Photo by Jackie Batch Photography
Charlotte Lillie Balogh is the author of the new young adult novel Capsized. She also has written the YA novel Kill the Lax Bro. She lives in Los Angeles.
Q: What inspired you to write Capsized, and how did you create your characters Margaret and Jo?
A: Capsized is a young adult book about a girls’ rowing team, and it was inspired by my experiences as a competitive rower in high school and college. However, despite always wanting to be an author, it didn’t initially occur to me to write a story set in the rowing world—I think I was just too close to the subject!
I later moved to Los Angeles to pursue screenwriting, and when I began a part-time job coaching a real-life rowing team, I realized that writing a book about the sport was the perfect combination of two of my passions—rowing and writing.
Coaching also gave me the opportunity to see the sport from a different perspective, and watch a new generation of girls find their place on a team.
As for our protagonists—Margaret and Jo—I always thought of the two as foils to one another. Jo is a freshman—impatient, outspoken, and still figuring out who she is—while Margaret is a senior—polished, graceful, and someone who has sacrificed everything to get to where she thought she wanted to be.
Despite their differences, both girls are deeply loyal and remarkably stubborn, which unites them early on.
In many ways, I’d like to think that Jo is the freshman version of myself. Margaret, on the other hand, is the big sister I needed, wanted, and was lucky enough to find as a younger athlete on my team.
Q: The author Alexandra Brown Chang said of the book, “Balogh effortlessly pulls the reader into the high-pressure world of elite rowing, where ambition, loyalty, and scandals collide.” What do you think of that description?
A: I think it’s a fantastic description! I love that Chang captures the energy of the book in just a few words.
One of the things I appreciated about my own high school team—and wrote into the world of Capsized—is that the girls at our boathouse came from completely different worlds. We all attended different schools, public and private, and had different backgrounds.
Rowing has a reputation for being an “elite” sport, and while there is historically a financial barrier to entry, I also wanted to challenge the idea that rowing exists only as an extracurricular for college applications.
Ultimately, I wanted Capsized to capture that rowing is about so much more than winning—it’s about friendship, identity, belonging, and the relationships you build with your teammates.
Q: How did you research the book, and did you learn anything that especially surprised you?
A: At first, I foolishly thought there wouldn’t be a lot of research I’d have to do, simply because I was writing about a topic so close to home. I was quickly humbled!
Like many sports, rowing has its own specific language, and I made sure to ask my dad, a rowing coach himself, to read various drafts of the book. He held me accountable down to the literal nuts and bolts.
For example: I initially wrote that the uniforms are made of “spandex,” but it’s actually “sweat wicking lycra.” I also learned that “gunnel” is spelled like “gunwale”—a word I heard every day as a rower, but never had to spell myself. Until now!
Q: Did you know how the novel would end before you started writing it, or did you make many changes along the way?
A: I did! Which is a little bizarre looking back now, seeing as I’ve been working on this project for eight years, and many other things did change along the way (mostly: character names).
However, I always wanted to write a book set during the fall rowing season in Boston, which meant things would naturally come to a head at the Head of the Charles Regatta (pun intended). That race has played a very important role in my life, as an athlete and spectator, and is still my favorite race every year.
Without giving too much away—even the way the finale of the book is written, and the POV we are in during the race itself, was something I saw from the very beginning.
Q: What are you working on now?
A: Earlier this year I wrote a TV pilot called Heartbreak Hill, a half-hour rom com about a headstrong college senior who gets dumped by her high school sweetheart and decides to run the Boston Marathon. That script placed on the 2026 Love List, a collection of the best unproduced romance scripts in Hollywood, and I am now adapting the story for a New Adult novel.
Q: Anything else we should know?
A: I’m still a rowing coach today! In addition to my writing career, I work with middle and high school girls at RowLA, a nonprofit in Los Angeles dedicated to empowering young women through rowing.
I believe team sports are one of the most positively impactful things in a young person’s life (or any person, at any age) and that learning how to be a team player is the most important thing we can do.
--Interview with Deborah Kalb
