Our Fault
Our Fault
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Mercedes Ron on Our Fault
In her own words: quotes and insights from the author.Why she wrote it
A protagonist she couldn’t find on the shelfBefore she was a writer, she was a reader who outpaced her household budget. The practical solution she landed on at home in Buenos Aires would eventually become a trilogy sold in dozens of countries.
The truth is that I fell in love with reading. Obviously, writing comes from reading. And I read books so quickly that my mother couldn’t buy me so many because they literally lasted two days. That’s when I said, ‘Why don’t I write my own stories that don’t cost money?’
Once she started writing, she found the genre she loved had a problem she kept running into: the girls in those books weren’t anyone she wanted to follow. Noah, the protagonist of the Culpables trilogy, was her correction.
When I was reading books, I didn’t find that so much. That’s why I wrote Noah, because I really wanted a girl who could ride a car and win a race, someone who isn’t afraid to give her opinion and speak loudly.
By the time she came to write the trilogy’s closing book, Ron had a structural obligation the first two volumes didn’t carry: the reader needed a reckoning, not just a reunion. She described the emotional logic behind that choice in an interview tied to the film release.
Writing the third book for me was important to the reader to understand what was going on, like, they needed to forgive each other. You know, they’ve been through a lot of things, and the past has been really tough for them. So, to see Nick forgiving Noah and giving love a chance to end up in a good way — it was important. But as well, I really wanted people to see them separate, like how their lives were going without them being together. And it wasn’t very good, so I think they’re better together, you know? [paraphrased from audio]
The separation wasn’t a detour from the romance arc. It was the evidence she needed to make the reconciliation feel earned rather than inevitable.
How she wrote it
Rejection, Wattpad, and a film in her headShe finished the first Culpables book at nineteen and spent close to two years sending it to publishers before a single door opened. What kept her going was a conviction about the audience, not about the industry.
I would receive rejection letter after rejection letter from publishers. In those moments it’s tough to keep going, but I really believed there was an audience for my story.
Wattpad, the serialized fiction platform where readers respond chapter by chapter as the author posts, gave her a feedback loop that traditional publishing never would have. The result was immediate: she had an audience before she had a contract.
I wrote the book when I was 19. I tried to publish it in the traditional way, but no answer came to me. So I put it on Wattpad, and I think that people were thankful to have a book that I had worked on so much, and they welcomed it very well. And a year later, I was offered the trilogy.
The step-sibling setup attracted the most commentary from critics and readers alike, but Ron frames it as a decision about architecture, not provocation. Forced proximity keeps two people who would otherwise avoid each other in constant contact, and that contact is the engine of the whole trilogy.
I just wanted them to be living under the same roof. Of course, they are not related, so for me, it was fine.
She was studying audiovisual communication at the University of Seville while writing the books, and the two tracks were never separate in her mind. When the Prime Video adaptation eventually happened, it fulfilled something she had been imagining since before the first draft was finished.
I wrote the book thinking about picturing it becoming a film someday.
In Our Fault, the third book, Nick and Noah are no longer teenagers navigating a new household. Ron saw that shift as a creative opportunity: the enemies-to-lovers dynamic that opened the trilogy could now run between two people with real history and real consequences behind them.
We’re going back to the enemies-to-lovers dynamic, which I love, and I’m a huge fan of it. And you know, we’re seeing Nick and Noah, they’re more mature and they are facing maybe real problems now. So that was very interesting to watch and to write. [paraphrased from audio]
What she wants us to sit with
Forgiveness as a throughline, not a twistRon connects the trilogy’s central question, whether forgiveness is possible after genuine harm, to something she lived through as a teenager. When readers tell her the books changed their lives, she doesn’t deflect the claim.
What really touches my heart is when readers come to me and tell me that I saved their lives or that they started reading because of me. That is the best kind of compliment, and honestly, I can resonate when someone says that a book saved their lives. When I was a teenager, reading helped me get through a lot in life, it helped me forgive.
Ron resists the comparison to other long-running romance series. The distinction she draws is about scope: the Culpables arc asks readers to watch the same two characters cross from adolescence into adulthood, and Our Fault is where that crossing completes.
I think Culpables is very different from A través de mi ventana or After...because we have a super big arc where we start getting to know the characters when they are super young and we end up getting to know them as adults.
Our Fault is her favorite book in the trilogy and, she has said, the one where Nick and Noah finally confront problems that can’t be solved by proximity alone.