Because I Killed Him
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Edith Birde on Because I Killed Him
In their own words: quotes and insights from the author.Why they wrote it
The story as their only statementEdith Birde declines all interviews and public appearances, a stance that is itself a creative position. The refusal to explain themselves outside the text is not evasion but policy, and the policy has a rationale.
We want readers to step into this world, connect with its characters, and immerse themselves fully without our voices shaping or influencing that experience. In many ways, we feel we are already saying everything we wish to say through Because I Killed Him and the books that will follow in the series.
The book, in other words, is not a vehicle for ideas they hold elsewhere. It is the only place they have chosen to speak.
The Civilized World, the novel’s Art Deco-inflected society organized around genetic caste, did not arrive from a single idea. The authors named the inputs directly, and the list maps onto the book’s two distinct registers: its aesthetic surface and its political logic.
Their debut novel, Because I Killed Him, drew inspiration from travels across Europe and interests in history, architecture, technology, political theory, philosophy, foreign languages, and the Jazz Age.
Writing under a shared pen name, the sisters are both mothers with young children. Anonymity was a practical choice, but it also opened something in the writing itself, and they have been specific about what.
There’s a freedom in anonymity that allows us to write more honestly and boldly. But more than anything, we’ve always been drawn to the idea of letting the work stand apart from us. Without a face attached, the story belongs entirely to the reader. It becomes something more personal and hopefully more immersive. If you’d like to know who we are, you’ll find us in the pages. We very much exist there.
How they wrote it
700 pages and a generational mapAt close to 700 pages, the novel sits well outside the range most traditional publishers will carry without cuts. The authors reached the self-publishing decision early, and the reasoning was structural rather than ideological.
Given that Because I Killed Him is a longer novel, we knew early on that pursuing traditional publishing would likely require significant word count reductions. Those kinds of cuts would have changed the story’s structure and limited our ability to develop the later books planned for the series. Rather than compromise the narrative, we chose not to query literary agents and instead moved forward with self-publishing from the beginning.
The novel centers on Loredana and Edmund, but before those two characters could exist on the page, the authors worked out the generation that preceded them. The Dandies, Bruce Waldsten’s student friend group that includes both sets of parents, appear only briefly in Book One. The authors had nonetheless mapped their entire history.
We’ve spent a lot of time plotting the history of the Dandies: their friendships, their conflicts, the things they did to one another, and the things they did for one another. Some of those choices were good, others weren’t, and decades later, the consequences are still unfolding.
Each chapter in the novel opens with a quotation attributed to a named character. Readers encountering the book for the first time are likely to read these as decorative, but the system is load-bearing across the full series.
Most of the chapter-header quotes in Because I Killed Him come from characters you meet within the story itself, while others are attributed to unfamiliar names. Some belong to characters you’ll never meet, but many belong to people who will be introduced in Book Two or later in the series.
What they want us to sit with
An introduction, not a conclusionThe intergenerational structure of the novel is not background; it is the architecture. On their Substack, describing why the Dandies matter to readers of Book One, the authors stated the premise of the series in a single sentence.
The friendships, grudges, loyalties, betrayals, loves, and hatreds of one generation have left their fingerprints all over the next.
On their book club page, the authors ask readers to consider what conversation the book might inspire, a question they leave pointedly unanswered. The Substack gives a clearer signal about what they expect those conversations to be waiting for. Delivered through the Tattler, a fictional narrator the authors write as a narrative device, they framed Book One’s relationship to the series as a whole.
Because I Killed Him is merely an introduction, and Book Two is where the Civilized World’s best-kept secrets begin to surface. [paraphrased from Edith Birde’s Substack, “Spilling Book Two’s Secrets”]