By Any Other Name follows a struggling young writer who is horrified when she happens upon a novel in an airport bookstore that is certainly based on her own unpublished manuscript. What drew you to explore authorship and ownership through the structure of a mystery?

I found out last spring that my work had been included in one of the online datasets that had been illegally downloaded to train AI language models. So authorship and ownership were heavy on my mind as I was writing the story. It was a helpless feeling knowing that my work had been taken, and not knowing what (if anything) there was to be done about it, and I leaned into that in crafting a mystery that tried to answer those questions: How did this happen? What can I do about it?

Were there particular mystery writers or literary thrillers that influenced your approach?

I’ve listened to a lot of John Grisham audiobooks on road trips, but I admit I otherwise don’t generally read a lot of mystery/thrillers. I have a TON of respect for serial mystery writers, especially now that I have completed my own. It’s hard to be clever and come up with plot twists, red herrings, and “whodunits?” that readers don’t see coming. One thing that was stylistically important to me in writing this mystery was that it fit real life. I didn’t want my protagonist to have help from unlikely sources. No best friend who happened to have access to the DMV database. No dad who used to work for the FBI. No former college roommate who happened to be into surveillance. Just the tools that most of us would have at our disposal – like Google search and social media stalking.

Which scene was the most satisfying to write?

The reveal of who Beatrice Mitchell was was particularly satisfying because I knew it would be the payoff for the reader. It’s the moment they get to find out if any of their hunches are right, and I enjoyed crafting a scene that answered all the questions and tied up the loose ends (while still leaving some intrigue for the final 50 pages!) I also love writing a good breakup scene, and I got one of those in there, too.

The novel seems especially suited for book club conversations. What discussions do you hope it inspires?

The book is ultimately about authorship and creativity, and I think we live in a time where the importance of that (and what it even means to create or author something) is really being questioned and tested. I hope it inspires people to value the time, effort, energy, and heart that authors pour into their work, but maybe more importantly, I hope it inspires people to value the creative process as a whole – including how it shows up in their own life, the writing they do, and the stories they have to share. We now have the ability to have a textbox on the internet to tell our stories for us, and I hope people talk about the dangers of that. And I hope people resist. Not because AI is inherently evil all on its own, but because storytelling is the most innate thing we do as humans, and if we give that up, then who are we?

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