That's Not My Name
That's Not My Name
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Megan Lally on That's Not My Name
In her own words: quotes and insights from the author.Why she wrote it
A girl in a ditch, and nowhere to put the podcastsBefore this book existed, Lally had spent years writing YA horror. The switch to thrillers was not a gradual drift but a single image that arrived uninvited and refused to let go.
The opening chapter is actually where the story began. The image of a girl in a ditch with no memory came out of nowhere and sparked an entire adventure about trying to figure out what’s safe when you can’t remember who your people are. The rest of the story was no doubt inspired by countless hours of listening to too many hours of true crime podcasts.
The image did more than generate a plot — it exposed a reservoir of ideas Lally had been stockpiling without realizing it. Years of true crime listening had filled her with thriller material that her horror career had no use for, until this moment.
I switched to thrillers when I got the initial idea for ‘That’s Not My Name’ and realized I actually had a TON of thriller ideas from the hundreds of hours I’ve spent listening to true crime podcasts.
How she wrote it
Solving the amnesia problem, one POV at a timeMary, the amnesiac protagonist, arrived first. But Lally realized quickly that a single perspective locked inside a character who cannot remember anything would exhaust both the plot and the reader long before the final page.
I quickly realized just telling Mary’s POV wouldn’t be a very long book AND that it would be really hard to hold reader interest for a whole book of amnesia. So Drew came about as a way to solve that problem… The person who is MISSING someone, rather than being the person that’s missing. Drew fit into that mold very easily and he was actually the easiest of the two POVs to write. He came into my brain almost fully formed with his angst and sarcasm and desperation to find the girl he loves.
Once Lally committed to Drew as the second POV, she found she could not slow down long enough to second-guess him. By the time the book was finished, he had become something rarer than a useful structural fix.
Drew, my sweet baby angel… I absolutely flew through his POV chapters. He was so fun to write because he had a LOT going on, but he cares so much about the people around him and I really love how he fights harder as things get worse for him. He carries the hope in this story… He’s part dread, part grief, part sarcasm, and he was so much fun to write. Don’t tell my other characters, but he’s definitely my favorite.
Believability in a thriller set across specific Oregon locations required Lally to do work that never appears on the page directly. She needed the geography to hold up to scrutiny, and she needed the police response to Mary’s situation to be accurate enough that it could later become a source of danger rather than a plot hole.
I got some interesting information from an air marshal about police procedure early on. With Mary being underage and also unable to identify herself or her family, I needed to make sure that the police would handle her identification in a believable way, that ALSO put her in believable danger later, and that was really interesting to work into the opening chapters. I also spent a considerable amount of time mapping out where every location was in the novel, and drive times between them to create a believable timeline for each chapter. My maps were all marked up with high traffic times and speed limits on rural highways.
The dual POV also gave Lally a structural tool for pacing that a single perspective could not have provided. The cliffhanger at the end of one character’s chapter could be held in suspension across an entire second chapter, compounding the reader’s urgency rather than releasing it.
My best advice is to end as many chapters as possible on a cliffhanger. It keeps readers in that ‘I need to know how this resolves right away’ headspace... I plotted very carefully to create as many of those situations as possible while also amping up the danger with every plot twist. The dual POV actually helped in this a lot, because a cliffhanger at the end of one POV would have to wait a bit for a resolution.
The title the book is now known by did not exist for most of the time Lally was writing it. The placeholder she used throughout drafting was so tonally mismatched with the finished story that she and her agent treated it as a running joke.
For the longest time the document was titled ‘Daddy Issues’ when I was drafting it, which my agent and I found hilarious considering what the story is, but ultimately not a great title to go out to publishers… ‘That’s Not My Name’ by The Ting Tings was one of the songs on my playlist, so I pitched that as the title and it won everyone over! But I think the final title didn’t come into play until the book was almost fully revised.
The title arrived from the same place the story’s atmosphere came from: the playlist she kept running while she wrote. The song’s own premise, a person being called the wrong name, turned out to map exactly onto Mary’s predicament.
What she wants us to sit with
Hope as the thing that outlasts the darkThis question, what she wants readers to carry out of the book, was something Lally answered before the book was even published. In 2021, when it was still in edits, she gave the shortest version of the answer.
That the darkness in the world doesn’t always win.
By the time the book reached booksellers, she had expanded that answer into something more specific: not just that darkness loses, but that what defeats it is a particular kind of ongoing, exhausted, committed effort.
That no matter how bad things get, there’s hope in the fight. A lot of what happens to Drew and Mary shouldn’t be happening to these poor teenagers but they only really get to the end here by continuing on and fighting through, even when all seems lost. Hope is such a powerful force in the face of the hard things that happen in life (and in books!) and it can really be the thing that gets you through — even if you don’t end up where you thought you would in the end.
That tension between darkness and hope is not specific to this book for Lally. It describes every project she wants to make, and she named it as a kind of creative signature before her debut had a final title.
I think my author brand is probably a collection of terrible, creepy things, happening to incredibly strong people. All things dark and terrifying, but with a twist of hope and a whole lot of spunk and sarcasm.