The Boyfriend
The Boyfriend
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Freida McFadden on The Boyfriend
In her own words: quotes and insights from the author.Why she wrote it
A dating thriller told from the other sideMcFadden has said she dislikes being asked what inspired any specific book, and she’s joked she’ll give every future interviewer the same deflection. What she has talked about is what made this book feel distinct enough to write: where it sits in relation to the bad-dating-story thriller that had become a recognizable subgenre by the time she started it.
I think what’s different about The Boyfriend is that you also get the male point of view in that book. And I don’t think you see that in a lot of like terrible dating story, especially terrible dating thrillers. So I think it’s a little different from the typical one for that reason. [paraphrased from audio]
The male character at the center of that departure is Tom, whose chapters could have been a straightforward villain POV. McFadden’s consistent preoccupation, across book after book, is with characters who don’t resolve neatly into hero or monster, and Tom was built from that same instinct.
I love writing morally grey characters. I’m intrigued by the idea that a person can be good deep down but still do bad things. Or a person can be mostly ‘evil’ yet still have sympathetic qualities. Someone who does nothing but good things is not interesting to read about, in my opinion!
How she wrote it
Calibrating the protagonist’s bad decisionsGiving Tom a POV created a structural problem: if his chapters ran alongside Sydney’s in real time, readers would know too much too soon. McFadden solved it by displacing his narrative in time entirely, setting his sections years earlier when he was a teenager, so his arc and Sydney’s occupy different moments in the story’s chronology.
His point of view actually takes place many years previously, when he was a teenager. So you’re kind of reading his narrative from many years ago and you’re not sure if this is a good narrative or a bad narrative or where it’s going to go. [paraphrased from audio]
Reader complaints about McFadden protagonists making poor choices have followed her across her career. With Sydney, she didn’t sidestep the critique so much as name the exact line she was trying to walk: keep the bad decisions believable enough that readers stay in the book rather than throw it across the room.
My characters make terrible decisions. But sometimes they have to because that’s what makes the story interesting. If all they do is like, this doesn’t seem right, I’m gonna call the police — that’s kinda the end of the story a lot of the time. So they have to make a few bad decisions, but I didn’t want it to be so over the top that readers are like, oh my God, this person’s just too stupid to live. I have to stop reading. So it was that balance that was challenging. [paraphrased from audio]
When a Goodreads reader asked her directly why her female characters have such poor judgment, she answered without hedging. The answer she gave there is the logic beneath every Sydney scene where a reader might want to grab her by the shoulders.
If they made only good decisions, the story would probably be over within twenty pages!
The twist construction in The Boyfriend follows a philosophy she’s applied across her writing life. She grew up on math team puzzles and has described the hunt for the right twist in those terms: a problem with a solution that is both hidden and, in retrospect, inevitable. The standard thriller convention of the least-suspected character is, for her, a floor, not a ceiling.
I think it’s not enough for the killer to be the person you’d least suspect. It has to be someone that didn’t even cross your mind for a millisecond. And yet, at the same time, it also has to be someone that is meaningful. The killer can’t be the victim’s father’s brother’s best friend’s college roommate, because he was mad about the electric bill being split unevenly.
To stay outside genre convention, McFadden reads genre convention carefully. She has catalogued patterns in psychological thrillers the way a chess player catalogs openings, specifically so she can see them coming and refuse them. The pattern she described to James Patterson is one she’s treated as a near-inviolable law of the form.
If there’s a woman, for example, and there are two men who are both attractive to her. One of them has to be the killer. If they’re two men. So that’s a rule. And I have never read a book and been proven wrong about that rule. If you read enough of it and you know where people usually go with it, you can try to go somewhere else. [paraphrased from audio]
That sentence, ‘you can try to go somewhere else,’ is the compression of her whole structural method: the pattern has to be internalized before it can be broken.
What she wants us to sit with
When the label ‘boyfriend’ becomes a warningMcFadden wrote the discussion questions for The Boyfriend herself, and they press readers on something more specific than whether Sydney should have trusted Tom. She frames the title as a problem of perception that the reader has to answer: what does calling someone a boyfriend actually confer, and what does it conceal.
What do you think the title The Boyfriend suggests about perception, roles, and danger? Is the term meant to be comforting, misleading, or ironic?
The discussion questions she drafted also ask readers to trace the exact mechanics of Tom’s manipulation rather than just its outcome. That specificity points toward what she built the book to argue: that the tactics are the story, not merely the vehicle for it. Away from the book, she offered the personal disposition that makes this kind of material feel natural to her.
I’m always the person who imagines things going wrong. So it’s not hard for me to get in that frame of mind.