Family Lies and Family Ties: A Conversation with Susan Walter
Susan Walter’s newest novel, Letters from Strangers (Lake Union Publishing, 2025), is a departure from her usual genre. Walter is the author of four suspense novels—Running Cold, Lie by the Pool, Over Her Dead Body, and Good as Dead (Lake Union Publishing, 2024, 2023, 2022, and 2021, respectively)—and the writer and director of the 2017 film All I Wish, starring Sharon Stone. In Letters from Strangers, Susan explores complex family trauma, writing from the viewpoints of a mother and an adopted son. At its heart, the novel is about concealment, expectations, different ways to mother, and characters who forge their own path in search of a more authentic life. It is also a gripping tale of secrets and discoveries. For more information on Susan, visit www.susanwalterwriter.com.
Profiles editor D’Ann Drennan caught up with Walter by email to discuss her book. This interview has been edited for content and clarity.
D’Ann Drennan: You have said this novel is inspired by true events. Are there any details from your personal life that you can share? How difficult was it for you to write a family drama based on your own life?
Susan Walter: Well, I pretty much shared my entire life in this book: you just have to know me to know which parts are true! Okay, maybe not my entire life. But many of the formative parts, for sure.
I wrote the opening chapter, when Jane [the protagonist] gets the call from her mother’s neighbor telling her that her father passed away, with tears streaming down my face, because that’s exactly how it happened for me. I had just gotten home from work, and it was my new babysitter’s first day on the job. I was about to send her home when my phone rang. I remember collapsing onto the floor next to my bed. I couldn’t stop crying. My daughters were 7 and 11, and they came to me, and I held them. I worried that the babysitter would never come back, because what a thing to have happen on your first day. But she was amazing, stayed with the kids until my husband got home. I drove the whole way to my mom’s in a daze, just trying to breathe and not crash. All the emotions Jane experiences—fear, sadness, shock, bewilderment—are drawn from my memory of that surreal day.
Jane is not me, but she is infused with many of my thoughts and struggles. She’s in recovery from an eating disorder, as I am, and I tried to portray that honestly and without too much drama. For so many women of my generation, we lived with disordered eating like you might live with a fear of spiders or a bad knee. As for Jane’s journey, the fertility struggles are made up (to serve the plot), but the trauma she experienced as a teen mirrors something quite serious that happened to me. I can’t tell you what that is without spoiling the read, so I guess I’m off the hook talking about it for now. If you want to know the true story behind the story, you’ll have to take me out for a drink!
As for how difficult it was to write, I would say that once I let go of trying to adhere to the facts and surrendered to what was best for the narrative, the prose just flowed. I got to have a little wish fulfillment—to rewrite the ending of my own tragic tale, in a way. And writing the romance was great fun.
DD: I appreciate that you address the struggles with eating disorders that affect both Jane and her co-protagonist, Adam. So often, we think of eating disorders as “women’s issues.” Tell me more about your process for writing about it. How much did gender affect how you treated the issue? What about the decade in which each character was born?
SW: People ask me all the time where the inspiration for the character of Adam comes from, and I don’t have an answer beyond “that’s how he showed up for me.” Sometimes a character comes in fully formed. When that happens, I try not to question it but rather learn from the journey I get to go on by writing it. I knew I wanted to make Adam an athlete with a steep hill to climb to reach his goals. His compulsive overeating made for a formidable (and pertinent) obstacle, and I felt, if presented truthfully, that it had the potential to make his journey relatable, because haven’t we all struggled to love ourselves exactly as we are? I was warned that writing a character who is adopted, gay, and male when I am none of those things was risky, but I think creators should be encouraged to disappear into every kind of character, because what is there to learn through writing only what you are? Isn’t it better to explore and ask questions?
This book is “period” (dual timeline, 1983 and 2001) because I wanted my characters to exist before conversations about body positivity entered the chat. Anyone who walked through a supermarket in the eighties saw advertisements demanding we eat “fat-free!” and supermodels with perfect, oiled bodies on every magazine cover. Jane Fonda was on TV in her high-cut leotard telling us to dance the extra pounds away, then binging and purging in her dressing room. Even our teachers in school told us we should eat according to some bullshit “food pyramid,” sabotaging our ability to listen to our bodies. No one was exempt from the pressure to be thin, not even kids. Women may have been the poster children for disordered eating, but men were not immune. I wanted readers to experience that through Adam—to give him a realistic-feeling journey so we can be reminded that body negativity is not just a women’s issue. It affects us all.
DD: Jane hero-worships her father and has a strained relationship with her mother. When, as an adult, Jane discovers her father’s letters, her perspective shifts about both her parents. What secrets do you think parents should keep from their children? Are there ever secrets that should never be revealed?
SW: Oh boy. I’m not sure I should answer this question because I am probably the world’s worst secret-keeper! My daughters are 17 and 20 now, and I think they know just about everything about my sordid past. I told them about my debauchery because if they ever find themselves in trouble, I want them to feel safe telling me. I told them about my trauma so they will recognize my triggers and forgive me when I overreact (as I do). Maybe that’s self-serving. But they are both emotionally intelligent, and I trust them as (I hope!) they trust me.
Maybe I also tell them everything because I grew up in a house with a lot of secrets. We lived in a big house, and the doors were always closed. My mother was very private. She never talked about her feelings, and when she cried in front of me, I never knew why. I grew up with a lot of anxiety. I can’t say it was because of all that secrecy, but it certainly didn’t help. Speaking of secrets, those (secret!) letters from strangers at the center of this novel? They exist in real life. My discovery of them after my father’s death is what compelled me to write this book.
DD: You previously have written four suspense novels, and you wrote and directed a film. What made you decide, now, to share your family secrets and wounds and write a family drama?
SW: I started writing this book in 2020, right after I finished my debut, Good as Dead. But when I showed sample pages to my agent, her reaction was mixed, and I knew I wasn’t ready to write it. Mystery thrillers are puzzles and can be tricky to plot out, but in some ways they are simpler because it’s easy to create jeopardy when you have a murderer on the loose. Emotional stakes in a character-driven story are more subtle than the stakes in a thriller (“Don’t open the door!” See what I mean?), and I needed a surer hand to craft them. I learn new things with every book I write and every book I read. I am grateful to my agent for hitting the pause button and giving me time to mature as an author before I tackled this deeply personal story.
DD: What suggestions do you have for other Lit Mamas who want to forge a path in the literary world?
SW: We are all storytellers. Take time to lie on the couch or the grass or the beach, and let your imagination wander. The stories will float in if you let them. My first work of fiction (a movie script) was cobbled together from a series of journal entries—fantasies about a road not taken, a love lost, an unexpected new beginning. Play! And don’t worry about finding the perfect words: that’s what rewriting is for.