Throwback: Us!

Some things you may not know about Us, which was published this week in 2016! (Note: mild spoilers ahead. Only read these if you’ve already read Us!

As others have pointed out, this is the only true novel-length sequel I’ve written. Yesterday, the novella length follow-up to Understatement of the Year was the same sort of mental exercise, though. I enjoyed writing both!

As a reader, I skip sequels. 🤷‍♀️ That’s why I don’t write many.

This may be my only book where a piece of furniture has such a large plot angle. The Death Chair went into the end of Him on a whim. (Ooh, that rhymes!) But then we had a lot of fun with it.

“Chiweiler” was all Elle. But Blake’s gross Tim Horton’s donut sandwich was my idea, and I’m not even Canadian.

I wrote the first draft of the first chapter, where Blake is introduced. But I felt like I didn’t know him yet. And then Elle wrote his next appearance. Much later—when the whole book was done—I told her that I couldn’t “see” Blake until I read her first use of him. And she said “that’s funny because I saw him right away when you introduced him. #magicisreal

I had fun doing the research on giving [spoiler] a novel flu virus and putting him in that isolation unit at the hospital. (Thanks internet.) And then in spring 2020 I read articles about the way that Covid hospital patients were handled, and the familiarity gave me chills!

Ripped from my real life: in the kitchen, I have to put flags on pans so that I don’t burn my own fool self. It’s a super handy trick that often saves me.

Some people in publishing told me that Him and Us could probably never be published in Catholic-leaning countries like Italy and Spain. They were wrong.