Paynesville in the ‘80s was the home to at least two notorious sex offenders and a series of sexual assaults on children that didn’t get solved until 2016. There was also my hometown of Paynesville (a name, by the way, too on the nose to ever make it into fiction). I grew up in a house with swinging parties, drugs, and abuse, where my sister and I were cautioned not to tell because no one would understand our family’s “creativity and genius,” and where my father created in the winding woods glorious art installations alongside booby traps to catch trespassers.

Here are the facts: My father was a Vietnam vet and an alcoholic with PTSD and a sex addiction, and my mother was and still is his wingman. It’s also the true story of my childhood, true in a way that only fiction can be. Unspeakable Things is, I hope, a suspense novel so taut, so incendiary, that it keeps you up long past your bedtime.

But despite having threads of vulnerable honesty, none of my other novels arrowed to the heart of truth like May Day until my latest book, aptly titled Unspeakable Things. I’ve written eighteen novels since, and all of them expose a truth that couldn’t be told so honestly outside of fiction: a character who shares a shameful secret with me, the personal cost of political sexism, the ugly shapes fear takes when it goes unacknowledged. I didn’t want to shatter the good time with the sharp truth: writing it was my cry for help and my search for truth and justice after my world exploded. In the decade between May Day ’s publication and my TEDx, when asked, I’d offer flip, partially true answers about where I’d gotten the inspiration for the book: Minnesota has long winters, I had poor TV reception, why not write a novel? After all, May Day is a comic caper mystery. It took me another ten years to reveal to the world via a TEDx Talk that I’d written it as a response to my husband’s suicide. May Day, my first published mystery, released March 8, 2006.

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