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Q&A

Q: Where did you grow up?

I grew up in the San Francisco Bay Area in Northern California. I was lucky as a kid to spend a lot of my summers with my grandparents in the Sierra Nevada (near Lake Tahoe) at a small, rustic log cabin, accessible only by boat, with no electricity. It was the perfect place to run wild as a kid, and it is still my favorite reading spot in the world.

Q: Where do you live now, and what do you do there?

I live in Los Angeles with my husband Blake and our two cats Dash and Jenova, who sit next to me while I write in the morning.

When I’m not writing books, I work as a film and television producer, which essentially means I work with screenwriters and filmmakers to develop ideas and help bring those to the screen. Some of the movies I’ve worked on include the Academy-award nominated film THE BIG SICK written by Kumail Nanjiani and Emily Gordon (in which I have a small on-screen cameo!), the Emmy-Award winning HBO documentaries THE ZEN DIARIES OF GARRY SHANDLING and GEORGE CARLIN’S AMERICAN DREAM, TRAINWRECK starring Amy Schumer, THE KING OF STATEN ISLAND, starring Pete Davidson, POPSTAR: NEVER STOP NEVER STOPPING starring Andy Samberg and The Lonely Island, the HBO TV series GIRLS, and the films MACHETE, and SPY KIDS 4.

Q: What inspired you to write THE LIES OF ALMA BLACKWELL?

I’ve always been fascinated by a place called The Winchester Mystery House in San Jose, California. It’s a bizarre yet beautiful mansion full of architectural oddities, like staircases that dead-end into ceilings and doors that open onto nothing but air.

It was built by a woman named Sara Winchester in the late eighteen hundreds. She was the widow of William Winchester who invented the Winchester Rifle, aka “The Rifle That Won the West.” The story goes that Sara Winchester believed she was being haunted by the souls of those killed by her husband’s rifle, and so she sought the help of a spirit medium who instructed her to build a home for those spirits in order to atone for her family’s sins. But the spirits continued to torment her, which is why, according to rumor, she slept in a different bedroom every night and built a sprawling maze-like mansion in order to confuse the spirits who stalked her.

Another theory is that Sara Winchester was simply an over-ambitious amateur architect and the reason there are so many curious features in the house—like windows built directly into the floor—can be chalked up to simple poor planning (an explanation I find much less exciting!). We’ll likely never know the real reason Sara built the house in the strange and spooky way she did, and to a writer, that is just too tempting of a mystery. I decided to come up with my own version of what might have happened all of those years ago, and—although Sara Winchester’s house is now an uninhabited (and excellent) museum—I decided that in my version of the story, her descendants would still live in the house she built, and that they would be haunted by the same mysterious curse that their ancestor lived under over a century ago.

Q: What inspired you to write your debut novel, THE SECOND DEATH OF EDIE AND VIOLET BOND?

This story was inspired by my great-grandmother Edith Bond and her twin sister, Violet, who were both life-long Spiritualists. I never met the real-life Edie & Violet, but as a kid I was a bit obsessed with a rather haunting photograph of them as teenagers that lived on the bookshelf of my childhood home. I always wanted to write a story about Edie and Violet, but it wasn’t until a few years ago when I was researching the Spiritualist movement of the nineteenth century that lightning struck and the puzzle pieces for the idea that became this book slid into place.

The entire history of Spiritualism is deeply fascinating, but it was the work of writer and scholar Ann Braude that truly opened up Edie and Violet’s story to me. In her excellent book, Radical Spirits: Spiritualism and Women's Rights in Nineteenth-Century America, Braude sheds light on the intersection between early Spiritualism and the women’s rights movement of the nineteenth century, and I was so interested to discover that in many ways, Spiritualism became a loophole through which women were able to publicly make their voices heard.

 This was an era in which women were rarely encouraged to speak publicly and were instead expected to cultivate a nature that was pure, pious, passive, and domestic—qualities which effectively barred them from leadership roles. But the invention of the spirit medium neatly got around all of that. It gave women a socially acceptable way to speak in public. As spirit mediums and trance lecturers, they could travel the country, get up on stage and simply accept messages from the spirit world as passive vehicles.

Suddenly, teenage farm girls were traveling the country as trance mediums, seemingly unconscious on stage as spirits spoke through them about everything from women and children’s rights to marriage reform, ideological individualism, dress reform, socialism, labor reform, and religious freedom. In fact, many women who developed their oratory skills on the Spiritualist circuit later went on to use those skills to become influential women’s rights advocates. Laura de Force Gordon, one of California’s first female lawyers, is one example of this (and she makes a small cameo in the book)!

In this story, Edie and Violet are runaways who join a traveling Spiritualists show. Edie gives trance lectures on stage, as many mediums did during that time, and Violet conducts séances. They are joined by a found family of other young female mediums, all of whom were inspired by real-life Spiritualists of that era, including a medium who performed spirit poetry and another who attributes her musical talent to the spirit world.

Q: What kind of readers might like The Second Death of Edie and Violet Bond?

This is a book for readers who love to be transported into worlds with mystery, magic, adventure, suspense, a lot of heart, and a healthy side of romance. If you enjoy the rich, sweeping historical settings in books like Stacey Lee’s The Downstairs Girl with an added twist of the magical and supernatural that you’ll find in books like The Night Circus or The Secret Life of Addie LaRue, I think you’ll enjoy Edie & Violet’s story.

Q: Who are your favorite authors or influences?

Growing up, Louisa May Alcott and Madeleine L'Engle were my favorite authors. I read all of their books so many times that their influence is absolutely baked into my DNA. (You could say that The Second Death of Edie and Violet Bond is my own version of Louisa May Alcott meets Madeleine L’Engle fan fiction). Both of these authors wrote about messy families trying to love each other despite the things that get in the way—including their own flaws, weaknesses, and fears—and that’s something I always strive to include in my own stories.

Some of my other more recent favorites and influences include The Downstairs Girl by Stacey Lee, The Night Circus by Erin Morgenstern, Bone Gap by Laura Ruby, We Are Okay by Nina LaCour,  The Secret Life of Addie LaRue by V.E. Schwab, Red Hood by Elana K. Arnold, The Gilded Wolves by Roshani Chokshi, Sabriel by Garth Nix, The Raven Boys trilogy by Maggie Stiefvater, The Poet X by Elizabeth Acevedo, Out of Darkness by Ashley Hope Perez, Ten by Gretchen McNeil, The Accident Season by Moira Fowley-Doyle, everything by Tamora Pierce, and In the Shadow of Blackbirds by Cat Winters, to name only a few.

Q: What’s an unpopular opinion you hold?

My big one is that I prefer used books to new books—the more coffee stains and folded down pages the better! Other book-lovers may call this a crime, but I absolutely adore reading a book that’s been well-loved. One of my favorite things to do as a kid was to look at the index card in a library book that listed the names of the previous patrons who checked out the book. I loved wondering about the person was who once turned the exact same page.