This Story Might Save Your Life
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Tiffany Crum on This Story Might Save Your Life
In her own words: quotes and insights from the author.Why she wrote it
One last try, on her own termsThree completed novels preceded this one, and none of them found a publisher. After years of MFA training and literary ambition, Crum was confronting the possibility that the path she had chosen had cost her more than it returned.
I’d written a few practice novels before this one — quiet, literary stories that didn’t sell. I was starting to feel like maybe I’d wasted a big part of my life on this writing thing. I decided to give it one last try and write the kind of book that would make me happy, packed with everything I love.
The shift she made was not toward a different genre but toward honesty about what she actually wanted to read. The video interview makes clear that the literary novels were written from obligation rather than appetite.
I was writing not the books that I wanted to read. I was writing the books that I thought that I should be writing. [paraphrased from audio]
The specific gap she wanted to fill came from her own reading habits. No single book was doing what she found herself reaching for across two separate shelves.
At the time, I was bouncing back and forth between thrillers and rom-coms. I’d listen to audiobooks with adorable banter during the day, and at night I’d curl up with twisty thrillers full of tension and reveals. But what I really wanted was a book that could do both — heart and humor and that propulsive, can’t-look-away pace, all in one story. So that was the challenge I set for myself.
Podcasts entered the book because they had been shaping her imagination for years. The impulse she wanted to examine came from her own fandom, specifically the parasocial loyalty she felt toward Karen Kilgariff and Georgia Hardstark of ‘My Favorite Murder,’ whom she had listened to for a decade without ever meeting.
If one of them found themselves in trouble and put out a call for help tomorrow, I know my hand would go up before I had time to analyze the impulse...It doesn’t feel like fandom in the moment. It feels like loyalty. And yet we’ve never met. They don’t know my name. Still, the reflex is there. That reflex is what I wanted to explore in This Story Might Save Your Life.
How she wrote it
Six weeks, two dogs, and a dual timelineEach of the previous novels had taken roughly a year to draft and another year to revise. This one broke that pattern entirely, and Crum traces the speed directly to the change in approach she had made.
I drafted the book in six feverish weeks. It just poured out of me, all hope and excitement and love for these characters. I adored every minute.
Once the draft was done, she settled into a daily revision rhythm that eliminated the blank page problem. Every morning, after her children left for school, the dogs handled the logistics while she filled her phone with the next day’s material.
I have two dogs that I attach to my waist, one on the right side and one on the left. They know not to cross paths so that I don’t have to deal with the leashes. And I’m holding my phone and I am dictating ideas or entire storylines. I might be doing the exposition all the way through the dialogue, beginning the chapter to the end, like a teleprompter in my mind. [paraphrased from audio]
Joy, the book’s protagonist, has narcolepsy, a sleep disorder in which the brain cannot properly regulate wakefulness, and Crum spent months inside the condition’s medical and community literature. What she feared most was reducing a life to a symptom list.
There was no way that I was going to write narcolepsy in a way that it was a punchline. I wanted it to be a very thorough and sensitive portrayal of how it affects every facet of someone’s life. [paraphrased from audio]
The book runs two parallel timelines, one following Benny in the present and one following Joy thirteen years in the past, converging as the novel closes. The architecture looked daunting from the outside, but Crum’s real problem was a sequencing question, not a structural one.
What surprised me most, once I completed my first draft, was how much of TSMSYL is about control — how we lose it, how we fight to get it back. Joy’s narcolepsy is the most obvious example: her body betrays her, forcing her to find new ways to navigate a life she can’t fully command. But it’s her relationship with Xander that pushes that loss of control to its most insidious extreme — the kind that creeps in slowly under the guise of love and partnership. Writing her memoir becomes the way she takes that control back, reclaiming her voice after years of having her story shaped by someone else.
The control theme, as she describes it, was not planned. Her subconscious deposited it and only the first draft revealed it was there.
The personal thread
A dairy farm girl who needed to lead by exampleBefore she wrote fiction, Crum worked as an executive assistant and then as a bookkeeper for her husband’s film production company. A practical background and a practical self-image made a creative career feel like something other people did. The change came not from ambition but from a pregnancy journal.
I was a Dutch dairy farm girl with a business degree. Far too practical to let myself believe I could ever make a career in the arts. That all changed when I became pregnant with my son Mason. As the pregnancy progressed, I kept a journal of wishes for him, and at the top of the list was my hope that he would have the courage to pursue his dreams. Only then did it occur to me: If I wanted to lead by example, then why wasn’t I doing the same?
Her Hollywood years, working inside a small film production company, gave her access to a particular type she would later need. Xander, the book’s failing producer and Joy’s controlling partner, is a character drawn partly from observation rather than invention.
My experience working in Hollywood helped me build Xander’s character. He’s a failing producer, and anyone who’s lived in LA knows at least one of those.
The book’s origin as a piece of audio-aware writing also traces back to a specific stretch of highway. Crum identifies the moment she understood what a voice in your ear could do, and it was before she had any idea she would write fiction about podcasts.
Serial was the first podcast I ever loved. I listened to it alone on a long drive through the flat center of California, where the landscape is so empty it feels abstract. With nothing much to look at, Sarah Koenig’s voice took over, filling the car. It was the first time a story in my ears felt larger than the space around me.
What she wants us to sit with
The mirror that only faces one wayJoy hosts a true crime podcast called ‘This Story Might Save Your Life,’ and her audience believes it knows her. Crum built the book around the question of what an audience is actually entitled to know, and she does not answer it cleanly.
A microphone is a one-sided mirror. It made Joy feel accessible, while keeping everyone firmly on the other side.
The book carries a thriller’s pace and a romance’s warmth, but the emotional argument beneath both is about character complexity. She pushed back against the idea that a thriller needs legible heroes and clear villains.
I really tried to show that yes, there are many facets to good people and many facets to bad people. The good people in my book have things that probably anyone reading them just would want them to change. We’re all not perfect. [paraphrased from audio]
Despite the coercive control at the book’s center and a protagonist whose body routinely refuses to cooperate, Crum is specific about the emotional register she wants readers to leave with. Hope was not a marketing choice; it was the target she aimed at from the first week of drafting.
I want readers to come away with a sense of hope and to feel that people are inherently good. [paraphrased from audio]