Want to Know a Secret?
Want to Know a Secret?
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Freida McFadden on Want to Know a Secret?
In her own words: quotes and insights from the author.Why she wrote it
A midnight fury that changed everythingMcFadden had been writing women’s fiction with a comic edge before a single novel by British author Shalini Boland rewired her sense of what fiction could do to a reader. What she wanted to replicate wasn’t a plot device or a structure but a specific physical experience: being so invested in fictional people that sleep became impossible.
I kind of wanted to recreate that feeling of being so passionate about this could be happening to me, and this is so frustrating.
She describes the writing career itself as something that happened to her rather than something she pursued. That accident of ambition shapes the whole catalog, including the domestic thrillers that followed once the genre clicked into place.
I genuinely started doing this for fun. I didn’t expect it to go anywhere and then it became a fun challenge — let me see if I can get more readers — and then it just exploded.
Behind the genre she chose to write in is a specific frustration with how consequences work in ordinary life. She has named that frustration as one of the engines driving her fiction, and it runs directly through a book about secrets whose exposure does not distribute justice cleanly.
My general feeling is that in life, people rarely get exactly what they deserve. But in art, you can dole out that poetic justice.
That impulse toward poetic justice also carries an implicit question: who decides what justice looks like, and from whose point of view? In a novel structured around competing secrets and unreliable self-images, the answer keeps shifting.
How she wrote it
The twist first, the draft secondThe plot’s endpoint is fixed before a sentence goes on the page. That constraint might seem to limit improvisation, but she frames it as the opposite: knowing where the story lands frees her to let characters behave badly and irrationally in the middle, because the architecture will still hold.
My process is that I come up with an idea including a twist in advance... I do generally let the characters take me where they want to go, but I always know the final destination.
The actual drafting happens in a compressed burst after weeks or months of silent planning. That speed is a deliberate choice about how to stay inside the story’s emotional temperature, though it comes at a cost she’s mentioned more than once.
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.
The fast draft is followed by a revision phase she describes as its own long project. The two phases are so different in tempo and character that they function almost as two separate jobs.
I write a first draft really quickly. I don’t like to do things halfway. I’m not the kind of person who can write a few hours a day and just be done with it. I completely immerse myself, and I don’t stop, ignore everything from life until I’m done.
Her prose carries a conversational rhythm that reviewers notice but often can’t explain. The explanation turns out to be literal: much of the writing begins as spoken language, which accounts for the way sentences land without effort on a reader who is, effectively, listening.
I actually dictate a lot of my writing. So I think that’s why it sounds very conversational. It’s literally me talking.
That conversational rhythm points toward a specific effect she’s after. The target isn’t the formal authority of a narrator but the pull of someone sharing something they probably shouldn’t.
I describe my writing as like, a friend telling you an especially juicy piece of gossip.
For a book built around suburban secrets passed between neighbors and spouses, that framing is exactly right: the reader is positioned as the confidant, already implicated before the first chapter ends.
What she wants us to sit with
Justice, grey characters, and a laugh in the darkHer clearest statement of purpose as a thriller writer concerns the reveal at a story’s heart. She holds the twist to a precise double standard: it must be unexpected, and it must matter. In a 2023 interview about The Coworker, she laid out the logic that governs every book in her catalog.
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.
She writes characters who make choices readers will second-guess, and she does it deliberately. The alternative, a protagonist who navigates every situation wisely, forecloses the kind of plot she wants to build.
If they made only good decisions, the story would probably be over within twenty pages!
The moral ambiguity she builds into her characters isn’t ornamentation. It is the argument. She wants readers to stay uncertain about who deserves sympathy and for how long, because that uncertainty mirrors something true about how people actually work.
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!
In Want to Know a Secret?, where the secrets characters keep are also the secrets that define them, that greyness isn’t a caveat about the story’s people. It is the story’s subject.