Los Angeles was actually the missing piece to Jo’s story! I moved to Los Angeles for grad school and didn’t know that much about the city. When I first started trying to learn about the history of Los Angeles to make sense of my new home (admittedly, mostly via murder bus tours, which are not necessarily the same as diving into peer-reviewed research or history), I was struck by how much it felt like the myth of the city eventually just became the history of the place. I thought a good way to approach understanding LA might be to dig into it through a cultural lens, which refired my love of noir. Once I figured that out, I realized that Jo was a perfect femme fatale voice, and the rest of her story clicked into place for me.

Were there any particularly challenging scenes or characters that you encountered while writing? Were there any surprises during the writing process?

Jo’s scene seducing Carrigan was the hardest in the novel for me to get right. I probably wrote more than twenty drafts of that scene, each one maybe a little better than the last (maybe), but none of them right. It was the scene I was working on the longest in the book, but once it was the right version of itself, I knew. That was a very, very satisfying moment.

Did current events or the rise of the Me Too movement have an influence on your writing? Would you define The Lady Upstairs as a feminist novel?

Not as much as you’d think, or at least not in the sense that it was written with the Me Too movement in mind. It’s not like men abusing power or women started with #MeToo, but the movement did put a specific stamp on it. I started writing The Lady Upstairs in 2015, and stories about sleazy Hollywood men capitalizing on the casting couch to assert power over women have been around since Hollywood began. They probably started when the first couch was made, to be honest.

To me, The Lady Upstairs is a feminist novel because it centers on the experience of women—broken, jagged, fucked-up women. That said, they’re also working within the patriarchy, and much of their work and lives do revolve around men—they haven’t broken free of the structure, even if they’re subverting it for personal gain. Jo often prioritizes herself or Lou above the well-being of other women. I don’t know that I think Jo would describe herself as a feminist. I would not describe Jo as a feminist, either.

Sexuality and sex work are forms of both currency and agency in the novel. Why did you want to explore these themes? And why was it important for you to depict queer characters on the page?