Gatsby-era glamour, a swoon-worthy love story, and an indomitable heroine dazzle in this romp that captures the extravagance of the Roaring Twenties and the dangers of vigilante justice.
We chat with author Kendall Kulper about her latest release Murder for the Modern Girl, along with writing, book recommendations, and more!
Hi, Kendall! Can you tell our readers a bit about yourself?
I’m an author and artist in Cambridge, MA, where I live with my husband, two daughters, and sweet dog, Abby. Murder for the Modern Girl is my third published novel, but I’ve been writing for as long as I’ve been stringing words together! I studied History and Literature in college, and I especially love delving into different historical eras and combining them with fantasy elements. When I’m not writing, I am often embroidering! I run a small side business selling custom embroidered artwork, usually highly-detailed portraits of people’s pets. I’m also an avid runner, sometimes weight-lifter, decent home cook, and certified Plant Lady.
How has the almost first half of 2022 been for you?
Ahh, we’re all doing the best we can, right?? There have for sure been some pandemic-related challenges and disruptions, but on the whole my family is healthy and we’re all doing well. I got into weight-lifting in a big way in January, which has been a wild ride, and I love it. Mostly, my life has been very full with fun and exciting book things! Prepping for Modern Girl’s launch, and getting ready for the next thing coming along (which I will hopefully be able to share more of so soon!).
When did you first discover your love for writing?
I think I have literally always loved writing. I can remember being in first grade and having to write sentences for homework every night, using one or two of the words of the week, and I would just write pages and pages. I used to write stories all the time in elementary school, and at the end of the day, I would sit in the cafeteria, write a page, and immediately hand it off to the person next to me to read, who would hand it off to the next person in line when they were done, and on and on down the row. That’s the kind of instant reader feedback I’ve been chasing my whole life lol
Quick lightning round! Tell us the first book you ever remember reading, the one that made you want to become an author, and one that you can’t stop thinking about!
First book I remember reading: probably Pat the Bunny, which I loved because it was interactive! Also, I definitely thought “Pat” was the bunny’s name…
The book that made me want to be an author: I read A Tree Grows in Brooklyn when I was 12, for 7th grade summer reading, and it has been a touchstone for me my whole life. I felt such a kinship with Francie, the main character, who loves to read and write and dreams about becoming an author. I’d always dreamed of becoming a writer someday, but seeing Francie on that path helped make it feel like a real possibility!
The book I can’t stop thinking about: Other than the book I’m writing right now, which I literally can’t stop thinking about, right now I am absolutely loving Pachinko, by Min Jin Lee. The writing is so beautiful and evocative, and I have it on audiobook, so I’ve been going for lots of long walks imaginging myself in this different world!
Your new novel, Murder for the Modern Girl, is out May 31st! If you could only describe it in five words, what would they be?
Fun, flirty, flapper, mind-reading, murders 🙂
What can readers expect?
Set in Prohibition Chicago, Murder for the Modern Girl is about eighteen-year-old Ruby Newhouse, a fun party girl who hides a secret: she can read minds. Along with absolutely crushing at Charades, she uses this ability to hunt down and poison men who have escaped justice. Everything’s going all swimmingly when she learns her father, the last uncorrupt civil servant in Chicago, is being targeted by a political conspiracy, and she has to find and expose the people behind this to keep her family safe. While investigating this plot, she meets and makes friends with Guy Rosewood, a shy, sweet shapeshifter working in the city morgue. Fortunately for Ruby, brilliant Guy agrees to help her protect her family—but unfortunately, he’s also started investigating where all those poisoned dead bodies came from. And even worse, Ruby finds herself falling for him.
Where did the inspiration for Murder for the Modern Girl come from?
I read an excellent book called The Poisoner’s Handbook, by Deborah Blum, about the birth of forensic science in New York City in the 1920s and 1930s. At the time, poisons and other methods of chemically killing a person were widely available and nearly impossible to trace, and scientists began racing to develop methods to detect whether crimes had actually taken place. I love the Jazz Age in general, and this was such a fascinating angle to approach that time. Since I always love combining history and fantasy, I started to imagine how a fantasy element might complicate the idea of a person involved in murder, and I created the character of Ruby, who feels a responsibility to eliminate criminals who have escaped justice and are planning more crimes. I wanted her to have a foil and someone who could bring in more of the scientific aspects, which led me to Guy, and since I love a tragic backstory, I added in that his scientific interest comes from a desperate desire to understand his own shapeshifting ability, after he lost control in a way that ended in tragedy.
But truly, I draw inspiration from so many places! F. Scott Fitzgerald’s excellent short story, “Bernice Bobs Her Hair,” helped me really get a sense of the time and feeling of the Twenties. The short-lived, much-loved show Pushing Daisies has a wonderful balance of sweetness and darkness that I tried to capture. “Strong Female Protagonist,” a webcomic by Brennan Lee Mulligan and Molly Ostertag about superheroes dealing with the messy reality of their powers, was excellent for thinking through exactly how Ruby and Guy would walk around and face the world with their abilities. And Chicago was my hometown for several years, so there are lots of neighborhood-specific details!
Can you tell us a bit about the challenges you faced while writing and how you were able to overcome them?
Murder for the Modern Girl had a looooong road. I first came up with this idea around the end of 2015 and spent the next year and a half really nailing it down. After I came back from maternity leave with my second kid, I jumped right back into the book and it went out to publishers in 2018. It took two years to find the right home, and boy those were tough years. I usually find it very easy to let go of manuscripts I’ve written, and like pretty much all authors out there, I have a few manuscripts that will never get published. With all of them, I feel like that was the right move—those manuscripts might have had things about them that I loved, but ultimately they were not the right books for me at the time. The only manuscript I felt real, true grief over the possibility of never getting to share with the world was this one. I never reread my books—even the published ones—but I found myself pulling out this manscript so many times, just because I had written it to give myself hope and joy during a difficult time, and rereading it never failed to make me feel a bit better.
As far as overcoming that challenge, the best thing you can do for your career is to have a team who supports you. I truly have to credit my incredible agent, Sara Crowe, for always believing in me and this book and continuing to search for the right home for it. I think I honestly didn’t believe her at first when she called me in Spring 2020 to tell me it had sold! (I was also deep into early pandemic survival mode with two small kids—it was a wild time) But in the end, it was exactly the right time and place for it—I couldn’t be happier with my editor and my publisher, and I am so thrilled this book will be out in the world!
Were there any favourite moments or characters you really enjoyed writing or exploring?
As much as this book is a romance, there is so much about the importance of friendship, and creating and exploring the relationship between Ruby and her best friend, Maggie, was such an unexpected bright spot. Their friendship is based on a lot of close friendships I’ve had, how they support and trust one another, step up for each other, joke around, and inspire each other to be better people. Maggie started out as just a side character, but the more I wrote about her, the more I fell in love with her, and she absolutely has all the best lines in the book lol.
I also loved learning more about science through Guy! Science has never been my strong suit, and I basically white-knuckled all my required science courses in college, but I am still fascinated by how the world around us works. Forcing myself to see through the eyes of a scientist gave me a new perspective on life, and it was a very satisfying challenge to figure out how to describe all these scientific processes in an accessible way.
What’s the best and the worst writing advice you have received?
Best advice: Just Write the Damn Book. There is so much in publishing out of your control, but the thing you do control is the writing. Write. Focus on that. Give it your time and attention, and let go of the rest of the process.
Worst advice: When I was in a college writing program, there was a real undercurrent of disdain for children’s books. I can remember an instructor telling me, a twenty-year-old, that my next piece of writing had to have a main character old enough to have a mortgage. So for many years, I slogged through writing extremely boring, extremely depressing, theoretically “edgy” stories about divorce, affairs, childbirth, elder dementia—topics which I knew absolutely nothing about but I thought would give my writing prestige. What it actually did was completely suck all the joy out of writing. When I thought about when was the last time I enjoyed writing, what came to me was the Newsies fanfiction I had written in high school, which was essentially just historical fiction YA. I stopped caring about what I thought I “should” write and instead focused on the writing that gave me joy, and now I am a much happier, and very proud, children’s book author.
What’s next for you?
I’m working on another book! There will be more details to share soon, but it involves the Golden Age of Hollywood and ghosts, and it is so freaking fun to write!
Lastly, do you have any 2022 book recommendations for our readers?
I love anything by Ruta Sepetys so of course I Must Betray You is high on my list! Claire LeGrand is another must-buy and her recent horror novel Extasia is incredible. And I’m loving the audiobook of Katie Cotugno’s Birds of California!
