“Are you going into witness protection?”
“Are you moving to Ohio or Idaho? Which one has the corn?”
“I don’t believe Iowa is a real place.”
These were some of the milder comments I received when I told people I was moving from South Florida to Des Moines, Iowa. At the time, I was twenty-four years old and working in the same county I had grown up in and always lived in.
People were shocked. Most of them tried to talk me out of it. They thought the idea of trading beaches and luxury condos for endless stretches of cornfields made me clinically insane.
No one I knew had ever even been to Iowa. For months, when I pondered the move, they imitated nasal Minnesota accents and piled on with jokes about ranch and cheese curds. They said I would have nothing to do, and I would hate the people there. They all thought I was making a huge mistake, and I’d be back within the year.
I understood the hesitancy. I felt it. I thought my life was perfect then. I had my dream job and lived in a place that was perpetually eighty degrees and sunny year-round. My Instagram looked like most peoples’ did only on vacation: an endless scroll of technicolor backgrounds, resort-style pools, and outdoor seating.
It was post-pandemic Florida, and people were flocking to the state in droves. A mass influx of northerners who believed Florida was both their salvation and solution for tax evasion. It drove up prices and made renting an apartment or affording car insurance nearly impossible, but still the idea of leaving it all made me physically ill. I was a proud born-and-raised Floridian, who ate a pub-sub a week and wore a uniform of cut-offs and flip-flops.
But my father had received an exciting job offer and he, my mother and my little sister were going to relocate to the Midwest. My family was close, so this left me with a quandary; did I stay in the only place I ever lived, without any family or move to a place I’d never even visited? It was a difficult decision, and I labored over it for months before deciding to move.
The 1,500-mile move from “paradise” to a “fly-over state” would have been challenging for anyone, but for me it also meant leaving a job I adored. I had spent the past five years working as an associate librarian in the library system I had grown up with. It was my dream job, and I was good at it. My co-workers were like family. Moving to Iowa meant giving all of that up and starting over. I convinced myself it would be a new adventure.
The adventure proved more challenging than I expected. While I adored my new loft (yay for affordable housing!) there was definitely an adjustment period. I had to get used to weather changes, learning to drive in snow, and new cultural norms. Iowans are very friendly and almost unnervingly cavalier about crime and personal safety. I had to navigate a new city and try to build a life for myself without the community I had back home.
The first four to five months of my time in Des Moines was challenging, isolating and frankly, lonely. I missed my life back in Florida. I missed my friends and my job. I felt like I didn’t fit in here and worried I’d made a terrible mistake. I stayed up late alternating between reading library books and googling the cost of moving back across the country. I binged the entirety of Girls and almost threw my remote at the screen when Hannah moved to Iowa City and was waxing poetic about how great Iowa was to her coastal friends. It felt like she was personally mocking me.
Simultaneously, my family had completely immersed themselves into their new life in Iowa and were flourishing. They were deliriously happy here and it made me feel strangely othered. How could the people I love, who had the same shared experiences, be so happy when I was so miserable?
I didn’t know anyone in Iowa besides my family and boyfriend (who I had forcefully imported from Florida) and hadn’t made any friends yet, so I decided to pour myself into my lifelong dream of writing a novel. It was something I always wanted to do but never had the time for with my library workload. I figured, if I was going to be miserable, I might as well make something out of it.
My feelings about living a completely different experience than my family poured themselves into my book. I wanted to explore the opposite of my situation; someone forced to return home to a place they despised. I also liked the idea of writing about feeling so completely differently than your family that it makes you question yourself. So, I wrote a story about my hometown of Loxahatchee, Florida and pondered the idea of how close-knit, happy families could be ripped apart by tragedy and differing viewpoints.
The idea for the main character of Nasty Little Secrets was formed out of my desire to spend a few months in the mind of someone more assured and confident. Someone who was dealing with things far worse than I was and taking it in stride. Writing about Florida also helped to ease some of my own homesickness during my grueling first winter in Iowa (and first blizzard).
As a lover of true crime and one of four sisters, the idea began to grow. I became obsessed with the idea of writing about murder and the public’s fascination around victims. Especially within the context of loyalty, family and home.
As I worked on the book, I kept coming up with ideas for new books. Something that had been really hard to do back home. Iowa had inexplicably triggered an outpouring of creativity from me.
While I was in Des Moines, I also tried to put myself out there as much as possible. On the days I wasn’t working on the book, I read and eventually joined a local book club on Facebook. There, I met incredible women who also loved to read and were so nice to me. Within a few months of meeting them, they had become my new community, welcoming me into their lives with open-arms and wholeheartedly supporting my writing dreams.
By this point, I had also discovered Des Moines’ bookish community. There were so many incredible independent bookstores, and they did so many events. I started attending them and made more friends, with readers and bookstore owners alike. There were always new author signings and book clubs. The entire state was almost the size of my old county back home and somehow still had ten times the book-related events and stores. The number of readers in Iowa was insane! It blew my mind and I got deeply involved in the local book community.
By the time I had finished a first draft of Nasty Little Secrets, I had actually slowly grown to love my new city. I had become more familiar with the area I lived and made it a point to try new things. I got the hang of driving in the snow and layering for the cold. By the time Roses’ story concluded, I had zero desire to move back to Florida. I was happier in Iowa, words I never thought I would say.
That January, I applied on a whim to the unpublished authors scholarship to the writing conference Thrillerfest that was shared by the author Karin Slaughter on Instagram. I had followed Karin after seeing her speak at the Des Moines Public Library, right in the depths of those sad, early months. I was eventually awarded the scholarship, went to NYC to attend Thrillerfest and there I met and pitched to my agent and my eventual editor. I spruced up my manuscript with what I had learned, signed with an agent, went on submission and received an offer for my book all within four and a half months of attending.
This was an experience I had only ever heard of because of Karin Slaughter. At an event I attended because I felt so alone and confused, and somehow it had led me on a path that changed my entire life and helped me publish my book. It felt like fate. Like I was supposed to be in Iowa all along to lead me to this journey and all of my worry and hesitation had been for nothing.
After I signed my book deal, my life in Iowa only became more fulfilled. The women I met in book club became my closest friends. The community supported me so much. People I had only met a few times, preordered multiple copies of my books. Local bookstore owners bent over backwards to help me promote it and ordered a case of copies.
I developed routines and found my favorite hidden gems in the city. Des Moines went from feeling like a mistake to feeling like a place I not only liked but loved. Over time, I began to understand what a beautiful place Iowa was.
And I loved it so much that it built my second book from the ground up. When I’d lived in Florida, I had a vague idea of a book about two sisters. I wrote down plot points from time to time but nothing stuck. I really struggled on where to set it. I wanted it to be in a small town, but I didn’t have a concept of what that truly was back then. My hometown of Loxahatchee was considered “small and rural” but in reality it was 40,000 people.
When I’d first moved to Iowa, I worked as a secretary in a small town about an hour from Des Moines. It was a rough commute, but the town was adorable. It was picturesque, with only 10,000 people and a main street that looked straight out of Gilmore Girls. The people were friendly and gave me a crash course on small town living. A kind of life experience that seemed more akin to the Truman Show than the life I’d lived back in Florida.
While it was charming and beautiful, the town was also isolated, incestuous, and full of secrets. It was a trove of inspiration. Suddenly my second book had a setting, and it flowed out of me. Iowa, and specifically small-town Iowa culture became the set dressing and backbone of my second novel.
Two years after my move to Iowa, I had everything I ever wanted; a community, and two books that wouldn’t exist without the move. My life in Iowa had far surpassed my life back home and I was happy. What I had thought would be the worst mistake of my life, ended up being the biggest gift I’d ever been given.
It taught me valuable lessons about perspective and patience. Sometimes things take time, and what might feel like a hardship in the moment, is necessary for your growth.
Without Iowa and that difficult move, I wouldn’t have had the idea for my book or the time and motivation to write it. I wouldn’t have known about the conference that changed my life. I wouldn’t have been in the right headspace to address and explore the topics in my debut novel. My second book wouldn’t exist. And while I am in a much happier and healthier place now, those challenging first few months allowed me to create the story and characters that I did. Now, I love living in Iowa and am grateful for everything the experience has brought me.
Also, much to dismay, the Floridians were right and I did develop a serious addiction to both ranch and cheese curds. That stereotype it turns out, is true.
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