"I held back from actually writing it for a WHILE because I was like, '...do I actually have the writing chops to execute this idea?'"

Megan Collins on stretching the limits of likability, turning a love story into something sinister, and her wonderfully twisty thriller, CROSS MY HEART.

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 Megan’s buzzy new novel, available now.

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Me: Hi hello!

Megan: hiiiii

How's it going? How are you feeling post-launch? Are you still on a high from your book getting THREE (3) recs in the New York Times???

Things are starting to calm down now! As you know, pub week is a lot of just...fielding social media notifications and tags. It was definitely a very exciting week. Never in a million years did I think the NYT would mention CROSS MY HEART three times (just getting a review was already so incredible)!

So great and so well-deserved! I loved this twisty, genre-blending thriller. Can you share what it's about?

Thank you! And of course. CROSS MY HEART is about a heart transplant recipient who becomes romantically obsessed with her donor's husband—even as rumors swirl that he might have had something to do with his wife's premature death. My editor likes to say it's "YOU'VE GOT MAIL by way of Gillian Flynn" (which is my favorite description ever), and I often describe it as being about a woman who fervently believes she's living a romcom, only to discover it's actually a thriller.

Such a unique and grabby premise. Where'd the idea come from?

A loooong time ago, like 2008, I came across an article about two people connected by a heart transplant. I believe it was the widow of a man whose heart got donated, and the man who then received that heart. At the time, I became so fascinated by that connection, which is simultaneously special, intimate, and emotionally fraught, and I started working on a book based on it, which was a straight-up love story. And when I say "started working on," I mean I wrote like two pages and then abandoned it.

But the idea of two people connected by a heart transplant stayed with me forever after that (it's so potent with metaphors!), and once I started publishing thrillers, my mind looped back around to it and thought of a way to turn it from a regular romance into something much darker and more suspenseful.

Fascinating! Rife with metaphors for sure. I loved how this book looked at parasocial relationships and "crazy" women and kinda took on the societal pressure women feel to find a man. (Or am I projecting my own baggage onto the plot?)