Minotaur Debut Week: Jenny Hollander (9/11/23)

Ready for more thrills, more suspense, and more fun? Welcome to Minotaur Debut Week! Each day for the next week, we will be spotlighting one mystery debut author with forthcoming books that are ready to kill.

We are kicking off Minotaur Debut Week with EVERYONE WHO CAN FORGIVE ME IS DEAD by Jenny Hollander, a page-turning psychological suspense that has one woman trying to escape a horrific event from a haunted past that has finally caught up with her.

Dive into this immersive and sharp thriller, and scroll down to get to know author Jenny Hollander with this Q+A and letter to librarians!

EVERYONE WHO CAN FORGIVE ME IS DEAD is available for download on Edelweiss and NetGalley. LibraryReads votes due by January 1st.

Where is your local library? How have libraries played a role in your reading life?

I just moved from New York to London, so my local library is the gorgeous Clapham Library on Clapham High Street; before that, it was the even more beautiful Park Slope Library in Brooklyn (the architecture alone is worth a visit!).

What’s on your TBR right now?

Like the rest of the world, I just devoured YELLOWFACE by R.F. Kuang, so next up for me is her debut, BABEL. A friend also recommended to me DISORIENTATION, by Elaine Hsieh Chou, so I’ve just added that to my Kindle. And I’ve heard incredible things about THE QUIET TENANT by Clémence Michallon, which just came out.

Tell us about your writing process.

Honestly, I only started writing fiction in 2020, so I’m still figuring it out myself! But when I’m not in editing mode—and self-editing, I’ve learned, is a good half of it—I try to write 600 words each night, usually between 8-10pm or so. The one thing I’d recommend to anyone starting out is to dig up an old computer—I use my battered MacBook Air from 2015—and wipe it clean of everything except for the writing tool you use (I like Scrivener). Mentally, I find it helps to have a computer I associate *only* with writing.

Who’s your favorite character in literature?

It’s a cliché, but Anne Shirley, later Anne Blythe, of L.M. Montgomery’s Anne of Green Gables series. Actually, I have a soft spot for the whole Blythe family, particularly Rilla and Walter. I spent so much time with those books when I was younger, I felt like I was growing up with that family.

Can you describe your debut novel in five sentences?

What if everything you believed about the worst night of your life turned out to be a lie? Charlie Colbert thinks she’s finally moved on from the bloody tragedy she witnessed in grad school—Scarlet Christmas, the tabloids call it. It’s been almost ten years, after all. But when an old classmate reveals plans to make a film about that night, the truth about what Charlie saw—and did—will collide with her shiny present.

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Dear Librarian,

I was a shy kid—socially awkward, physically awkward to an even greater degree, and more connected to characters in books than the world around me. When I was nine, I was diagnosed with dyspraxia, known in the U.S. as DCD, an oft-misdiagnosed developmental disorder formerly known as “clumsy child syndrome.” It would be years before I’d learn, alongside the emerging science on the topic, that my social difficulties were also connected to my diagnosis—but in the interim, I sought solace in libraries.

I have a confession: To this day, my mom finds never-returned library books in my childhood bedroom, or boxed up in the attic. Don’t hate me; I’m sure that kids like me, the kind that joyfully take out dozens of books and then completely forget to return a couple of them, are the bane of your life. (My mom, for what it’s worth, always returns said books, even if they’re twenty years overdue, because my mom is more conscientious than I am.) I was always in and out of libraries as a kid, re-reading old favorites and discovering new friends. (Book friends, not IRL friends. Like I said, socially awkward.) The only time anyone could get me to open up was by asking about the books I was reading—and then they’d have to suffer through long monologues about characters I found frustrating, genres I was trying out, and beloved authors who were taking too long, in my opinion, to write follow-ups.

Now an author myself, as well as a person who has grown out of a lot (though not all) of her social awkwardness, I have more in common with those authors than I do that quiet child with strong opinions about books and only books. But I’ve never forgotten what library books meant to me as an eleven-year-old who was still a long way from establishing her identity—because at least, I thought at the time, that was who I could be: a person who loved books.

Which brings me to my own book, the adult thriller EVERYONE WHO CAN FORGIVE ME IS DEAD. I wrote it during the pandemic, after one of those long, strange, quiet days when I suddenly realised that I hadn’t done the one thing I always promised myself I would—write a book of my own. I hope you like it, and I hope that you know how much what you do means to kids like me.

Love,

Jenny

EVERYONE WHO CAN FORGIVE ME IS DEAD by Jenny Hollander; 9781250890849; 2/6/24