PRosé with special guest L. Alison Heller
L. Alison Heller, the author of the recently published The Neighbor’s Secret, talked to PRosé about her new book, how she got started in writing and how much of the gossiping ladies of The Cottonwood Book Club are based on real life.
The Neighbor’s Secret is all about that book club vibe. Alison Heller says while not based on any specific group, The Cottonwood Book Club represents that kind of group where its members and their gossip share intimacy and familiarity with each other because they are “a very consistent part of each other’s lives.”
The pressures of parenting helped inspire the novel, which centers on a kid-friendly suburban neighborhood where the neighbors aren’t all that they seem. Heller says the inspiration behind the complex characters was exploring “that gap between the striving for perfection, and the impossibility of ever achieving it, and what’s going on internally,” she says, and “looking around at all the other parents who seem to have their acts so together to the extent that they can do things like bake a perfect on-theme snack or dessert for book club – and wanting to explore that gap between the perfectionism, and the reality, and the second-guessing, and all the decisions you are sure you are making incorrectly when you are taking care of someone else or making decisions for someone else.” Heller says, “I wanted to take on women who were very confronted by the pressure of those decisions – and those secrets.”
Mid-law career Heller stayed home for a year to take care of her sick father and her young kids. “I sat and wrote my first book, and I loved the creative process so much and felt such a passion for it, and I felt such joy and got so much energy from it, I felt like I wanted to do more and keep doing it,” she says, and so she left law to write full time. The newly released The Neighbor’s Secret is her third novel, and she is already writing the fourth, which, although she’s early in the process, she says, is shaping up to be more of a thriller, with even “more twists and turns.”
Listen to the PRosé podcast to hear more about Heller’s mid-life career change to novelist, the parts of writing she loves the most (it is not what you’d expect—she likes revisions!), and how she writes as if her characters were real people.