Murder is a pop megastar’s muse in the YA author’s darkly funny adult debut, The First Cut Is the Deepest.
What inspired this novel?
IP development company Bittersweet Books came to me with a concept I was very interested in, but wanted to take in a slightly different direction. They were very patient and allowed me a lot of freedom to just be unapologetically myself. So they kicked off the idea, but what we created is a disturbingly accurate portrait of my own mind.
Did you always intend for the book to be such a comedy?
Always. I have been writing about dark subjects for over a decade. I write about sexual assaults, mental health, addiction—really hard things. And for the last decade, whenever I would do a presentation or a school visit, people would say, Wow, you are not what I was expecting. I’m funny, but my books aren’t. Up until now, I was a very bad walking advertisement for my own books. Now there’s going to be a nice little dovetail where I get to be dark as hell but funny as shit.
What inspired the switch in audience?
I love writing YA because I love being around that age group. They have energy, they give you energy, they’re enthusiastic, they’re unapologetic about the things that they love and hate. But I’ve been publishing for 13 years. My first readers are parents now, right? This concept was put in front of me. I loved it. As soon as I started writing it, what came out was so complete—the first chapter is essentially what I wrote when I first sat down. I just let that ride.
Did you feel any trepidation about making the jump to adult fiction?
I have no trepidations about what I wrote or who I am. We were on submission with this particular manuscript for over a year. Might have been two. We kept getting feedback that it was too much, too hard, too fast, too gory. One person literally called it “grotesque.” Eventually, my agent, John Cusick, put all of the feedback together and emailed me asking how I felt about pulling back. And I said, Did anyone ever tell Chuck Palahniuk that he’s grotesque? John’s amazing, that’s not a stab at him—it’s a stab at society. The people who had a problem with this book, they didn’t have a problem with the content. They had a problem with the fact that a woman wrote it. It bothered them that a woman could have such dark, violent thoughts. So I said, No, I’m not pulling back. And then Daphne Durham, my editor, read it, and was like, I fucking love it—what’s wrong with everybody else? Because I’m still also a YA author, I do have concerns about parents googling me before a school visit. Maybe this book is the one that comes up first, and then there’s a party with signs with my name on them in front of the school. If there’s any trepidation, it’s that.