The Only One Left
The Only One Left
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Riley Sager on The Only One Left
In his own words: quotes and insights from the author.Why he wrote it
A documentary, a caretaker, and a question no one was askingThe book did not begin with a murder. It began with what came after: a documentary about Lizzie Borden left him thinking not about the axe killings but about whoever ended up tending to the accused woman in her old age, decades later, in a house the rest of the world had moved on from.
For reasons completely unknown to me, I started thinking a lot about Lizzie Borden. Not the things she was accused of doing, necessarily, but decades later. Basically, I was struck by one of those ‘What if…’ ideas that often prompt a book. This one was: ‘What if Lizzie Borden, in her old age, needed a nurse to care for her?’ It got me thinking about this hypothetical nurse. What events led her to this situation? Is she scared of her patient? Suspicious? Curious? And what if this allegedly murderous patient offered to tell her the whole story? I knew right away there was a book there.
Once he had the premise, he made a deliberate choice that ran against the instincts of his former journalism career: he refused to research the actual Borden case. The name and the nursery rhyme were already lodged in the culture, which meant readers would arrive with the illusion of familiarity. That gap between what people think they know and what they actually know was exactly what he wanted to exploit.
What interested me most about the Lizzie Borden case is how much I don’t know about it. We’ve all heard the name and we’ve all heard the rhyme, which makes us think we know the story. But there’s so much more to the story that I simply didn’t know. And still don’t, by the way. Once I decided I was going to write a book vaguely inspired by the case, I didn’t do any research into it. I wanted this to be its own completely original thing.
The emotional engine he was building toward was a specific kind of doubt: the unresolvable question that shadows a crime when guilt looks obvious but certainty is impossible. To explain the feeling he was after, he reached not for Lizzie Borden but for a case his readers would find far more recent, and far rawer.
The crime probably most familiar to people of my generation is the Menendez brothers, who were convicted of gunning down their parents. It again summons that question: Why? Were the brothers abused, like they claim? Was it greed? Or were they simply monsters? Those are the kinds of questions I wanted the reader to be asking when they first meet Lenora Hope.
How he wrote it
A crooked hallway, a fabricated murder house, and a typewriter that became its own bookThe plot came later. Before any structure existed, he was working from a single visual: a young woman in a period nurse’s uniform standing in a warped corridor. That image locked in the genre before a single scene was drafted, pointing him toward Gothic fiction and its tradition of houses that feel as dangerous as the people inside them.
I knew from the start that I wanted Lenora to be very limited in her abilities because I thought that was a very cool thing for a character to have all of these secrets and this potentially murderous past, but from the outside, just appear completely, utterly harmless. [paraphrased from audio]
The physical constraint was a craft solution as much as a character choice. By stripping Lenora of speech and mobility, he forced every secret to surface through the typewriter, which gave Kit a reason to stay in the house and gave the reader a reason to keep reading.
For the house itself, Hope’s End, he needed a real building that could carry the Gothic weight the story required. He found it in Blairsden, a Gilded Age New Jersey estate, through a piece of local legend that turned out to be entirely invented.
It’s rumored to be a murder house! Allegedly, Blairsden was a former orphanage where the nuns went insane and started murdering people. None of that is true! But I saw a picture and immediately thought ‘there it is — that’s Hope’s End.’
The 1983 setting was not chosen for atmosphere alone. A contemporary setting would have collapsed the plot’s central mystery inside a few minutes of searching, so a pre-internet date was a structural requirement. He then placed the Hope family murders in 1929 to take advantage of another historical condition: national attention was on the Wall Street Crash, which kept Lenora a regional legend rather than a figure the reader would feel they already knew.
Because the existence of Google would have wrapped the plot up in about five pages, I knew it had to be set in the past.
Seven books in, he expected the process to feel more manageable. It did not. The self-doubt he describes was not a beginner’s anxiety but something that returned specifically on this book, even after the core structure was already in place.
The surprise was that, seven books in, I still doubt myself. Despite having all the core elements in place from the start, there were moments in the writing of The Only One Left where I got completely lost.
The title he submitted was rejected as unmarketable, which set off a negotiation he eventually lost. He held out, then surrendered, and the committee’s choice turned out to be the one readers responded to most. Looking back from the book’s success, he reads the episode as a lesson in knowing when to defer.
The Only One Left wasn’t the book’s original title. The title I wanted wasn’t deemed marketable enough... So a slight battle of wills ensued until I waved the white flag and agreed to call it The Only One Left, a title that was kind of created by committee. Now, after getting so many compliments on the title alone, I fully admit that I was wrong, my publishing team was right, and that I should trust them more. They’re the professionals. They know what they’re talking about.
What he wants us to sit with
The book he expected everyone to hateHe went in aiming for a Gothic whodunit with strong twists and no pretensions beyond delivering a great read. What arrived unexpectedly, through the writing itself rather than through planning, was something he had not budgeted for.
There’s also like some real emotional depth to it that I wasn’t really intending. That just happened through the writing of it. [paraphrased from audio]
Beneath the emotional surprise, his baseline ambition for any of his books is stated without apology. The reader’s physical experience of turning pages is the standard he measures himself against.
I just want readers to have a chilling, good time. I love getting sucked into a book, sitting on the edge of my seat, turning the pages faster, being shocked by what I discover. That’s my wish for anyone who picks up one of my books.
He finished the manuscript convinced he had misjudged the audience. Three years later, speaking to USA Today about his tenth book, he named this one by title when cataloguing which of his novels had defied his own predictions.
‘The Only One Left’ because that one resonated in ways I never imagined. When I was writing it, I truly thought, ‘Everyone’s going to hate this one.’ That is by far my most popular book.