WHERE YOU END

June 8th, 2023

It’s been a minute since my last newsletter, and I’m beyond excited to share a big update with you. After writing four works of nonfiction (currently working on a fifth—more on that later!), I have finally delivered on my threat to write a novel. It’s called WHERE YOU END and will be out in the world on January 16, 2024. I’m revealing the cover here for the very first time.

Voilà!

My nonfiction has always focused on history’s seamy underbelly, its subversive characters and dark corners, and—as you might guess from the cover—WHERE YOU END is in a similar vein. The New Yorker writer Margaret Talbot kindly described it as “Donna Tartt meets David Lynch,” which gives a good sense of the tone. I promise it is not about literal rabbits.

A few writer friends have asked what’s more difficult: writing nonfiction or fiction. In many ways it’s a tossup. In nonfiction, it’s impossible to write bad dialogue, or to go awry with your plot; history has already written the story. Then again, dead people don’t always do what you want them to do.

With fiction, the creative freedom is liberating—but also terrifying. There are so many potential missteps and dead ends and reasons why you might want to abandon the whole thing entirely and toss it into your Bottomless Drawer of Failed Ideas (every writer has one). But the two genres have a symbiotic relationship. Fiction obscures the truth, but it also feeds on truth.

WHERE YOU END is pure invention, but shot through with real life. It’s set in the 1970s and ‘80s, so there might be some bell bottoms and fingerless gloves. There might be a self-help movement with cultish leanings. There is definitely some spilled blood.

I also mined details from my own life. Both of my parents are twins—my father fraternal; my mother identical. Like Kat and Jude Bird, the heroines in my novel, my mother is a “mirror" twin, a phenomenon that occurs when a fertilized egg splits later than usual. When facing each other, mirror twins appear as matching reflections. One twin might be right-handed and the other left. They part their hair on opposite sides. Dimples appear on opposing cheeks. WHERE YOU END is a thriller, but it is also about the powerful and peculiar bond between twin sisters. For Kat and Jude, that bond is threatened when one sister’s lies send the other back into their dangerous past.

You can read more about WHERE YOU END here, and even pre-order it. Pre-orders are vital for books, especially debuts, and pre-ordering will also earn you some exclusive content and special swag, so save your receipt (more info on this coming soon)! Please forward this newsletter to anyone who might enjoy wicked tales from the annals of history, a twisted thriller about twins, or even just the swag.

As always, thank you for reading. Until next time…

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