It was the golden years of magazines at Condé Nast and K.T. Nguyen was living the good life as a writer for Glamour. She was surrounded by Manhattan glitz where she attended New York’s coveted Fashion Week and covered beauty and fashion trends. Black town cars would pick her up in the evening from her Midtown office when she worked late. She’d fly to California to conduct celebrity interviews. She once slipped out unnoticed from a rubber chicken awards banquet and raced across Manhattan in Gucci heels to interview RFK Jr. They had a serious conversation about global warming and the environment. She ran into Vanity Fair Editor Graydon Carter in the hallways of Condé Nast headquarters and stepped into the elevator with Anna Wintour, editor of Vogue.
“I didn’t know I wasn’t supposed to get in the elevator with her. In a lot of ways it was like going into book publishing because I didn’t know what I was doing. I just did it.” And that has been part of her success––her fearlessness in the face of the unknown.
But there was more to it than that. What the world didn’t see behind her professional sheen was what she did––or didn’t do––when she rode the subway, entered her apartment, and immediately washed her hands, undressed, and showered. She was constantly asking herself, what if? What if this person who sat on the subway seat before her was a rapist or a murderer? What if the seat were contaminated with blood or semen? Time and time again, unsavory thoughts would cram her brain and distract her from living. Doubts would sometimes paralyze her so she couldn’t leave her apartment because she knew she’d have to shower all over again. Thoughts in her brain made her repeat many behaviors to the point of total distraction. Sometimes she just couldn’t function.
“I have disgust-driven Obsessive Compulsive Disorder (OCD),” she says. “No one at the magazine knew. They just thought, ‘Oh, she’s a little germophobe.’…It’s paralyzing. It’s been called the doubting disease, because you’re always doubting yourself.”
OCD is a pattern of unwanted, intrusive thoughts, which lead to repetitive behaviors that become a barrier to daily living. Ultimately, a person feels driven to compulsive acts to ease their stress. Even if a person tries to ignore or rid themselves of bothersome thoughts or urges, they come back, which leads a person to act based on ritual and becomes a vicious cycle.
K.T. says if she were driving in the country and passed a cat on the side of the road, she would feel compelled to stop, turn around and make sure she hadn’t hit it. She’d even inspect the car tires for signs of fur or blood just to be sure. Behaviors like this caused her constant stress. From age twelve to thirty-one, she struggled. It wasn’t until her daughter was born that she finally sought professional help. She was one of three million Americans who struggle with the affliction, but which she has now overcome for the most part with help from a specialist.
“The doubts are persistent and unyielding. I felt like a prisoner in my own body. That’s what OCD is. You’re trapped in this endless cycle of rituals and intrusive thoughts. Through medication, I manage the thoughts today and I don’t listen to them. They have a lot less power.”
In 2020, during the Covid epidemic, she decided to write down some of those thoughts. The beauty of her debut novel in 2024 is that while her protagonist, Annie Shaw, is an unreliable narrator, she’s never lying or hiding anything from her reader. The reader is sitting next to her in the front seat of her OCD rollercoaster while Annie is doubting everything, uncertain of what’s coming next or what just happened. And thus, the title of K.T. Nguyen’s debut novel –You Know What You Did. Its subtitle: If Thoughts Could Kill…
Her novel begs the question.
“Because I have the condition, I’m able to write about it pretty vividly. It’s amazing what OCD can do to make you not sure of what you did.”
A lot of people, however, were quite sure of what she did. So, catch your breath for a moment before you continue:
Booklist described the novel as “a twisty horror-filled thriller” and an “incredibly compelling debut.” You Know What You Did was selected as a People Magazine Best Book of April 2024. It was named Best Mystery and Thriller Book of 2024 by Elle magazine, Deadly Pleasures Mystery Magazine, BookBub, and Parade magazine. Her debut was nominated by Left Coast Crime for a Lefty Award for Best Debut Mystery and by Mystery Readers International for a Macavity Award for Best First Mystery. It won an Agatha Award at Malice Domestic for Best First Novel and an Anthony for Best First Novel (Bouchercon – the world’s largest mystery readers gathering).
The accolades focus on an author who admits she didn’t know what she was doing and only learned later. So how then did she do it? How did she overcome her OCD to become an award-winning novelist on her first try?
K.T. grew up in Newbury, Ohio, little more than a crossroads at the time. Her family were refugees following the Vietnam War. Her father was a fighter pilot for the South Vietnamese military while her mother was an interpreter and radio operator for U.S. forces. Her mother and four siblings were once in a North Vietnamese prison camp. Many relatives, whom K.T. never knew, were killed in the war. Her mother was pregnant when the family escaped and were housed in a refugee camp in California. K.T.–Kim Tram–was born. She was nicknamed Phinh, “the little one,” because she was so much younger than her four siblings.
The family soon moved to the small town in Ohio, where they were the only non-white people in a rural community of farmers and factory workers. Her dad found a job in a Cleveland auto parts factory, where he became a foreman and later, manager. After K.T.’s older siblings moved out of the house, her parents divorced. Her family shrank from seven to two in a short time.
There were undertones of bigotry in Newbury and K.T.’s strict, controlling mother kept a tight rein on her. She had few friends. So, her mother brought stacks of books home for her. “Not many classmates wanted to associate with me…I read nonstop. I was reading all the time.”
Before she graduated as valedictorian of her fifty-student high school class, she worked in the local library, something she also did while in college. “My first three jobs were working in a library. That’s where I felt at home.”
She attended Brown University, an elite Ivy known for its wealthy, jet-setting student body. But she wasn’t intimidated. “I had no idea of what I was getting into. It’s like writing a book. If you have no idea, it’s not intimidating.”
She grew up eating with chopsticks and while at Brown, was soon invited to a university dinner with Vietnam’s Ambassador. She quickly had to learn American dining etiquette. “It was like the movie ‘Pretty Woman.’ You had to eat properly with a knife and fork and place settings. It was all new to me.”
Recalling the fancy dinner reminded her of when her mother took her to apply for kindergarten back in Ohio. “My mother didn’t know I could speak English until the teacher asked what was my favorite color. I said sky blue. My mother was shocked.” Even though she had grown up in an isolated household speaking Vietnamese, K.T. had absorbed English from watching television. “When you grow up as a refugee, you have to learn everything.”
After college she went to New York City and found writing and editing jobs in magazine publishing. It was there she honed her story-telling skills. She first worked at Fitness Magazine before moving to Glamour, where the visual arts and media studies major spent most of her magazine career. When she was first interviewed by Glamour’s executive editor, Jill Herzig, K.T. admits, “It was for a beauty writer position, and I didn’t know a lot about the topic.” But she had an in-depth conversation with Herzig about popular culture, politics, and Ronald Reagan’s years in the White House.
She was hired.
“It was a pretty exciting time. We were in our twenties and the editors were in their thirties and we thought they were so old…You don’t have a good perspective at that age.”
She eventually left the magazine world and worked in marketing and branding in California. Back in NYC many of her friends had landed book deals and screenwriting gigs. She finally moved to the D.C. suburbs with her family when her husband got a new job.
Up until this point, her writing had all been magazine journalism and marketing. No fiction contemplated, not even a novel. And then the Earth stood still. “I thought during Covid I’ll just give it a try. So, I wrote a little every day and it just became this book.”
She was reading thrillers tinged with horror, so that was the path she followed. She read only one book on fiction writing, Stephen King’s On Writing: A Memoir on Craft. It was the only prep work she did for crime fiction. She liked King’s book, she says, because it wasn’t all about craft but more about getting your head around writing.
She avoided investigating everything about the publishing process because, “It’s very negative. So, I didn’t listen to that. I didn’t know what I didn’t know. So, I just wasn’t intimated.”
Instead, she spent a lot of time as a fitness buff, exercising two hours a day, five days a week. She takes classes in Jiu Jitsu, Krav Maga (Israeli military self-defense), and Muay Thai (kick boxing and sparring). It’s a wonder she found time to complete her first draft in ten months.
Not sure of her footing in the agent hunt and publishing process, she asked a former colleague from the magazine business who had become a successful author and writing coach to review her query letter and guide her through the process. K.T. started small, sending just sixteen queries. Within six weeks, nine agents asked for a full manuscript and three offered representation. She chose Stefanie Lieberman of Janklow & Nesbit, and it wasn’t long before Stefanie sold her novel to Dutton, a Penguin Random House imprint.
K.T. is both a writer and an artist. “I had the luxury of being involved with the cover. The cover artist, Vi-An Nguyen, was wonderful.” They went through more than 20 versions before deciding on a haunting vision of a Vietnamese woman’s reflection in dark water.
During the publication journey, people would ask if her manuscript was “a mental health book or is it about Asian people?” K.T. says. “They wanted it to be a one-thing book and it’s not. I’m not one thing. People are complex…I like crime fiction and am inspired by Elmore Leonard because I like the misfits. That’s more interesting to me than solving a puzzle.”
You Know What You Did is pure psychological thriller. It has a compelling build, making it difficult to put down even at times when the action is confined to the protagonist’s head. And then it explodes into pure thriller mode.
It sold well as a debut but never escaped the label of midlist. If it ever gains the recognition it deserves, bestseller status is the territory where it should reside someday. The plaudits and nominations can’t all be wrong.
Her next manuscript, on which Dutton has first dibs, does not have an OCD protagonist, although K.T. doesn’t rule out the possibility in a future novel. Instead, she’s working on a dark, comedic thriller drawing on her experience in the fashion and beauty world. Her experience in branding also seeps into the plot.
And so here is a woman who was never intimidated by the super-competitive consumer magazine world of high fashion or the book publishing universe because she deliberately ignored their rules of engagement and initial barriers to entry. Yet she’s a woman who was wracked with doubt and intimidated––and nearly incapacitated––by her own thoughts and actions, which she couldn’t ignore. By using her own insights, she now appears on the verge of becoming that rare original voice in book publishing.
She may have doubted herself, but no one’s doubting her now.
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You Know What You Did
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Start to Finish: 10 months
I want to be a writer: Age 44
Experience: Magazine writer, editor. Corporate branding, marketing director.
Agents Contacted: 16
Agent Responses: 9 requests for full. 3 offers of representation.
Agent Search: About 6 weeks.
Time to Sell Novel: A couple of months
First Novel Agent: Stephanie Lieberman, Janklow & Nesbit
First Novel Editor: Lindsey Rose
First Novel Publisher: Dutton Books PRH
Inspiration: Everything that doesn’t quite fit. The weird. The eccentric. Gladys Mitchell, Edmund Crispin, Shirley Jackson, Joyce Carol Oates, David Sedaris.
Advice to Writers: Write the story only you can write. Then write the next one and the next. Persist.
Website: https://www.ktnguyenauthor.com/
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