Best Offer Wins
Best Offer Wins
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Marisa Kashino on Best Offer Wins
In her own words: quotes and insights from the author.Why she wrote it
A twist arrives before the coffee is pouredKashino had spent 17 years writing at Washingtonian magazine, but a 2022 move into an editing role at The Washington Post took her out of the byline seat entirely. The absence hit harder than she expected.
I did not predict how much I was going to miss writing myself in my day-to-day life. That was what spurred me to try creative writing, which I had never done before.
The actual premise arrived one morning in her kitchen, coffeepot already brewing. She described that moment in a Barnes & Noble essay, and what followed was a reflex she traces directly to her years on deadline.
After 15 years in journalism, I was hardwired to fear getting scooped. If I didn’t sit down and try to write this, I was certain someone else would do it first.
The raw material had been accumulating for years before she ever thought about a novel. Her Washingtonian real estate beat put her inside the pandemic housing boom, where she interviewed dozens of agents and buyers and heard about properties so in demand that sellers opened overnight viewing slots so buyers could book 3 a.m. appointments.
The seed was planted during the years I spent covering real estate as a reporter — including during the particularly unhinged housing market triggered by Covid. I’d never written fiction before, so I signed up for a novel-writing workshop to learn some basics. I was still an editor at the Washington Post at that point, so I worked on the manuscript almost entirely on weekends.
The subject was not only professionally familiar; it pressed on something generational. Kashino positions Margo’s spiral as an extreme version of an experience she watched spread through her entire peer group.
I come from a great family, but not a fancy, wealthy, well-connected family. And when you move to a city like DC, all of a sudden I was surrounded by people that I had never been surrounded by; people that had been born into wealth, and had gone to the same Ivy League schools that their parents went to. They seemed to know so much more about everything than I did.
Kashino says she eventually got over that feeling. Margo, at 37, still has not. That gap between the author and her protagonist is where the novel’s darkest comedy lives.
How she wrote it
Journalism skills in a room with no guardrailsThe first draft was written in what Kashino called three fevered months of shutting herself away on weekends, while still holding her day job at the Post. Speed was partly a matter of anxiety, but it also forced a practical shortcut that shaped Margo as a character.
Because I was writing it very quickly, I did give her some of my own biographical details — just because that required no extra research.
Coming to fiction after nearly two decades of journalism meant discovering what lifted when the professional constraints did. The freedom surprised her.
Having been a journalist for that long, and beholden to the facts and the reporting, to have those guardrails taken off and have the freedom to just make it up — that was so fun.
She had expected the structural habits of magazine writing to be a hindrance in fiction, or at least irrelevant. The opposite turned out to be true, as she explained in a video interview recorded after the book’s publication.
When you’re writing long-form magazine pieces, you are kind of thinking about story structure and keeping a reader sort of engaged until the end and, you know, building the tension and all of those things, and I was very pleasantly surprised to see that those skills were applicable to novel writing too. [paraphrased from audio]
The trickiest problem was keeping readers tethered to a protagonist who does genuinely terrible things. Kashino named this worry openly when speaking to the ABA, and her solution combined two tools: backstory and comedy.
There were many moments when I wondered if I was making Margo too despicable. But I hoped that building out her backstory and giving her a wicked sense of humor would generate some empathy and induce readers to stick around. Because yeah, she does some horrible things and has some appalling views, but funny people are usually at least a solid hang!
One identity choice required particular care. Kashino is Japanese American herself, and she thought of Margo as yonsei (fourth-generation Japanese American), a detail that shapes how Margo moves through DC society without making ethnicity the novel’s subject. She told Joysauce exactly what she was trying to carve out.
I wanted to write a book that was not about being Asian American, but that was centered around an Asian American protagonist, because I think there is a lot of room for that.
The distinction matters in practice: some white readers have still assumed Margo is an immigrant, a misreading that points to the assumptions the book quietly refuses to correct on their behalf.
What she wants us to sit with
A cautionary tale, not a playbookMargo’s rage is the novel’s engine, and Kashino was deliberate about giving it room to run. She told the Daily Trojan that she wanted Margo to do what real women are not permitted to do in public life, and she connected that choice to something she felt well beyond the page.
I think most women feel some degree of rage right now. I know I certainly do, and I think that piece of her character is something that will resonate for a lot of readers.
The housing market is the novel’s arena, but the argument underneath it is generational. Kashino positions Margo’s obsession against a specific historical rupture: a promise made to millennials that homeownership was achievable, followed by decades of evidence that it often is not.
I think there has been a real shifting or there is an ongoing shifting of what the American dream entails. I think most, you know, elder millennials like me, we’re at a point now where we’re trying to hit these adult milestones, and for our parents, homeownership was sort of the centerpiece of the American dream — and for our grandparents. And I think for a lot of this generation, that still has been very unattainable.
The novel makes Margo’s specific version of that pressure visible: the 37-year-old who has done everything right and still can’t close the gap between where she is and where she believed she should be by now. Kashino described that pressure cooker to NPR in terms that double as a diagnosis of the book’s central tragedy.
She is feeling all of the pressures of, you know, a late-30s woman who thought by now she would have the house and the baby and all of these sort of kind of totems of an Instagram-perfect life. And it just has not fallen into place for her as easily or as quickly as she had hoped that it would. For Margo, that pressure cooker leads to a lot of internal rage.
When NPR’s Miles Parks called the book a cautionary tale, Kashino laughed with relief and said she was glad he hadn’t called it a playbook. Her verdict on Margo’s chances of ever finding happiness was blunt: when you put so much weight into material things as the source of fulfillment, she said, that’s a losing game.