Tara Goedjen is the author of the new novel Please Enjoy Your Stay. Her other books include the young adult novel No Beauties or Monsters. She lives in the Pacific Northwest.
Q: What inspired you to write Please Enjoy Your Stay, and how did you create your character Mia?
A: My intention was for Please Enjoy Your Stay to feel like a cross between a thriller and a ghost story, so I’m so thrilled every time a review mentions comparison titles like Daphne du Maurier’s Rebecca and gothic thrillers like Ruth Ware’s The Turn of the Key.
I put all of my favorite tropes into Please Enjoy Your Stay: it has a true crime podcast, a book within a book, and hidden identities. And after I decided on a castle-turned-hotel with a fraught history as the setting (or perhaps it decided on me!), I knew I wanted a character who likewise felt haunted by her past.
Mia’s a very itinerant character too, and in some ways her constant restlessness has mirrored my own life, but for different reasons. She’s strong despite hardship, and trying to fix everything by herself, and I loved the blend of stubbornness and determination in her.
Q: This is your debut novel for adults--why did you decide to write an adult novel rather than another young adult novel, and do you have a preference?
A: When I started developing the backstory of Please Enjoy Your Stay, I loved the idea of a true crime author at the height of her career, staying at an infamous hotel to research a cold case for her next book, only to end up being confronted by a devastatingly personal crime: the murder of her teenaged son, witnessed solely by her niece, Mia.
That scaffolding seemed like a better fit for an adult audience, so I leaned into that.
And actually, I enjoyed having fewer parameters while writing for adults—it’s also the stage of life I’m in, so it came very naturally to me—but the dual timeline in Please Enjoy Your Stay let me play to my strengths as a YA writer too.
Using a dual timeline structure allowed me to move between 13-year-old Mia when she first visited the hotel, and Mia’s inevitable return, years later, as an adult who is desperately searching for answers.
Q: Did you know how the story would end before you started writing it, or did you make many changes along the way?
A: I had a hazy idea of how I wanted the story to end, but the biggest change from start to finish was adding a second timeline. The novel was initially written solely in Mia’s POV, but a couple of beta readers (who are also authors that I trust!) suggested that I might want to add a POV from Mia’s Aunt Iris—the controversial true crime author in the novel.
So now there are sections from Iris’s journals throughout the novel, which give us those glimpses of Mia as a teenager, and show us Iris’s own experiences at the hotel as well.
And even though I initially resisted adding sections from Iris’s POV, they became my favorite passages in the book. Since Iris is a controversial true crime author known for her rather strange writing methods, I enjoyed getting to talk about books and the creative process through the lens of the “Queen of Murder,” as Iris is called by a (fictional) article in Vanity Fair.
Q: How would you describe Mia’s relationship with her aunt?
A: Mia and Iris only have each other—they don’t have any other family when the novel opens in the present day—but at the same time, they’re each dealing with their own demons, so to speak, and they’re not always entirely honest with one another.
I wanted their relationship to feel nuanced, and I liked being able to show how Mia acted around her aunt as a teenager, versus how she acts around Iris as an adult, as usually the dynamics of those parent-child relationships that we have in our lives can shift (or stay stuck) as we age.
Overall, there’s quite a push and pull between Mia and Iris, which becomes a source of tension and keeps the reader guessing along the way.
Q: What are you working on now?
A: I’m working on another gothic-tinged thriller, currently set near Vancouver Island in British Columbia. There’s a wedding gone wrong, and a haunted lighthouse, and so far it has been a lot of fun to write!
Q: Anything else we should know?
A: I absolutely love hearing from readers, and I’ll be making some appearances when Please Enjoy Your Stay comes out in October, so please stay in touch over on Instagram @taragoedjen, or subscribe to my newsletter (there will be giveaways!) over on Substack, or via my website: taragoedjenauthor.com.
--Interview with Deborah Kalb
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