“I think that it all goes back to childhood. I’ve always really been writing about family. I suppose we always are. I do think that it is the original wound, and it's where we are kind of wired and built from those early years. So I think every other relationship just replicates that. It's very natural for me to go there, I suppose because the feelings are most intense there. We just keep recycling these relationships and dynamics over and over again—until maybe someday we can catch ourselves and try to break the bad patterns. It feels the most visceral and real to me, always. You're always looking for that in writing. You want everything to be at this peak intensity, or at least I do. That seems the most natural place to start.

I've thought about that a lot while writing the book. We really are in the age of the grifter, as they keep saying. In some ways, it's the most deeply American type, the hustler of American aspiration. And money, I think that was hovering in my head when I wrote the book. How women persuade and convince one another of things feels particularly complex to me. I think there are so many layers to female relationships. That was really interesting to me to pursue because, in some ways, it's much more veiled and complex. So I tend to write about groups of women a lot, regardless of the field, but particularly the way they communicate or don't communicate, or communicate without words to one another, is an ongoing fascination of mine.”

Megan Abbott is the Edgar award-winning author of twelve crime novels, including Beware the Woman, You Will Know Me, Give Me Your Hand, and the New York Times bestseller The Turnout, the winner of the Los Angeles Times Book Prize. She received her Ph.D. in English and American literature from New York University, and her writing has appeared in the New York Times, the Guardian, the Paris Review and the Wall Street Journal. Dare Me, the series she adapted from her own novel, now streaming on Netflix. Her latest novel, El Dorado Drive, is available June 24, 2025.

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“The more that you have that evolving relationship with the natural world, that's dynamic and alive to the moment you're in, and that's not afraid of the feelings of fear, hopelessness, grief, or pain that attend paying close attention to the world as it is evolving around you, the better we are able to be flexible in the relationship we need to form with fixing what we can and holding onto what we have. The more we rely on that black-and-white thinking of either being in grief or being out of it, where we have a loss and we have to move on, or we don't and we're fine. The more that happens, the more difficult it is to flow into what we really need in terms of emotional flexibility to get through the staggering changes that are starting to happen regarding climate issues.”

Eiren Caffall is a writer and musician. Her work on loss, oceans, and extinction has appeared in Orion,Guernica, The LA Review of Books, Al Jazeera, and the anthology Elementals. She has received a 2023 Whiting Creative Nonfiction Grant, a Social Justice News Nexus fellowship, and a 3Arts Make a Wave grant. Her work includes her memoir The Mourner’s Bestiary, the short film Becoming Oceanthatshe made with Scott Foley, and her novel All the Water in the World.

Episode Website

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Instagram:@creativeprocesspodcast