Longtime friends Tracy Dobmeier and Wendy Katzman have teamed up for their debut novel, Girls with Bright Futures, a thrilling story about the intense and dangerous college admissions process. I recently got a chance to ask Tracy and Wendy about what it was like to write a novel with a friend and what we can expect from Girls with Bright Futures.
If you’re hosting a book club, Tracy and Wendy have created an event guide with a discussion guide, cocktail recipes, music, and more! The duo are also scheduling Zoom sessions with book clubs or friend groups that wish to explore the book with the authors! You can find more details on their website.
Hello Tracy and Wendy! Thank you for taking the time to answer some questions. Let’s start off with you both telling us a little bit about yourselves.
Tracy: Thanks so much for the chance to chat with you! I’ll start us off. I grew up a total nerd (appreciate the camaraderie!) in Los Angeles, and attended college at Princeton University and law school at UC Berkeley. My husband also went to Princeton and UC Berkeley law, but we didn’t meet until law school. We eventually settled in Seattle in the mid-1990s and raised our two sons here. Both are now in their 20s. I first met Wendy in Seattle when our eldest kids were tiny, but here’s a fun (and slightly embarrassing!) fact: I met Wendy’s husband, Van, several years before I met Wendy. Van and I both lived in Washington, DC just after college and I briefly dated one of his housemates there. Then, the following year, I dated another one of his housemates. What can I say? He had good taste in friends! We always joke that it’s a good thing I never got around to dating Van! But seriously, Wendy and I have been through a lot together over the past 20 years and since neither we nor our husbands have any family in Seattle, we’ve helped fill that void for each other, celebrating holidays, birthdays, bar mitzvahs, and anniversaries together, and showing up to pick up the pieces when life has dealt us setbacks.
Wendy: I grew up in Ann Arbor, Michigan, perhaps less of a nerd than Tracy, but mainly because I was a competitive tennis player and athletes are always cool, right? I attended the University of Michigan where I played on the varsity tennis team. Van and I actually met at an athletic competition in Venezuela—I was on the US tennis team and he was on the US soccer team. Eventually, like Tracy and her husband, we also moved to Seattle in the mid-1990s. As couples, we ran into each other every so often and our husbands, who at that point were acquainted professionally, would say vague things about getting together. One day we all ran into each other at the zoo. In front of the otter exhibit actually. Tracy and I agreed we’d had enough of waiting for the guys to make plans. Tracy said tell me your phone number (this was long before cell phones). She remembered my number (something that seems rather miraculous given our limited capacity for remembering things these days) and she called me. We’ve been friends ever since. Prior to joining forces for this writing adventure, I had a long career in marketing medical technologies, including co-leading the Philips HeartStart Home Defibrillator business, which ultimately made it possible for you to buy a home defibrillator without a prescription. I have two kids, one who is a senior in college and one in eighth grade, along with a cat and a puppy.
What can readers expect from Girls With Bright Futures?
We like to describe our novel as a suspenseful read with a side of satire. The premise of the story is an exaggerated setup in which three ambitious moms of daughters at an elite high school find out that the one college they most covet for their daughters—Stanford—is only allocating their high school one spot in the incoming first year class. The story unfolds from there with shocking secrets, damaging lies, snarky judgments, and behavior that is morally questionable at best, criminal at worst. It’s a romp and a cautionary tale (we hope!) all wrapped up in one.
When did you two decide to try and write a novel together?
As we mentioned, we’ve been friends for more than two decades. For years, we felt it was inevitable that we would embark on some sort of professional collaboration, but it took us a long time to find the perfect idea, and we cycled through many, including a business, an app, a non-fiction book, and a board game. Finally, just when we were starting to launch our kids from the nest, we read two books that led us down this path, albeit indirectly. The first was Modern Romance, which was a collaboration between the comedian Aziz Anzari and Eric Klinenberg, a sociologist from Columbia, in which they examined how romance and courtship rituals have evolved over the last 100 years or so. Something about that the way that book took on a culturally relevant topic, combining humor and research really resonated with us and got us thinking about whether we could do something similar with modern motherhood and friendship. But we quickly realized we were neither stand-up comedians nor sociologists, so we were still casting about for an idea.
And then we read Daring Greatly by Brene Brown, which was truly life-changing. For years, we’d been urging our kids to adopt a “growth mindset” (to borrow the phrase coined by Stanford psychologist Carol Dweck), telling them that it’s OK to try new stuff and even fail, and yet we’d been unwilling to take that kind of risk ourselves. And so we thought: If we were going to “go big” and risk utter vulnerability, what would we do? All of the sudden we realized we wanted to write fiction (and writing a novel and sharing it with the world is nothing if not an excruciating exercise in vulnerability!). The only problem was that neither of us had ever written a word of fiction. But that’s where the “growth mindset” came in. So we pulled out our computers and Googled: “How do you write a novel?” That was at the end of February, 2016—and now we are publishing our debut almost exactly five years later.
What does your combined writing process look like?
We used to sit side-by-side, usually in Tracy’s kitchen, while Wendy’s daughter was at school, but now we largely work over Zoom mapping out all the key plot points chapter-by-chapter before we start writing—a necessity with two of us. We also initially split up characters when we start writing, which helps us more easily define their unique voices before editing it all together. People always ask us how often we argue. The truth is never. From the beginning, we had an understanding that if we didn’t agree on a certain direction we would keep trying until we found something we both loved. In addition, we’re grateful for each other’s strengths. For example, Wendy is super organized and detail oriented. She keeps us on track and moving forward. Tracy also fondly refers to her as the adverb police—Tracy tends toward the verbose and Wendy makes her “buy” adverbs. On the flip side, Tracy toils over every word in every sentence until she’s absolutely satisfied. Wendy is often off checking email waiting for Tracy to finish (or die trying). Perhaps the best part of writing together is that it often takes both of our middle-aged brains working together to remember any given detail about our manuscript!
Did any of your real-world experiences with the college admission process come into play while writing Girls With Bright Futures?
Having been through the college admissions process several times, we were well-aquainted with the intricacies of the college admissions industrial complex—standardized testing, tutoring, college visits, athletic recruiting, summer opportunities, leadership, AP classes, application types, you name it—which helped us create a realistic, albeit exaggerated, world. We also were able to draw upon our anxiety, uncertainty, and fear surrounding the process and infuse that into our characters. Thankfully, attempted murder was not part of our real-world experience.
Girls With Bright Futures has a very tense thriller vibe to it. Where did you pull inspiration from to achieve that atmosphere?
That’s great to hear—that’s what we were aiming for! We’re avid readers and, on the suspense front, drew inspiration from a number of writers, including Liane Moriarty, Sally Hepworth, Noah Hawley, Dan Brown, Celeste Ng, Taylor Jenkins Reid, Megan Abbott, Robyn Harding, and Greer Hendricks & Sarah Pekkanen. We spent quite a bit of time studying books whose authors we thought had really mastered the mystery/suspense vibe we were seeking. And then we created our own structure, one that would best serve our story. We also worked to occasionally offset the tension with humor, satire, and even some emotional scenes. While we were writing, we actually had no idea if our vision for the story was going to hold together, especially with so many plot twists, but we were pleasantly surprised when we read the entire manuscript through from start to finish for the first time. We looked at each and exclaimed, “Oh my gosh! This totally worked!”
While being an author is typically seen as very solitary work, I feel like author duos are starting to become more commonplace. Is there any advice you can give to future author team ups?
It’s exciting to see more author duos popping up. Obviously, it’s not for everyone, but we can’t imagine writing any other way and highly recommend giving it a try. Like any meaningful relationship, we believe trust, respect, and communication are essential. Make sure you’re equally committed. Come up with your own ground rules for how you will handle disagreements before they happen. Take advantage of having two people. Identify your strengths. Divide up responsibilities, particularly as they grow beyond writing to include marketing and managing partnership responsibilities (banking, bill paying, taxes, etc.) We’ve discovered the hard way that most writing tools are not designed for use by two people. We recommend Google docs. It took us a while to figure that one out. Finally, we highly recommend having a sense of humor. Laughter has carried us through the ups and downs of this wild ride.
2020 was rough on everyone for a myriad of reasons, but a lot of people found comfort in books, movies, and TV series as ways to escape. Did you have anything that helped you escape the chaos of 2020?
YES! It probably won’t surprise you to hear that we share book, TV, and podcast recommendations with each other on a regular basis. On the TV front, we both loudly lamented having already watched Gilmore Girls for the first time a few years ago, but Schitt’s Creek and Ted Lasso were the clear pandemic-era favorites for both of us. We also loved The Queen’s Gambit, Chernobyl, The Crown, Teenage Bounty Hunters, and more recently, Bridgerton.
As for books, in no particular order, either one or both of us enjoyed the following: The Vanishing Half by Brit Bennett, Beartown by Fredrik Backman, No One WIll Tell You This But Me by Bess Kalb, The Last Flight by Julie Clark, Nothing to See Here by Kevin Wilson, The Nickel Boys by Colson Whitehead, Long Bright River by Liz Moore, Musical Chairs by Amy Poeppel, Eliza Starts a Rumor by Jane Rosen, The Midnight Library by Matt Haig, Black Buck by Mateo Askaripour, One to Watch by Kate Stayman-London, Boyfriend Material by Alexis Hall, and A Long Petal of the Sea by Isabel Allende. Tracy’s favorite pandemic podcast was “In the Bubble” with Andy Slavitt, and Wendy’s was anything produced by Wondery.
And lastly, any plans for more novels together that you can share?
Absolutely! We love writing and working together and are already well into our next book. We actually spent the first six months or so of COVID working over Zoom sketching out this new idea and beginning to write, before we had to pivot to all the work that goes into a successful book launch, especially one during a global pandemic. It was sad to not be able to sit side-by-side at Tracy’s house, and we missed our face-to-face brainstorming walks, but like everyone else we made the necessary adjustments and kept plugging away. Our next novel isn’t a sequel to Girls with Bright Futures, but it is set in a similar world with more parents behaving badly and another suspenseful event at the heart of the story. That’s about all we can say right now!
