It's Not Her
It's Not Her
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Mary Kubica on It's Not Her
In her own words: quotes and insights from the author.Why she wrote it
A cold case with no daughter and no answerThe novel’s opening situation, a family slaughtered overnight in a remote cabin while one child sleeps undisturbed and another vanishes, came directly from a real 1981 crime that no one has ever solved. Kubica found the case, recognized its shape as a mystery she wanted to work through herself, and built the book around it.
I found inspiration for It’s Not Her in the 1981 Keddie cabin murders, a true crime case that is still unsolved today. Though the novel and the real-life murders are different, they share some similarities: a cottage in a remote place where family members are murdered overnight, only for police to find a surviving son in one of the bedrooms, who seemingly slept through the brutal murders, and a daughter missing from the home.
Beyond the initial crime scene, what kept Kubica inside the premise was its refusal to offer an obvious solution. She goes into every book without knowing who the killer is, and she was drawn to the Keddie setup precisely because it gave her a puzzle dense enough to occupy a full novel’s worth of discovery.
a lot of times those red herrings develop because I don’t know if maybe this person actually is the villain or not. So part of that is just me exploring different possibilities. [paraphrased from audio]
The emotional cost of the project caught her off guard. Her daughter was in the middle of a stressful college audition process during drafting, and Reese, the book’s missing teenager, was only a couple of years younger. That gap kept collapsing as she wrote.
It’s an emotional book... like terrifyingly possible, you know, and like real, and like, this can happen. And so, that was hard too. The missing Reese is 17. And I have a daughter who’s just a couple years older than her now. So it just hit really close to home. [paraphrased from audio]
How she wrote it
Two documents, one killer she hadn’t named yetThe book’s dual-timeline structure, alternating between Courtney’s investigation in the present and Reese’s account of the days before the murders, required a drafting method that kept the two voices from bleeding into each other. Kubica finished one narrator entirely before opening a new document for the other.
I wrote Courtney first. I wrote her entire narrative from beginning to end. And then I’ll set it aside and pick up with Reese. And so, it’s really fun, and then when it’s all done, I just start to merge them back together. [paraphrased from audio]
The Wisconsin setting, a remote Northwoods lake resort rather than the Chicago-area suburbs she had used in previous books, was already on her mind before this novel took shape. She had named the Northwoods specifically as where her next project was headed, and when It’s Not Her arrived, that location gave the story an isolation her earlier suburban settings couldn’t supply.
I definitely foresee myself venturing into other locations for future books, and in fact, the book I’m working on now is set in the Northwoods of Wisconsin!
Because she didn’t identify the killer before she started writing, the manuscript’s misdirections weren’t planted strategically from the outset. They accumulated as she genuinely auditioned different characters for the role of villain, which meant revision required her to go back and calibrate what the reader could and couldn’t see too early.
With this book, I did not know. I had my starting points. There are a lot of red herrings in this story. And a lot of times it’s because I didn’t know. Like, maybe, maybe that person did it. So I had to figure that out still. [paraphrased from audio]
She described rereading the finished manuscript repeatedly in the final stages to confirm that every loose end connects and every breadcrumb lands where it should, and she relies on her editor, agent, husband, and a circle of trusted readers to flag anything that gives the ending away too soon.
Writing Reese meant inhabiting a headspace she hadn’t occupied for decades. Kubica drew on what she was observing at home, but she also reached back to her own adolescence, accounting for one thing her teenage years didn’t include.
It was really fun, eye-opening, a little nostalgic to get back into the mind of a 17-year-old. [paraphrased from audio]
What she wants us to sit with
A simple catastrophe, and why we should find it believableThe novel’s disaster is set in motion by a careless social media post, and Kubica wrote the book club questions for It’s Not Her herself. One of them asks directly what impact social media has on children today, a signal that she wants the conversation to move past identifying the killer and toward the conditions that made the crime possible.
Even though my books are suspense and like terrible things are happening to people, I want them to be very plausible, too. The simplest solution is the right one. Because it seems to make it just more plausible that this could really happen. [paraphrased from audio]
The violence in the book comes from grief and delusion rather than elaborate villainy, and that was a choice. Kubica returned to the word ‘plausible’ repeatedly when discussing the novel, treating it as the standard she was working toward rather than a byproduct of the plot.
It’s an emotional book... like terrifyingly possible, you know, and like real, and like, this can happen. [paraphrased from audio]
She named character comprehension as a goal she holds equal to suspense. Readers will disagree with decisions characters make in this book, but Kubica draws a line between disagreement and confusion about motive, and she works to stay on the right side of it.
It doesn’t mean that the reader’s going to agree with everything that a character says or does, but just that they feel like they understand why a character is making the decisions that they are. [paraphrased from audio]