Maggie Auffarth is a lifelong book obsessive and crime fiction enthusiast. She holds a degree in creative writing from Wheaton College and she was a finalist for the Helen Sheehan Book Prize in 2018. When she isn't plotting fictional crimes, she enjoys baking, running, and binge-watching Lifetime movies. She lives in Atlanta.
Auffarth's debut novel is Burn It All.
My Q&A with the author:
How surprised would your teenage reader self be by your new novel?Visit Maggie Auffarth's website.
She’d absolutely be scandalized (I was a pretty sheltered teenager), but I don’t think she’d be surprised. I often joke that every story I’ve ever written explores the same core concept: the relationship between two people, one driven by sadness and one driven by anger – and Burn It All embodies that idea more than most. In fact, my first ever attempt at a novel, which I started when I was fifteen, was about a teenage girl navigating lif in the aftermath of her best friend’s unexpected death, so maybe my teenage self would see Burn It All as the inevitable conclusion of her own groundwork.
Do you find it harder to write beginnings or endings? Which do you change more?
In general, I find beginnings much harder to write than endings. It’s true that there’s nothing scarier than a blank page. (And, if you’re like me, even a new scene or paragraph can be intimidating.) But, once I figure out where my story begins, it almost never changes. The same can’t be said for my endings. In fact, the original ending for Burn It All was completely different than theending I eventually settled on. It took a long time – years, in fact – to find an ending that felt both genuinely surprising and inevitable for these characters.
Do you see much of yourself in your characters? Do they have any connection to your personality, or are they a world apart?
For me, the answer is both. I think it’s impossible to spend so much time creating a character and writing from their perspective and not put at least a little of myself into them, but I don’t think anyone who knows me in real life would recognize me in either of the two main characters in Burn It All – Marley is more calculating than me, and Thea is more perceptive. Even if the characters start with a germ of something that is true to me, they definitely develop their own distinct personalities over time.
What non-literary inspirations have influenced your writing?
I’m always inspired by music, and there are a few key artists, including Hozier and The Neighborhood, whose music was crucial to me when I was drafting Burn It All. I also took a lot of inspiration from movies like Promising Young Woman and A Simple Favor – psychological thrillers about emotionally complicated women trying to take some agency for themselves in a fraught world.
My Book, The Movie: Burn It All.
--Marshal Zeringue