Lucky
Lucky
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Marissa Stapley on Lucky
In her own words: quotes and insights from the author.Why she wrote it
A bus ride, a dying mother, and a lottery ticket no one could claimThe premise arrived not at a desk but on a ski vacation, carried in by a radio DJ’s throwaway speculation about an unclaimed jackpot. Stapley had no character yet and no book. She had only a scenario that refused to leave her alone.
My family and I were on a ski vacation in New York and listening to a story on the radio about how this lottery ticket was about to go unclaimed. One of the DJs said, ‘I wonder what would happen if you were wanted for a crime and can’t come forward to get your winnings.’ I couldn’t get it out of my head.
A premise without a person is just a situation. Stapley needed a protagonist she could follow the length of a novel, which meant ruling out the obvious direction. She had been watching Ocean’s Eleven with her teenage son and noticed how automatically audiences side with con artists, but the genre default of an ultimately unredeemable antihero was somewhere she refused to go.
I don’t love the experience of following along with someone who is compelling but ultimately unredeemable.
That refusal pushed the book toward Lucky specifically: a woman with a moral code and a past that explained how she arrived at her crimes.
In 2019, Stapley was already struggling with a different novel when her mother received a diagnosis of incurable colorectal cancer. The caregiving trips between Toronto and Markham were exhausting, and the tragic arc of the book she’d been working on felt impossible to live inside. Her mother ended the debate.
She said, ‘I will not have my illness derail your career. Find something to write.’
On one of those bus rides to Markham, the character arrived without warning. Stapley had been carrying the lottery premise for months but had nothing to put inside it. What happened next was less a decision than an interruption.
I don’t know what happened, but it was like Lucky came and sat down beside me. It was as if Lucky was saying: ‘Here I am. I’m totally alone. Just focus on me.’
She was texting her agent before she reached her destination. The notebook she kept through those months holds Lucky’s plot notes on one page and her mother’s care notes on the next.
The book was taking shape during the Trump years, and what Stapley was watching in politics sharpened the question she wanted the novel to ask. Lucky’s crimes are real crimes, but Stapley’s anger was trained elsewhere.
The complexity of being good was top of mind as I wrote Lucky. I was seeing people in the highest offices in the world not held to any sort of standard of fundamental goodness, and it made me want to explore the idea of being ‘good’, to try to make sense of the concept, to find the gray areas, rather than the extremes.
How she wrote it
One woman to carry everything, built in two timelinesResearch for Lucky began with a library card. Stapley’s method with every novel starts at the Toronto Public Library, but the subject here, the mechanics of con artistry and financial fraud, sent her across a wide range of texts before she wrote a scene.
The way I start with any novel is I go to the library — I live in Toronto, so I go to the Toronto Public Library, I take out every book I can. In this case it was The Confidence Game [by Maria Konnikova], which I read, and then all the cast read the book too. I also read so much more, from Catch Me If You Can [by Frank Abagnale] to books about Bernie Madoff and how Ponzi schemes work.
All of Stapley’s previous novels distribute the weight across multiple characters. Lucky broke that pattern, and the break created a specific obligation she hadn’t faced before. With no secondary POV to hand a scene to, the protagonist could never go passive.
Lucky is my first experience with writing just with one main character. So I really needed her to be strong and tough and resilient and a bit of a lone wolf. [paraphrased from audio]
The single-protagonist constraint was compounded by a structural problem she only recognized after drafting. The present-tense thriller she had written held the reader at arm’s length from someone they needed to trust. The fix required going back to Lucky’s childhood.
At first, I was only writing the story in the present, but it eventually became clear to me that my readers need to know and understand Lucky the way I did — so they would get the rewarding experience of rooting for her to prevail from a very pure place.
The personal thread
A mother on the stairs, a memory that waited thirty yearsLong before she had the lottery premise, Stapley had a childhood image she couldn’t shake. Her mother, a single parent, had lost her entire savings to a Ponzi scheme when Stapley was ten. The con artists fled to the Cayman Islands and were never prosecuted. The image that survived wasn’t the fraud itself.
I remember seeing my mother sitting on the stairs, crying. It’s a core memory of mine.
Her mother got up, retrained as a grief counselor, and never dwelt on what had been taken. That pattern, absorbing a devastating financial betrayal and choosing forward motion, is the pattern Lucky enacts across the novel.
By the time the book was finished, it had become something Stapley could only partially account for. She wrote it on buses, in waiting rooms, alongside care notes for a mother who was dying and who kept telling her not to stop. The novel that resulted carries all of that, even when readers don’t know to look for it.
When I look back on this novel, I don’t even really remember writing it. My mom and I were so close. And even as she was dying, she told me, ‘You have to keep fighting, you have to keep working.’ I was just surviving too, and the resilience was necessary for me to complete the book. To me, that is the takeaway: I know life can be hard, but I also know what can happen when you find it within yourself to keep going against all odds.
What she wants us to sit with
Remorse as the only real measure of goodnessThe novel’s moral argument is more precise than the usual crime-fiction formula of a good person doing bad things. Stapley arrived at a conclusion about what actually separates a redeemable person from a dangerous one, and it has nothing to do with whether they broke the law.
I think if there was any conclusion I was able to draw it was that being ‘good’ doesn’t always have to do with your actions. There are criminals out there who feel remorse for what they have done, and I think this is so important. It is the people who do not feel remorse, who aren’t capable of feeling empathy or sorrow for the ways in which they’ve negatively impacted people’s lives, who we need to worry about.
Stapley also wants readers to hear Lucky’s hypervigilance, her constant reading of every room, as something beyond thriller mechanics. She sees it as a condition most women will recognize without needing it named.
That’s why I love writing Lucky — she represents how all women constantly have to be reading the room, staying one step ahead, how we can never fully relax.