Ashley Winstead Talks Grief, Legacy, and True Crime Amateur Sleuths (and a GIVEAWAY!)

with Greg Wands

Ashley Winstead is the national bestselling author of Midnight is the Darkest Hour, The Last Housewife, In My Dreams I Hold a Knife, The Boyfriend Candidate, and Fool Me Once. Her books have been Library Read picks, Loan Star picks, Best of Amazon picks, and Best of Apple Books picks, and have received starred reviews from Publishers Weekly, Kirkus Reviews, BookPage, and Library Journal.

The Book Will Bury Me is out now!

Ashley, your captivating new novel, This Book Will Bury Me, is, amongst other things, a thoughtful meditation on grief and legacy. Were these concepts front of mind when you first dove into the story, or did they emerge as you wrote?

First of all, thank you for the lovely compliment. Grief was front of mind—I knew from the beginning that I was writing an unconventional detective book about the ways we all become detectives while grieving, trying to piece together fragments of our loved ones. In the book, my main character takes up amateur sleuthing as a literal manifestation of this, but every aspect of the story is about the things grief drives people to do.

Legacy, on the other hand, took me by surprise. The book opens with an epigraph from a Richard Siken poem about history: “There are many names in history/ but none of them are ours.” So the reader knows from the outset that Bury Me is about who gets to write history and have their stories be part of the official record, but I was the last to know.

It wasn’t until I was coming to the end of drafting, and thinking about the emotional resolution, that I began to realize the whole thing was about my main character Jane wrestling with her place in history and, more important to her, her father’s. I wrote this book in the style of a fictional memoir in which Jane is very transparently trying to shape her and her father’s legacies, telling readers how to see her, and yet it still took me the whole book to figure out what I was doing! Luckily I did in time for the final twist to snap into place.

The novel, which centers around a group of true crime amateur sleuths, also digs into the media ecosystem, touching on inherent bias, the hive mind, and how narrative can ultimately be shaped and manipulated. Was there anything you came across in your research for this book that you found to be particularly surprising or enlightening?

So much! This is my most heavily-researched book, so I was in a constant state of discovery. Maybe because I had a view of amateur sleuths that was too influenced by YouTube and TikTok, but I was surprised to learn that many amateur sleuths are older retired folks who work on cases over the course of years, and the work is extremely time-consuming and detail-oriented—it’s rarely the flashy breakthrough moments you see on TV, more the steady accretion of hundreds or thousands of hours of diligent research that eventually produces an answer.

To touch on some of the things you mentioned about our media ecosystem, I am always interested in how narratives get shaped, the meta questions of it all. I followed the Gabby Petito case and particularly the discourse it spurred about which missing persons cases get that level of attention and which don’t, and how much of a role racial, gender, and beauty bias all play. I felt very strongly that those biases continue to get repeated ad nauseam, so that’s something Bury Me directly explores.

Finally, and maybe this won’t surprise readers, because I like to think we’re all a little savvier about the media these days—but it truly did shock me in the books, news articles, and documentaries I reviewed just how much baseless or slanted information proliferates around every case. There is so much noise to sift through. It’s a throughline across true crime stories, and especially the stories I chose to fictionalize in the book: how much cops but especially the true crime community, where there’s no barrier to entry and anyone can post anything that shapes a conversation, get things wrong, and how damaging it is.

What’s interesting to me is that even though we might be more media-savvy, we don’t seem to have developed that same level of skepticism about what we read on the internet. (Wild, right?) It’s almost a feature of the internet at this point, how you’re guaranteed to get completely wrong takes or incorrect information presented as undeniable fact, and then encounter a group of people willing to die on that hill—or worse, act on that false information. What do you do with so many wayward Quixotes swinging their swords at windmills?

It honestly scares me how quick the average person is to swallow what we’re told on the internet, and I’ve been guilty of this too (hello, Blake Lively and Justin Baldoni case). You see in so many stories how disinformation leads to genuine heartache, and it certainly does in This Book Will Bury Me.

Your protagonist, Jane Sharp, recounts the story in hindsight, providing you the opportunity to mete out teasers and withhold details to maximize suspense and heighten the reader’s anticipation. How did you determine that this would be an especially effective way to let the story unspool?

I actually didn’t start out writing the book that way. In the beginning I wrote it as a present tense, real time, straightforward story, but it was missing something. I was really dissatisfied with it. I started to think about the genre of true crime, and how highly mediated all the books and documentaries are, and that’s when I realized the story had to be Jane’s version of that, her highly-mediated contribution to the history of the Delphine Massacres (the central case in the book).

Once I realized that, the whole book cracked open. Suddenly everything was flowing, and Jane became the character and voice she was meant to be: older, wiser, snarkier and more embittered than how I’d originally written her. And I had so much fun deciding which moments she’d break the narrative and directly address the reader, as well as where to drop in footnotes that undermine or emphasize what she’s purporting to be the honest truth.

There are a number of recurring themes in your work–family, friendship, love, ambition, power dynamics, privilege, patriarchal influence and social justice, to name just a few–that you explore in compelling ways across a range of genres, including thriller, dark academia, gothic horror, and romance. Do the themes tend to dictate the genre you choose to work in on any given novel, or is it more a case of a particular genre calling to you at a specific time?

This is such a writerly question, and I love it. I guess the real answer is genre and theme occur to me together as a package. When I get an idea for a book, it’s always already married: A plot + B genre + C thematic exploration. I absolutely add and change things as I write, but I go into each book thinking of the genre and themes hand in hand. This might be because the thing I’m most excited to write about is theme, so it always pops up early. Maybe that’s a sign I belong back in academia instead of in novel writing?

If I know I need to write an upmarket fiction book next, or a thriller, I’ll go to my list of ideas and think through them all. Do I want to pitch the X heist thriller, which is all about my uneasy relationship with money and success as a first-gen college student, or do I want to pitch the Y art thriller, about symbiotic relationships that turn into leeching? A lot of times, I know I’d be equally excited to explore X or Y, because eventually I want to write them all, so I’ll pitch them both and let my editor decide.

There are some exceptions though, when a book has to be written right then and there because it’s the only thing my mind can process. This Book Will Bury Me was one of those—at the time I was gearing up to write it, the only thing I was capable of writing was a thriller about grief, legacy, and the parasocial relationships we form with victims, victims’ families, and even killers through true crime. That’s what was happening in my life, so I’m grateful my editor let me go for it.

In addition to being an author, I understand you’re also a fine artist. Are there any aspects of your painting practice that inform or influence your writing process, or vice versa?

Visual art absolutely inspires me. Back in grad school, I almost went down a different path with my dissertation, wanting to write about the exchange of influence between visual artists and poets in twentieth century America. Eventually I chose another topic, but there’s nothing that gets my brain working harder than encountering paintings, sculpture, installations, thinking about what the artist has to say and how they chose to say it. It just opens up the brain. When I paint myself, which I only do these days as stress relief, nothing serious, I’m drawn to Marilyn Minter-style close-ups: hyper-femme, hyper-gritty, edgy, seductive, maybe a little vulnerable. If I could one day write a book that gave readers Marilyn Minter vibes, I would feel very proud.

We’re all about the thrills here at Thriller Thursday. What has thrilled you lately?

Books are my main source of thrill, and some books I’ve loved lately are Trust Issues by some folks you might’ve heard of, Elizabeth McCullough Keenan and Greg Wands, Saltwater by Katy Hays, and The Last Session by Julia Bartz.

I’ve also been thrilled by recent New Yorker takedowns of Elon Musk’s “techno-fascism” (many people I love work for the federal government and are currently suffering through Elon’s shadow puppetry, so I’m extra-extra invested). As well as the fact that Richard Siken, my favorite poet, granted me permission to use his poems as epigraphs in my novels. We had a lovely email exchange I will treasure forever.

There, that covers the whole gamut of thrills: book thrills, horror thrills, and happy thrills.

What are you currently reading?

I have the pleasure of re-reading the Finlay Donovan series so I can be fresh for my event with Elle Cosimano at Murder By the Book, celebrating Finlay Donovan Digs Her Own Grave. This series is such a delight! I love Finlay and would commit crimes for Vero.

Question for our readers. Answer in the comments for a chance to WIN a signed copy of This Book Will Bury Me!

Do you enjoy true crime, and if so, why? If not, why not?

Congratulations to Mallika N. who won the signed copies of THE CLOISTERS and SALTWATER by answering Katy Hays’s Question of the Week!