They want answers, which is a very natural desire, but one of the things they ultimately have to consider is whether there are some secrets that shouldn’t be told.
And the two main characters both have ties to Echo Ridge’s infamous unsolved mysteries and even though they weren’t directly part of those, they experienced these ripple effects from growing up in families that can’t move on. There’s a similar theme in Two Can Keep a Secret, but here it’s even broader because there are generations of secrets that have piled up in this one small town.
That’s one of the things I explored in One of Us Is Lying, the lengths people will go to in order to protect these hidden parts of themselves and what happens when those parts are exposed. I’ve always been interested in the power of secrets. The original kernel of an idea was to take a small town with a tragic past and have characters whose families were affected become part of a new mystery. I learned a lot about my own process, what’s working and what’s not working, all things that I’ve been able to apply to my third book, which is not quite done yet, but it was a lot easier to draft.Ĭan you talk about what sparked the idea for Two Can Keep a Secret? I did get through it and I’m so happy with how the book turned out. I think most authors talk about that a lot, which is actually comforting to me to hear from other authors who have found it challenging writing in this new dynamic that they’re in, as maybe a contracted author or an author who’s looking to extend an option potentially. Second books are hard in general, though. So it took me longer to finish than I would have liked. I did find myself struggling to clear all of that out of my head and just focus on the book. You’re realizing people are going to be reading this book and it was a little bit intimidating. I had all these new voices in my head, not only my agent and my editor’s voices, which are helpful, but also you have reader reactions in mind. I had a draft but I wasn’t happy with it and I was revising it.
On the other hand, I wasn’t very far into the book at the time. So I struggled with just finding some time, on the one hand. Then, after the book launched and it took off, suddenly those hours were eaten up with travel and promotion and other things that were wonderful, but they weren’t writing time. I wrote from nine o’clock at night until midnight when I wrote One of Us Is Lying, after my son went to bed. I was still working fulltime back then and I had always written at night. Did all of that attention affect your approach to your new book? Your debut novel, One of Us Is Lying, was such a great success.
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