The Locked Door
The Locked Door
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Freida McFadden on The Locked Door
In her own words: quotes and insights from the author.Why she wrote it
A character built from the inside outMcFadden has gone on record calling origin questions her least favorite to answer, and the gap is genuine: no interview in the available sources addresses what drew her to Nora Davis, the surgeon who changed her name to escape her serial killer father’s legacy. What the sources preserve instead is the character logic that made Nora possible.
With any book, the motivation can come from many different places, and sometimes we can’t even remember what it was.
The discussion questions McFadden posted on her own website for the novel ask whether Nora could have committed the murders herself, and whether Nora’s act against Mr. Kellogg was the first time she had done something like that. Those questions signal what she built the book to do: make readers uncertain about a protagonist they have followed for three hundred pages. The character type that produces that unease is one she returns to across all her fiction.
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!
Nora’s bad decisions accumulate across the book rather than appearing in a single dramatic rupture. McFadden treats that accumulation as a structural necessity, not a flaw in her protagonist’s design.
If they made only good decisions, the story would probably be over within twenty pages!
Nora’s choices — hiding evidence, lying to colleagues, acting on instincts she cannot fully explain — are, by this logic, the engine of the plot rather than deviations from it.
How she wrote it
Months of silence, then a sprintThe Locked Door was written while McFadden was still primarily self-publishing and working full-time as a physician. The schedule that produced it is one she has kept for every book: a long incubation that leaves no paper trail, then a compressed writing window that can override sleep.
I spend a lot of time planning the book in my head and the physical writing is quick. I’ll think about a book for months and then I like to blow through the first draft really fast because once I’m writing, it’s all I can think about. My agent wanted me to take a break from something I was writing but I said, I can’t, because I can’t sleep until I finish it.
The lean, direct prose that readers describe as easy to sprint through is not the result of careful sentence-level revision at the drafting stage. It comes from the way the draft is made in the first place.
I actually dictate a lot of my writing. So I think that’s why it sounds very conversational. It’s literally me talking.
The thriller’s central mechanism, a reveal that recontextualizes everything before it, is not something McFadden discovers in revision. By the time she types the first sentence, the ending is already fixed. Her standard for a twist that earns its place is specific enough to function as a rule.
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.
Nora’s surgical career is not a costume McFadden put on a generic protagonist. The operating-room scenes, the hospital rhythms, the specific texture of a physician’s self-regard: none of that required a research phase because the author spent years inside it.
It’s definitely helpful to have that background in my back pocket. If I do write about a doctor or something medical, I don’t need to research it because I’ve lived it.
The personal thread
The author inside the surgeonMcFadden writes under a pen name specifically to protect her medical career, keeping the two identities separate in public while allowing them to converge on the page. Nora Davis, a surgeon concealing a history she did not choose, is the sharpest version of that doubling anywhere in her catalog.
The protagonists are always based on me, of course.
The humor that surfaces in Nora’s internal voice, dry observations about colleagues and hospital protocols, is not tonal decoration. It reflects something McFadden names as a genuine constraint on how she works: she cannot sustain unbroken darkness, even when the subject demands it.
I love to laugh. I don’t like to take myself too seriously, and that translates into my books. I hope people get a laugh from them, even though they are actually thrillers, so humour is more like the side plot.
What she wants us to sit with
Justice on the page, unease off itThe Locked Door ends with consequences assigned and a killer stopped, but McFadden’s own discussion questions refuse to let that resolution stand as comfort. She asks readers to sit with whether Nora’s final act was a first offense, and whether Nora owes her mother forgiveness. The epilogue is less a settlement than an opening. Her view of what fiction can do that life cannot helps explain why she writes toward closure at all.
My general feeling is that in life, people rarely get exactly what they deserve. But in art, you can dole out that poetic justice, which I enjoyed doing again in The Intruder.
The word ‘again’ places the impulse in a pattern that runs across her catalog. In The Locked Door, the poetic justice is real but the moral accounting is not finished, and McFadden’s discussion questions are designed to keep it open after the last page.