I was writing the final chapters of The Wrong Family when the pandemic hit and we went into lockdown. And if you’ve read that book you know it takes place in an old, dark house. My brain needed a vacation from not only pandemic gloom, but the setting of my last novel in general. So, I decided to set the next book in Las Vegas...and what do you know? It rains while they’re there. Sorry, not sorry.

5. You write about strong, complex women who are flawed in a very human way. Can you speak a little about the book’s feminist themes?

To me, that is all women: strong, complex, organically flawed. What I like to examine in my books are the ways our complex personalities overlap in society. In my last two books I wrote about how they overlap in a negative way, so this time I went in a different direction. I wanted to showcase a female bond that surpassed circumstance and situation. There is a choice being made in this book to do what is right regardless of how dangerous it is.

6. We see a lot of similar behavior and beliefs from men who lead cults. Was Taured inspired by anyone in particular, either from real life or fiction, or is he more an amalgam of these kinds of men?

Cult leaders of the ’70s and ’80s never seemed to plan ahead; their impulse-driven personalities were the draw to many of their followers. So, I thought: What would happen if there was a cult leader playing the long game back then? Taured’s goal was to raise the children in his cult to be his true loyalists. He was working with progression, not against it, which makes him a different kind of ’80s or ’90s cult leader.

7. Lorraine, Rainy’s mother—while only in the “Past” sections, nonetheless looms large in this story. Talk to us about her character.

Lorraine escaped her controlling religious family only to walk into a different type of controlling religious family. She represents the cycle women become stuck in. She was always willing to take action to change her circumstance, but she was often forced to make decisions out of desperation. No matter her mistakes, she loved her kid. She was a doer, and that’s what Rainy absorbed from being around her.

8. For you, what is the most important thing for readers to take away from this story?

Strength.

9. Your characters’ names are always so interesting and memorable. How do you come up with them?

I named Rainy after Mt. Rainier in Washington State. My own name means tower or hill in Gaelic and I wanted her to be a mountain of a force. Braithe was a shortening of the last name Braithwaite, which I thought was beautiful. The rest just fell in my head at the right time.

The Wrong Family

by Tarryn Fisher

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