A Court of Mist and Fury
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Sarah J. Maas on A Court of Mist and Fury
In her own words: quotes and insights from the author.
Why she wrote it
The secret she carried through a year of signingsBy the time readers were falling for Tamlin at launch events for the first book, Maas had already finished ACOMAF and was living with the knowledge of exactly where those readers were wrong. She spent roughly a year nodding along at signings, unable to say a word.
One of the hardest things was when the first book came out, I had already written book two, so I knew exactly what was gonna happen with Feyre and Rhys. So having to keep all those little secrets and details to myself during events when readers would come up and be like ‘I love Tamlin!’ and I’d be like, ‘Weeell.’
That silence shaped the book’s architecture: every Tamlin scene in book one was written knowing it would need to survive a second reading, in harsher light.
The Tamlin arc was never a villain reveal bolted onto a sequel. Maas designed both books together as a single argument about what readers accept as normal when they are inside a relationship alongside a character who has normalized it.
I wanted readers to experience book one with Tamlin and his controlling, alpha-male behavior and be like, ‘Oh, it’s kind of the norm,’ and fall in love with him the way Feyre does — not blindly, but accepting that that’s how things are. So then in book two when Rhys comes along and Feyre has her own journey, they can look back at book one and see all those moments where things that kind of got brushed over by Feyre weren’t exactly OK.
How she wrote it
Surprises from the sisters, and a three-day marathonNesta was not planned as a major figure. When Maas began drafting the first book, she wrote the older sisters as functional placeholders, the kind of stock antagonists fairy tales require to make the protagonist’s goodness legible by contrast. The character only became real in a single scene she had not anticipated.
when I wrote A Court of Thorns and Roses, um, when I when I began writing it, I actually just kind of imagined her sisters as these like cardboard cutouts of the typical fairy tale, like evil older sisters. Um, and then as I wrote the novel, I realized I wanted to do more with these two women that had really shaped Feyre’s life. Um, and I really believe that Nesta was kind of a gift to me. [paraphrased from audio]
The moment that unlocked Nesta came in a scene Maas was writing for book one, not book two: Feyre’s return home. What that scene disclosed about Nesta’s behavior while Feyre was gone changed the series beyond ACOMAF.
when Feyre went back home, uh, and we learned that Nesta had tried to go into Prythian to get her, it opened up this whole part of Nesta’s personality that I just didn’t see coming and then wound up shifting the entire course of the series. [paraphrased from audio]
The extended sexual sequence late in the book drew the most reader attention, but Maas was not writing it as spectacle. She was writing a convergence point where the romantic arc and several plot threads arrived at the same moment, and she treated it accordingly in emotional terms.
[The marathon] was the culmination of not just Rhys and Feyre’s romantic relationship, but a lot of the plot points that have come out, and it was a big moment of healing for both of them. It was a very emotional thing for me to write.
Writing those scenes carried its own discomfort. Maas has described needing a glass of wine to get through the first sex scene in the series and feeling watched. When ACOMAF came out, she called her grandmother to suggest skipping those chapters, and received the reply: “Well, that sounds right up my alley.”
The personal thread
The marriage at the center of the Night CourtRhysand’s particular quality of care, the way he makes Feyre feel known and looked after rather than managed, had a direct real-world source. Maas named it at a 2017 Baltimore signing, where she was speaking to fans who had just read the book and wondered where that portrait of a relationship came from.
Rhys’ bond with Feyre is inspired by the bond I feel with Josh. It’s because of him that I can only really write about true love, because I have it every day. He takes care of me while I’m in the writing cave, feeding me and making sure I shower.
emiesnook.wordpress.com, “Meeting Sarah J. Maas! (Again) – Prose and Purls”That proximity between the fictional and the personal came at a social cost. After ACOMAF published, readers fixated on its most explicit scenes, and Maas’s family was reading alongside everyone else.
One of the most mortifying moments of my career was, I think, after ‘A Court of Mist and Fury,’ my mother-in-law pulled me aside. She goes, ‘Were all those scenes inspired by you and Josh?’ I wanted to just walk into traffic. I was like, ‘No, Linda, they are not.’
What she wants us to sit with
The mark that power always leavesFeyre enters ACOMAF broken by events Under the Mountain, the Fae realm’s underground prison where the first book’s climax takes place, and Maas refused to let the narrative treat that damage as a detail to move past. She described the decision as following an internal logic about what it costs to be a character in stories like these.
It felt like a natural thing for my characters to face emotional consequences. The fate of the world sometimes is on their shoulders. That’s going to leave a mark on them. [paraphrased from audio]
Feyre’s recovery across ACOMAF is also the clearest expression of what Maas has described as her consistent interest in female characters who resist a single read. The feminism she discusses here was not imposed as a theme after the fact; it emerged from who the characters turned out to be.
I’ve always been drawn to writing women that can’t be placed in any definable category. … They can be very feminine, but then also go kick the you-know-what out of the bad guy and save the world and look good doing it.
On Tamlin specifically, she put it plainly: “Even in the world of ACOTAR, his behavior is not really OK by any means. I had to pull apart that alpha male type, and see what makes them tick and where that comes from and explore that really dark, controlling side of someone.”