Hello friends! This month, I’m excited to share a guest craft essay by Amber Sparks, long-time friend and one of my favorite writers, whose highly anticipated debut novel Happy People Don’t Live Here is out today from Liveright.

Here’s the jacket copy for Happy People Don’t Live Here:

Just past the edge of summer, Alice and her daughter, Fern, arrive at the Pine Lake Apartments―a former sanatorium occupied by an ensemble of peculiar neighbors and a smattering of ghosts. Among the living: the Mermaid Lady, who performs in a nightclub fish tank; the building’s handyperson, moonlighting as a medium; and an awkwardly charming professor of medieval studies. Fern alone is acquainted with the undead, who pass like troubled clouds through the apartments, humanity mostly lost ages ago. For the determinedly private Alice, Pine Lake seems the perfect place at the edge of the world to hide herself and her daughter―until the day Fern finds a dead body in the dumpster.

Intent on solving the mystery of this discarded corpse, Fern eagerly puts her encyclopedic knowledge of detective novels to good use while dodging warnings from her increasingly paranoid mother. She soon comes to realize that within the strange tapestry of Pine Lake residents, nothing is ever quite as it seems. Her investigation digs up long-buried secrets, including her mother’s, that implicate each of her neighbors . . . and conjures a new one from beyond the grave.

The hotly anticipated debut novel from “master of the fantastic” (Roxane Gay) Amber Sparks, Happy People Don’t Live Here is an unforgettable portrait of family―whether by birth or by chance or by choice―and the sometimes dangerous myths we make to keep ours together.

I had the good luck to read this novel twice—once in the middle of Amber’s writing process and once at the very end, right before the book went to print—and I loved it both times. Amber is a smart, funny storyteller, and I hope you’ll check out her novel, whether you’re new to her work or already a fan of her excellent story collections like 2021’s And I Do Not Forgive You: Stories and Other Revenges.

Happy pub day, Amber! Thanks so much for sharing this look at your process!

How to Write a Novel with the Kitchen Sink Thrown In

I’m an unrepentant maximalist when it comes to writing. If you’re like me, you write what you’re