"It's like I've been trying to say something for a long time, and now I've finally said it."

Bestselling author Kimberly McCreight on plumbing ultra-personal depths, unlocking new levels of bravery, and her brilliant new thriller, LIKE MOTHER, LIKE DAUGHTER

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 Kimberly’s rich and nuanced new thriller, out now!

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Me: Kimberly, hi!!

Kimberly: Hi there!

Thanks so much for chatting with me, and huge congrats on LIKE MOTHER, LIKE DAUGHTER!

A national bestseller!!

How are you feeling post-launch?

Still feeling a little mid-launch! I have a taping with CBS New York for the Book Club and an event in Chicago on Thursday. Because of summer it's been a more spread out book launch than normal!

Wow, congrats! Is that...good or bad? lol

When anyone wants you to do anything related to a new book it is ALWAYS good, right? Only bad thing is when no one wants you to do ANYTHING. It's restful but way more stressful.

That's true! And having a long tail for publicity is definitely great. Just as long as it wasn't cutting into your Greek vacation or anything.

No work at all on vacation, luckily! Unless you count the unavoidable thinking about all the problems laying in wait in next book!

That's inevitable! Vacations are good for solving plot holes, I think.

I know you've got a lot going on today, so I want to talk about Like Mother, Like Daughter! Can you share what it's about?

Yes! The book opens with Cleo an NYU student reluctantly returning home for dinner in Park Slope, Brooklyn. She arrives to find food burning on the stove and a bloody shoe under the couch and no sign of her mom Kat. Something terrible has obviously happened, but what? Once very close, the two have been estranged for months. And there is a lot Kat has been keeping from Cleo. The book is narrated from both Cleo's perspective after the disappearance and Kat's in the days leading up to it. And, for sure, it's a mystery and I hope people find themselves staying up way too late turning the pages. But it's also a love story -- about a mother and a daughter trying to find their way back to each other before it's too late.

Your mysteries are always so richly layered and emotional! Where'd the idea for this one come from?

A conversation with my older daughter several years ago. She was sixteen at the time and asked how I knew that her dad was "the one." At the time, I knew that our marriage was over. Something that wouldn't have been at all obvious to her -- there was no fighting or anything like that. And I thought: "Oh no, she's going to realize I don't have all the answers if I got this whole 'the one' thing wrong in my own life!" From there, though, the idea developed into really being a question of how we at mid-life again face many of the questions our daughters (and sons) do in late teenaged years. And at that intersection -- and how we navigate it -- seemed to me to lie great fodder for the book. So that was the initial spark -- obviously there was much development from there!

I LOVE that! I love exploring points where you seem to come back to the same fundamental questions. (I had some joke in The Lost Night about your postgrad years being a second adolescence in that sense.)

How did you go about shaping a mystery out of that tension?