The Haunted Purse follows a teenage girl who stumbles upon an old denim purse in a thrift store that quickly reveals its supernatural abilities with things vanishing and reappearing, adding unplanned complications to her already messy life. What was the inspiration for the setup of your story?

Believe it or not, The Haunted Purse was inspired by a true incident. When my son was a high school junior mulling over college options, we visited an auto technology school three hours from home. After the tour, I couldn’t find my car keys. I searched my purse multiple times, but the keys were nowhere to be seen.

Our tour guide assembled a search team. A dozen students combed the campus for half an hour, but the keys never turned up. The tour guide offered to call a car dealership to see if they could provide a new set of keys. While he was on the phone, I checked my purse one last time…and found the keys. Oh, the mortification! I apologized profusely, and my son and I beat a hasty retreat out of there.

I couldn’t stop thinking about those keys as I drove home. How could I have missed them during my repeated searches? Was I really that dimwitted? Or could there be another explanation? My brain chewed on that question, and by the time I pulled into our driveway, it had come up with an answer: something supernatural was going on. Some mischievous other-worldly being had infiltrated my purse and hidden my keys. I wasn’t an idiot after all—just the victim of some supernatural pranking. Oh, how I wanted to believe that!

And then I thought, A haunted purse. What a great premise for a novel…

In many contemporary coming-of-age fiction novels, authors often add their own life experiences to the story. Are there any bits of you in this story?

An angsty teen still lives inside me, so I was able to channel that spirit while writing the novel. Like Libby, I grew up in a low-income household, so I know what it’s like to want things you can’t have. And Libby’s crush on a classmate is based loosely on my early experiences with crushes and heartbreak. But that’s about it. Most of the stuff in the story is totally made up.

What were some themes that were important for you to explore in this book?

I wanted to explore adolescent friendship in all its intensity, all its messiness. Feminine beauty was also a prominent theme: as Libby discovered, it can be both a blessing and a curse. And I threw in multiple references to Cinderella to reflect Libby’s transformation over the course of the story.

I find a problem in well-written stories, in that I always want there to be another book to keep the story going. Is there a second book planned?

No, this one has a very conclusive ending, so I feel no need to continue Libby’s story.

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