The Unbound Book Festival is coming up this weekend, and KBIA has been talking to featured writers in a series we're calling "Unbound Conversations." Find the rest of them here.
Jenna Blum is the author of the 2026 thriller Murder Your Darlings, which centers around author Sam Vetiver as she falls for the illustrious William Corwyn, a bestselling novelist. Things take a turn with the appearance of his stalker, The Rabbit.
KBIA's Isabel Kennedy sat down with Blum to talk about how her writing life was the backbone of Darlings. Here's an excerpt from their conversation:
Isabel Kennedy: I also saw that you were doing a panel about book tours. So I have to ask, does your experience rival Sam's in the book?
Jenna Blum: That's right. ... So, I am, and I have exactly the same experience with book tours as Sam. Sam is 100% me, I just don't even want to disguise that. What happens to her in the book hasn't happened to me, but her entire writing life is exactly my writing life. So, yes, I write books to go on tour. I don't like the writing part, I love the touring part. I love to connect with readers.
Kennedy: I felt like Darlings has a lot to say, obviously, on the publishing industry and writing as a profession, so I was curious about how much that pulls from your life, and if there are any misconceptions you touched on, or anything you wanted to dispel while writing Darlings?
Blum: All of it is my life, again. It's like — there's one point, I was doing a podcast, and the interviewer looked over my shoulder. I was in my living room instead of my study where I am now. And she said, "Isn't that Sam Vetiver's fireplace?" And I was like, "Oh yeah." I forgot I put my apartment in the novel, and my agent, and my editor, and my writing workshop. Each of whom chose their own character name. So it's all in there.
I don’t know. If I wanted to dispel anything, it's that — writing isn't sort of sitting on top of the Snoopy dog house, just typing, “It was the best of times, it was the worst of times,” and having everything just follow easily and naturally from there. It is more like a roller coaster, and so a lot of writers are up in the middle of the night thinking, "How am I going to pay the mortgage? Are readers gonna like this book by the time it comes out? Am I making the right creative choices for this novel? Is it going to be the best book it can be?"
And there's so much endemic doubt that goes along with writing, but there also is a lot of magic to it. When the writing goes right, it's the best feeling in the whole world, and so you really have a lot of those highs and lows.
And, I guess, it's not necessarily that I wanted to dispel a myth, but that I really just wanted to tell people, "This is what it's like back here." Like, you pull back the curtain, and this is how the sausage gets made.
"There's so much endemic doubt that goes along with writing, but there also is a lot of magic to it."Jenna Blum
Kennedy: We can tell by now, clearly, you've taken a lot of your own life and put it into Darlings. Did you take the stalker aspect as well?
Blum: I did. So, there is a moment in the book when Sam and William are talking about their respective stalkers — and of course we know The Rabbit by then, William's stalker, who's so determined and so dangerous — so, Sam and William are talking about that. And Sam shares, at least mentally, her own experience with her own stalker, and that's 100% my experience, of course. That I had somebody who got to commenting on my work through email, and then social, and then when I blocked him in both of these places, he sent me a nude sketch of myself to my home, although I don't share my address. And it actually was quite a good sketch. I was like, "Oh, I'm gonna show this to my grandchildren —"
Kennedy: Don't give him credit! He doesn't need the credit!
Blum: "— how dishy I am, this is great!" But anyway, it was quite disconcerting, and it didn't actually look like me.
But anyway, it was like my Kate Winslet on Titanic moment, except creepy.
