the chair and walk across? How did they get to that table? We had her voice in our head as well. And we didn't tell anyone when we were writing this book, not our agents, our editor, and I'm immensely grateful for that, because I think if we had gone into it with just a synopsis that everything that they would have said about the book would have hung over us. And I think it was really important for us to just do it quietly by ourselves, so that the story could be its own thing and not what other people thought that maybe it should be coming from us.

LAYNE: Interesting. I had assumed you guys sold it together on proposal.

KATHLEEN: No.

LAYNE: That’s fascinating. You're just like, here's a secret book, like "surprise."

LIZ: We wrote a hundred pages and a synopsis, but then our editor was like, she's so great because she's so flexible with things. So she was basically like, yeah, go write it. And we were like, oh, okay.

KATHLEEN: I think they were very surprised and happy, and our editor was very supportive. At first she was, like, wait, the two of you did what now? And she read it.

LIZ: Kathleen's impressions of our editor. It's amazing.

KATHLEEN: I don't ever want to leave her, cause she's just a really good and close reader. And also not a lot of editors or agents are supportive of writers moving in a different direction, like switching to a different genre entirely. And they were all supportive, and especially for Liz, she's making a bigger move into mystery and thriller. This is a good place for her as a writer, just to start here to make a shift. But not a lot of editors and agents are always supportive of that from the get-go. They're like, no, you do this one thing. You write romcoms, I don't really want a horror book from you. But ours were like, no, this is a good move for the both of you, you're doing something new, and we like it a lot. And we think that people are gonna really be enthusiastic about it. But I think the only thing, and this goes back to the unlikable female characters, is I love Alice and Iris, but our editor wanted to pull back a little bit on Alice's prickliness in the beginning.

LIZ: Alice was, personality wise, the most like me character that I'd ever written, and our editor's like, she's unlikeable. And I was like, oh. Thanks.

KATHLEEN: You take that stuff personally, but I think that it was more of an editorial thing because Alice, her chapter opens the book. And so they can be unlikeable, but they can't be too much so, because a reader has to start that book and want to stay with it. And so we had to pull back in the beginning, but maybe, not so much, like later on.

LIZ: And I will say, I feel like there are different kinds of unlikeable. I don't think Krista was reacting to the prickliness. It was more, she was almost like too snobby in a lot of ways. And when I went back and reread some of the parts, I was like, oh yeah, like I can see what she's saying. This could be very off putting for a reader. I had the same editor for The Lucky Ones, and my main female character in that, I've had multiple comments about how she's very unlikeable, but my editor never said a word. May is super angry and lashes out at people all the time. And I think that it's just, she didn't want people to be put off by unnecessary comments about snobbiness, because that's not really what that character is about. That's not what Alice is about.

LAYNE: Yeah. And I think it's maybe a different thing for a character who's like the Queen Bee popular girl. Cause a lot of readers are probably predisposed to dislike that girl because of their own high school experiences or other media that they've seen. So there's that issue right there where they're not going to find her relatable, which is even more important than likeable. But, as we talk about on the show all the time, really all a female character has to do to be considered unlikeable is to speak or take action.

KRISTEN: Have an opinion.

LAYNE: A single opinion.

KATHLEEN: Or to have a very intense, emotional reaction to something, like you're being dramatic and you're overreacting. And I think that's people's discomfort with women who just express themselves in general. And that the young adult community of writers is largely female. And I think it's really interesting, there is that sort of pushback on all these—these are written by largely female authors. They're not, there are a lot of way male authors, but the majority of it is female, as far as I know. And it's interesting that there's this punching down against unlikeable, teen female characters. So we're supposed to be writing morality lessons in our books or something. Just for expressing their emotions and reacting to events. What are you supposed to write? Then I'm unlikeable. Then Liz is unlikeable, and all of us are unlikeable. Right?

LAYNE: For young characters, especially, I have to roll my eyes so hard every time I see a review of a YA book, and these are adults reading these books and writing these reviews sometimes, and they're like, oh, the female main character was just so immature and she made bad decisions and she's so dramatic. And I'm like, do you remember what it's like to be a teenager? That's part of it.

KATHLEEN: People can say what they want in reviews. I think that's fine because it's out of your hands as a writer, but I think that slant in reviews is really interesting because, like you said, don't you remember what it was like to be a teenager? Of course you're supposed to make bad decisions and you're supposed to be over-reactive and you don't always do the right thing.

You're not supposed to because you're not an adult, you haven't learned some tools of life yet. But it's also strange to me because if you don't want to read about teenagers, then there's this whole other thing called adult fiction that you could go to. And when I read YA fiction, I try not to read it as an adult. Like I don't read it that way, where I'm judging the characters for simply being young and doing things incorrectly. I read it as like a 15 year-old. And so a lot of times I'll be like, oh God, I really love this book. This is so great. It's like wild. And all this stuff happens and I cried and, oh wow, they did this kind of awful thing.

And then someone else will read the book around my age and they'll be like, she's so petulant, like all the time throughout that whole book, like I could not believe. And I'm like, what were you like when you were 16 years old? Have you read your diaries lately? Cause you should.

LAYNE: I read a bunch of my college blogs when I was writing my last book, They Never Learn, because one of the POVs is an 18 year-old college freshman, and I was like, why did anyone speak to me, it was awful. It's awful. But I like reading YA because it's almost like the nostalgia factor, remembering what it was like to be young and have those intense feelings and so many different feelings all at once. And just to capture that again, but not actually have to live it.

KATHLEEN: Yeah.

KRISTEN: Yeah.

LAYNE: There's a pleasure in that. But I can't imagine reading a YA book and being like, why didn't she make the decision that like a 35 year-old grown professional woman would make, like what's going on?

KRISTEN: I also think it's really strange when people take the stance of, this book was frustrating because the characters made bad choices and these bad things happen. Do you really want to read a book about characters who are just completely likeable all the time and always make good choices? Of course not. There's no story there at all. Do people just want to complain?

KATHLEEN: There's no fiction at all, ever, if you don't have any character from any book making a bad decision, because that's what sets everything in motion really is bad decisions, in every single piece of fiction that you've read.

LAYNE: Do we want to talk more Agatha Christie, like Easter eggs and stuff? I was going to let you take the lead on this, Kristen, because I am woefully uneducated about Agatha Christie. I was in an Agatha Christie play in high school. That's all I know. And I did know about her disappearing. After her husband cheated on her, she like just fucked off to a hotel for a few days.

KATHLEEN: She registered under his mistress's name.

LAYNE: That is iconic behavior.

KRISTEN: Yes, the absolute legend.

KATHLEEN: I think it's a great story, cause it was covered in newspapers. She was a famous novelist already, so it was everywhere, and it became a real-life mystery, like where is she? And she's kicking back in this hotel. Liz, didn't she, like, fake crash her car too?

LIZ: Yeah, they're not sure if it was faked, like that's the thing is people still don't know how much of it was. Like there's theories that she disappeared just to be like, eff you to her first husband. But there's also theories that she was so upset when she found out about the affair that she disassociated and disappeared without fully knowing what she was doing. That's also fascinating to me that, now a hundred years later, people still don't know what happened, and that's what we wanted to capture in this book is, like, Alice disappearing, and people just not knowing, like that's her story, and she's not going to share it.

KRISTEN: Yeah. The hotel where Agatha Christie was staying and later reappeared is the site of a really great book festival in the UK called the Harrogate. It's called like the Theakston's Old Peculiar Mystery Writing Festival. It's fantastic festival, and if you ever get a chance to go, you should definitely go. But this hotel is like the most Agatha Christie-looking hotel I have ever seen.

LIZ: Ooh.

LAYNE: Describe please.

KRISTEN: So it's just, I don't know, like red and gold and brocade stuff and low ceilings and ornate elevators, and the rooms were quite modern, but like the common areas are very like, old, British hotel feeling. I went there to go to the book festival a couple of years ago and yeah, it was just really cool to see it.

LIZ: That's awesome. I would love to go there sometime.

KRISTEN: Highly recommended. So I love that you have quotes from the Agatha Christie books at the beginnings of the chapters. I feel like that really adds a nice layer to it. How did you go about deciding which ones you wanted to use? Were they quotes that you always liked, or did you have to do a hunt to find out which ones would be most appropriate?

LIZ: Yeah, so I basically just did a hunt. There were a few that I felt worked immediately that I could, think about, pull up in my head. But most of them, I just was thinking about what happened in each individual chapter and going off of that, like I wanted the quotes to really fit the chapters as well as possible. So I would look at different—like Goodreads has a lot of quotes from authors, and look at some of the books that I have here, and just try to fit it as close as I could to the content of that particular chapter.

KRISTEN: Love it. Do you have a favorite Agatha Christie novel?

LIZ: My favorite is actually A Caribbean Mystery. I love that one, and I also love The Murder of Roger Ackroyd.

KRISTEN: That's one of my favorites as well.

LIZ: I just love A Caribbean Mystery cause it's so cozy. Like it's Miss Marple, she's like in this different setting, and it's almost a more fun book than some of the other ones.

KRISTEN: Yes. To get out of the dreary English countryside does Miss Marple well.

LIZ: Yes.

KRISTEN: Yeah, and that's a lot of fun.

KATHLEEN: I love that Agatha Christie is so prevalent in our literary culture. There's so much Agatha Christie coming out this year. There's a couple of other books that are contemporary retellings of some of her novels in the YA sphere. And then there's an anthology coming out, where I think writers are writing short stories based on some of the Christie books, like Karen McManus is involved in that. And I think it's really great that the books are so timeless in a way, and I think it has a lot to do with the mystery factor, because everybody can get lost in a mystery. You could be any character in a mystery. There's always somebody to root for and somebody to root against, and I think that's a really great thing.

KRISTEN: And they're so cleverly constructed. You take away all of the trappings of modern life that we can bury our clues in. The way the mysteries in her books are built, they're just so artfully constructed to be these great puzzles, and that's completely timeless. Like you can take that dynamic out of there and put it anywhere, and it's going to work. Which is why I think so many people who write mysteries in particular look at Agatha Christie as such an influence just because she invented this game that we're all trying to do. And she did it so well.

LIZ: Absolutely. I recently read Riley Sager's new book—it's coming out in a month or two—and even in that book, the twist was from an Agatha Christie book. Or was used in an Agatha Christie book, originally thought of by Agatha Christie. And it's just so fascinating that she really, like you said, like she really managed to come up with these incredible twists, like having the murderer be the narrator. It's things like that, that people were like, wait, what? It astounded people at the time.

LAYNE: There's only so many plots, and she thought of all of them.

KRISTEN: She did. And they're so good. Like they're such good plots that we can just borrow them, and they still work. We can use some of these constructs and interpret them in new ways to make new stories. But really every idea that we could possibly think of has already been done by Agatha Christie and done better than we could ever hope to. We can try.

LAYNE: There should be—maybe there is?—a mystery writing craft book that just like breaks down her different plot structures and all the twists. Has anyone done that?

LIZ: That would be amazing.

KRISTEN: That would be fantastic. Thanks for the idea, Layne.

LAYNE: I'm not doing it. That's a free idea. There you go.

KATHLEEN: You could co-write it.

LIZ: There you go.

KRISTEN: You can write all the dialogue.

LAYNE: I can write all the dialogue.

Thank you so much for coming on the show. If you would each like to tell us, if you can share, what you're working on now, or what's next for you, and then where people can find you on the Internet. Do you want to go first, Kathleen?

KATHLEEN: The Agathas comes out May 3rd, so I'm very excited about that. And I have a solo book that is, I think coming out, I don't know, it could be like two years. I don't have a date yet. And right now that's called The Glass Girl. And you can find me on social media @kathglasgow on Twitter and @kathleenglasgow on TikTok. Or you can go to my website, kathleenglasgowbooks.com.

LIZ: I am currently working on something that I can't talk about yet. And I'm waiting for notes on the book that I wrote last fall, which is a fun mystery. I'm very excited about that book too. And you can find me on all socials @lzlwsn, which is my name with no vowels. And my author website is lizlawsonauthor.com.

LAYNE: Awesome. At the time this airs, The Agathas will be on shelves, so go get your copy ASAP.

KATHLEEN: Thank you so much.

LIZ: Thank you.

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Kristen and Layne are joined by one of their all-time fave authors, Tara Isabella Burton, to discuss her new queer dark academia novel THE WORLD CANNOT GIVE, writing feverishly-intense female friendships, and what it means to claim the label “unlikeable” out loud. Buy THE WORLD CANNOT GIVE or any of the other books mentioned in the episode in the official Unlikeable Female Characters Bookshop.

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Kristen and Layne welcome THE Kellye Garrett to discuss her new domestic suspense novel LIKE A SISTER, dish about reality shows they love to judge, and pour one out for the mentoring program that brought them all together. Pick up a copy of LIKE A SISTER or any of the other books mentioned in this episode at the official Unlikeable Female Characters Bookshop, and don’t forget to check out Kellye’s amazing organization Crime Writers of Color too!

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Kristen and Layne chat with Bethany C. Morrow about her chilling new novel CHERISH FARRAH, crafting scary stories that stick with you, and why we’re all unreliable narrators.

Buy CHERISH FARRAH or any of Bethany’s other books in the official Unlikeable Female Characters Bookshop.