"I didn't realize that I was writing such a morally complicated protagonist when I started..."

USA Today bestseller Lauren Ling Brown on flexing her screenwriter chops, finding a book's central dilemma, and her unputdownable campus thriller, SOCIETY OF LIES

Check out the collection of past Words With (Author) Friends, wherein I g-chat with an author and you get to read over my shoulder, and order Lauren’s new dark academia, out now.

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Lauren: Hello!

Me: Hello! Thanks for figuring out G-chat for me!

Haha I can't believe I've never used this before

I LOATHE Slack so here I am

Yes, me too

How are you? Huge congrats on SOCIETY OF LIES! What a debut!!!

I'm doing well! Thank you so much!

It was such a whirlwind!!

You're about two months out, I think—are things finally slowing down?

Yes, in some ways it has slowed down! It was so exciting to meet the other Reese's Book Club authors and do bookstore events, but I'm enjoying being back in my cozy little den and working on book two now

For anyone who's been living under a rock, can you share what SOCIETY OF LIES is about?

Haha of course! Society of Lies is a dark academia set at Princeton about two sisters, born ten years apart, who get involved in the same secret society...When the older sister, Maya, returns to campus to see her younger sister, Naomi, graduate, she learns that her sister has died. And Maya is convinced that the secret society had something to do with it.

Such a great hook! Where'd you get the idea for it?

Thank you! Well, I actually tried to write the core idea as a screenplay about ten years ago when I was in grad school at USC. My writing had a long way to go...so when I returned to the concept over the pandemic and wrote it into a book, I drew inspiration from a lot of things: how I felt like an outsider growing up Black and Chinese, my relationship with my siblings...the state of the world.

Okay, I LOVE hearing about pandemic projects. Did the lockdown affect the story, do you think?