Q&A with Lee Upton

 

 

 

Lee Upton is the author of the new novel Wrongful. Her many other books include the novel Tabitha, Get Up. She is the Francis A. March Professor Emerita and Writer in Residence at Lafayette College.

 

Q: In our previous interview, you said that the ideas for Wrongful and for your novel Tabitha, Get Up “both emerged from one failed short story I wrote.” Can you say more about that?

 

A: It’s so nice to be able to answer questions from you again. Thanks so much for this opportunity. Yes, both novels derived from one short story about a woman who went missing at a literary festival.

 

My 2024 comic novel, Tabitha, Get Up, emerged from an email that appears at the end of the story. The voice in that email had such infectious energy that I wanted to find a way to keep the voice alive in some form.

 

Wrongful, my new novel, derives from a portion of the plot of that failed story. As a short story, the original plot was too complicated and ended too abruptly. The plot brimmed over the top of the story.

 

Extending the plot was a challenge and an opportunity. Suddenly I found myself writing a mystery in which a number of writers behave badly. I had such fun thinking about all the temptations that the characters face. Soon, multiple mysterious events started blooming.

 

Wrongful is, in some ways, a homage to Agatha Christie. I turned to her novels during a hard time in my life. Focusing on her tricky plots helped me forget my own troubles. I hope Wrongful can do the same for others.

 

Q: The writer Olivia Clare Friedman said of the book, “I love Wrongful for its humor and wisdom, but also for the characters that keep you guessing.” What do you think of that description?

 

A: That’s a wonderful description, and I’m so grateful for it. I wanted the novel to contain notes of humor even though there are spikes of horror. The plot revolves around a mystery that a primary character, Geneva Finch, has been haunted by for 10 years. She recruits the aid of a former priest to determine what happened a decade ago.

 

In early drafts the characters kept me guessing too for a while. It was comforting to hear that Agatha Christie didn’t always know the identity of the culprit until later in the process. Once I figured a few crucial things out, it became especially exciting to reveal characters’ motivations.

Q: How was the book’s title chosen, and what do you hope readers take away from it?

 

A: The idea of being wrong was a motivating theme for the book. I’ve been humbled many times when I was sure I knew something—only to discover how wrong I was.

 

Mystery novels are about wrongness, in a sense. In a mystery novel if we’re not wrong much of the time as readers, suspense lags and the novel fails. We can allow ourselves to be misled by characters without doing damage to ourselves. There’s a kind of delicious excitement in that.

 

Characters get so much wrong in Wrongful. Some make errors because of envy or spite or projection—particularly when they assume others think the way they do.

 

Wrongful is also about readers and reading—the intimacy of reading, and the unique love that readers may feel for authors. (I began writing as a child out of love—love for words on the page and for all authors who opened the world for me.)

 

Q: How did you create your character Geneva?

 

A: I really enjoyed creating Geneva. She’s what I think of as an ideal reader. She immerses herself in novels, giving her full attention as she reads. At the same time, she has a capacity to “read” others in ways that might terrify them if they could hear her thoughts. She’s in some ways an innocent—but like many innocent people she tends often to feel guilty.

 

Q: What are you working on now?

 

A: I’m working on poetry and fiction and focusing intensively on one manuscript: a novel about two painters, one of whom believes the other painter ruined her life. The draft is giving me just about every kind of trouble.

 

Q: Anything else we should know?

 

A: In 2026 there will be a sequel to Tabitha, Get Up. It’s called Tabitha, Stay Up—and I had such a fabulous time returning to Tabitha’s world. The novel will be published by Sagging Meniscus Press. Tabitha’s world is turned upside down and jostled a bit. Sequels seem to require that sort of churning. Tabitha kept me laughing, I’ll say that.

 

Another novel—a very different novel (literary fiction that’s a thriller) is also appearing in 2026: The Withers, from Regal House Publishing. It’s a novel about friendship, obsession, profound loss, and the lure of forgetting—and it’s set in a world terrorized by organ traffickers. That sounds harrowing, and it is, but it’s also a novel about love.

 

Right now, I’m excited that Wrongful is coming into the world. It’s almost a taxonomy of the way writers and agents and publishers can be tempted to engage in ruinous behaviors.

 

But it’s also a jaunt, a tricky mystery that asks us to keep reconsidering what we believe to be true as it  explores questions about guilt and fear and envy, and how we can so easily come to the wrong conclusions—repeatedly.

 

Thanks for these great questions!

 

--Interview with Deborah Kalb. Here's a previous Q&A with Lee Upton.