The best writing advice I ever got was from one of my college professors: Read authors who are doing the sort of writing you want to do, better than you are doing it.
So, when I began writing Such Sheltered Lives, my research didn’t only include books that touched on the novel’s topics of addiction, eating disorders, the aristocracy, and treatment centers, but also books, movies, and TV shows by writers who had written the sorts of stories I wanted to write better than I knew how to do it.
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Lisa Jewell
I love Lisa Jewell’s thrillers—The Family Upstairs, Then She Was Gone…the list goes on. She’s so skilled at creating not only satisfying and unexpected twists, but also at creating rich characters and settings that feel truly lived-in. Reading her feels like a master-class in thriller writing, and I tried to take those lessons to heart as I wrote Such Sheltered Lives.
Taylor Jenkins Reid
When I got the idea for Such Sheltered Lives, I knew music would be a big part of the story—one of the narrators is a songwriter; another is the daughter of a late GenX rockstar. But I’d never written lyrics before, and I almost felt that I needed permission to include songs in the book.
Luckily, it was around that time that I read Taylor Jenkins Reid’s wonderful novel, Daisy Jones & the Six. Reid’s book showed me that novelists are allowed to write lyrics, too.
Julie Plec, co-creator of The Vampire Diaries
Every few years, I re-watch the CW series The Vampire Diaries, which came out at the height of teenage-vampire-love-triangle popularity. Why do I watch this show time and again? Well, mostly because I loved it during its original run, but also because it is so well-written. (This is a hill I will die on.)
The fast-pace, the memorable characters, the twists—every time I watch it, I’m impressed all over again. It’s obviously a completely different genre from Such Sheltered Lives—or anything else I’ve written, for that matter—but watching TVD taught me so much about pacing, cliffhangers, and surprises.
90s-Era Songwriters
My favorite nineties music was a huge inspiration for this book—while I wrote, I listened to Sarah McLaughlin, Tori Amos, Nirvana, Garbage, Hole, Fiona Apple…and so many more.
Jane Austen
I know Pride and Prejudice and Sense & Sensibility might not be the first books that come to mind when you think contemporary psychological thriller, but that doesn’t mean that Jane Austen didn’t have anything to teach me. To begin with, she’s one of my very favorite authors and reading authors I love always helps me when I’m writing, regardless of the genre. And for another, is anyone better at writing wealth and privilege?
Elizabeth Strout (everything she writes)
Another of my very favorite writers in another genre (literary fiction). I’ve learned so much from Elizabeth Strout’s books (Olive Kitteridge, Anything is Possible, Lucy by the Sea…) about how different the same set of events can look from varying perspectives—a particularly important lesson for a book like Such Sheltered Lives, which has multiple narrators who don’t always experience the same events the same way.
Elizabeth Wurtzel
I read Wurtzel’s memoir Prozac Nation when I was in high school. It was one of the first books I read that centered on the writer’s young adulthood, despite being published for adults. It focused on Wurtzel’s struggles with mental health; she didn’t seem to care whether or not her readers found her “likeable.”
She didn’t always portray herself in the most flattering light, but she was still—in my opinion—incredibly sympathetic and compelling.
The Mitford Sisters
I’ve read multiple books by and about the Mitford sisters (The Pursuit of Love, Hons and Rebels, The Sisters….), each of which helped fuel my fascination with upper-crust British families and the rarefied—but occasionally dysfunctional and somehow cash-strapped—air they inhabit. That fascination led me to create Lord Edward of Essex, one of the narrators of Such Sheltered Lives.
Lucy Foley
Like Lisa Jewell, Lucy Foley is one of my favorite thriller writers. She excels at placing her characters in settings that seem luxurious at first, but quickly become suffocating, as in The Midnight Feast, The Paris Apartment, and The Hunting Party—not unlike (I hope!) Rush’s Recovery, the exclusive treatment center where most of Such Sheltered Lives takes place.
Joan Didion (again—everything)
What is there to say about Joan Didion that hasn’t already been said, by writers much more gifted than I? Everything I read by her inspires me to write better, observe more closely, and read more widely, so no list of the writers who’ve taught me would be complete without her on it.
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