Wendy Walker’s ‘American Girl’ Solves a Murder with Neurodivergent Flair

Note: Text has been edited and does not match audio exactly.

Nicole Ransome: Hi, I'm Audible Editor Nicole, and I'm excited to welcome the ever-so-talented author Wendy Walker, best-selling author of Emma in the Night, All Is Not Forgotten, and Hold Your Breath. We're here to discuss her new Audible Original, American Girl. Welcome, Wendy.

Wendy Walker: Hi. Thank you so much for having me.

NR: It's great to have you here. So American Girl is told through the point of view of Charlie Hudson, an MIT-bound, small-town 17-year-old young woman on the autism spectrum. Is this your first neurodivergent character?

WW: It is actually, and she didn't start out with any specific neurodiversity. I just needed a character who had certain qualities so that she could observe her world through a different lens than a normal, average teenage girl in a normal average town, with a normal average life. She's had a difficult childhood. Her family structure is not ideal, and she is in a town that is really struggling economically, and she very much needs to and wants to get out.

So I gave her these qualities that would enable her to really observe the people around her and scrutinize them so that she could navigate her situation and her future and achieve her goals. In writing a character who did have this peculiar lens, where she makes rules about people and keeps track of things, I realized that I was actually writing a neurodiverse character, and more specifically, an autistic character.

NR: What kind of research did you have to do in order to develop her character, specifically?

WW: When we collectively decided that this was a good idea, I did a lot of online research. But I also spoke at length with a pediatrician who is also a child psychologist, and I spoke with other experts on autism and friends who have autistic children. And then the entire manuscript was read and combed through by a sensitivity reader, who is autistic. 

"One of the things I love about this format with Audible Originals is the freedom to have a breakaway into a scripted scene with an ensemble cast. We actually get to hear the conversation that Charlie and Ian had a year ago, in real time, through two different performers."

It was fascinating actually to see how many different views are out in the world about what language to use and also the approach to the different behaviors that some people who are autistic have—some what they call stemming behaviors, I actually have some myself. I am not autistic, but I have a little bit of OCD and anxiety, and so I actually do things with my hands when I am studying, or fidgety, or nervous. And I draw patterns with my finger. So I gave this characteristic to Charlie, and then discovered that it was a stemming mechanism for autistic people. So a lot of research. A lot of learning and a lot of enlightenment on my part as I went through the process.

NR: As a listener, I really did love the unique perspective Charlie's point of view offered in her day-to-day, especially when it came to the rules and how she basically observed everyone around her and used that to guide her own actions. So my question is then, what was your favorite part about writing from Charlie's perspective?

WW: Because Charlie sees the world through this very literal lens, when it comes to people her strengths are analytics, and memory, and math, in particular. She is very comfortable with formulas and things that make sense. Things that add up. 2+2 is 4. That's a fact. You can rely on it.

People are not that way, and it causes her a great deal of distress that she cannot always figure out people's motives and how they are going to impact her life, and her mother, in particular, is a very unique character. She was a teen mom. She's hypercritical in some ways, in that she's encouraging Charlie to go out, to get out of this town and to have this bigger life.

Charlie doesn't quite understand the choices that her own mother has made. So the advice her mother gives her, but the actions her mother takes for her own life, conflict. Charlie has to sort all of these things out about human behavior, and the way she does that is by trying to identify rules that she can apply for more than one situation.

It was so much fun to think about human behavior and then make a rule about it. As she's describing her life and telling us her story, she shares with us the rules that she has made about people, about behaviors that indicate they might be lying. She has used these rules to try to predict human behavior so that she can navigate her life.

NR: American Girl also includes a very interesting cast of characters, especially the characters that work with Charlie. Nora, Helen, Janice, and Keller. As you were writing, did you find that you related to any one co-worker more than the others?

WW: When I was a teenager, I worked in a sandwich shop. I drew directly from it. I don't usually do that in my books, but when I needed her to have a job and a cast of characters, I just decided to lean into my working experience when I was in high school. And the characters are not based directly on anyone that I worked with. 

In any kind of fast-food situation, you're going to find high school students. You're going to find career professionals who are managers and are working their way up, and this is their primary source of income. You're going to find working moms, working part time. All different ages, all different socioeconomic backgrounds. The characters each served a purpose, and each one was meant to highlight the dynamics of this economically struggling town.

You have Nora, who has been there her whole life, who takes great pride in her work. She wears nice clothing to the sandwich shop, even though everyone else wears jeans and t-shirts. And she tries to be a mentor and a fair and honest manager, even though the boss is sort of corrupt and is making her do things that go against her belief system.

And then you have Janice, who has four kids, and she's struggling, and her husband also works for the same terrible boss at a different store. She's a very maternal and emotional character.

And then you have Keller. Keller and her boyfriend, Levi, are meant to be symbolic of young love. They are Romeo and Juliet. It's fiery. It's desperate. Keller is in this horrible situation, taking care of an elderly, sick grandmother, trying to avoid the foster care system. She's dropped out of high school, and she's beautiful. And so the boss, Clay Cooper, he's inappropriate with her. For Charlie, she's meant to be the symbol of love, because Charlie's mother has warned her about young love, that it's a trick, it's God's trick, trying to get young people to make babies to populate the Earth. Because here she is, many years down the line having been a teen mom. So she's very cynical about love, and she has passed that along to Charlie and warned her, so many times, that Charlie is really very afraid of love.

She is afraid of her own feelings for a young man named Ian. She does love him and she feels these sexual feelings for him, and they terrify her. So she lives vicariously through Keller and Levi and the things that Keller tells about what it's like to be with a young man. What it feels like. What love is like.

And so these relationships, I think, give the book a lot of substance beyond the plot, which is essentially a murder mystery thriller plot, but these characters are meant to make the listener care about what happens to them, and I think that's a really important aspect of any novel, even a thriller that's driven primarily by the plot.

NR: Can you actually talk a little more about the relationship between Ian and Charlie? That was a really nice development. And the fact that he was the officer that comes to start the case, you know, is really interesting.

WW: So, Ian is a year ahead of Charlie in school. She's a senior and he just graduated. Ian is now a rookie cop in the town, and so he's the one to come to pick her up at the sandwich shop when they have discovered that she was there the night that their boss, Clay Cooper, was murdered. They obviously want to speak with her.

She had no idea there was this hidden camera in the store, and so she realizes it when there's this sort of dramatic scene when he comes in. She thinks he's just there to get his steak and cheese sandwich and then realizes that's not the case, and then that sort of kicks off the story. As Ian is driving her to the police station we get a break in the action and a moment of flashback to what happened between them a year before, which was he finally admitted to her his romantic feelings for her and there's some kissing and she's wanting so much to give into it. They've known each other since lower school. She loves him. She's attracted to him, and he loves her. He's the first boy that's ever expressed those feelings. It then becomes a scripted scene. 

One of the things I love about this format with Audible Originals is the freedom to have a breakaway into a scripted scene with an ensemble cast. We actually get to hear the conversation that Charlie and Ian had a year ago, in real time, through two different performers. They let me listen to a sample of that chapter, and I started crying because it was bringing back the emotions of writing that chapter and having to put myself in Charlie's shoes in this truck with Ian and wanting so much to love him and to be loved, and not being able to let herself do it because of the fear that her mother has put in her about love.

Because she has this lens through which she sees the world, she doesn't have any rules about this to follow. Her mother has put this fear in her and she does not trust her own instincts, because she sees the world through this particular lens and does not trust any instinctual feelings that she has about love, and about a lot of things. She needs her rules.

And when she looks around at her environment and the people in her life, she sees her mother, where love did take a lot of things from her. And then she sees Janice, who has four children, and it's another situation where love has put her in this really precarious economic situation. Where she is under the thumb of this ruthless business owner, as is her husband. And then she sees Ian and Keller, and it's so beautiful, the love, and it's everything to them. They would die for this love. She doesn't know what to make of it. It's devastating because she makes the decision that she feels she has to make, and it breaks her own heart to do it. And so now a year has gone by and she still loves Ian and he still loves her, but they're not together. I think it's really heartbreaking for this young girl to not be able to experience love.

NR: Without giving any spoilers, did you know who the killer was going to be from the very beginning? 

WW: I went through many different cycles in my mind of who the killer was. There was a lot of thinking and a lot of plotting, but by the time I sat down to write it, it was all plotted out, and what ended up being written was what was the outline. There were obviously some changes here and there as you're writing, at least for me. 

When I write, I go by my outline, but then an idea will come as I'm writing and I'll think, "Oh, that's a great new plot twist." Or I'll see an inconsistency in the motivations that I've given everyone. And I'll think, "Wait. This isn't making sense the way I've now started writing this character, in terms of motivation." And so some things did get sort of altered a little bit. But, yes, the basic plot was ready to go when I sat down and wrote this draft.

NR: I do have a question about the narration. American Girl is narrated by Paige Layle, and she is a known Canadian autism activist. What was the narrative selection process like? Did you always have a neurodiverse narrator in mind?

WW: Audible had that idea, which I thought was brilliant, and they did the search for the talent, and it is an ensemble cast. It was a lot of fun listening to the audition tapes and also listening to the different work that the various performers had done for other projects. So it was mostly Audible that found this amazing talent for the book, and I was just thrilled when I heard the portion of the chapter that they shared with me. It was absolutely phenomenal.

NR: Great. So American Girl is your second Audible Original, the first being Hold Your Breath. How did the creation process differ the second time around?

WW: Well, in two ways. Hold Your Breath is a novella, so it's short and it's also a sequel to my first thriller, All Is Not Forgotten. And the character in that is a man, and I know him very well. He was my brainchild in All Is Not Forgotten. Sometimes I think he's my evil alter ego. He's not meant to be a completely likable character. He's prickly. He's a psychiatrist. He's very opinionated and arrogant, but there's something appealing about him, and I think his story is very compelling. It felt like coming home, writing him again. The plot twist in that was something I'd been sitting on for a while. 

"I went home that night and thought, 'I have to write about a girl who is on the brink of adulthood, who has everything in front of her and now something is stopping it.'"

When I have this idea of maybe doing an Audible short, it was the perfect coming together of an idea and a character, and a format. And I knew as well that Dylan Baker, who was the performer for All Is Not Forgotten, had agreed to perform Hold Your Breath. So there was a continuity in terms of the voice for that character. 

American Girl was a full-length novel. So I wrote it the way I would write any novel, except that we had these scripted chapters, and I also knew it was going to be in an audio format. For that, it was a little bit different because Charlie lived in my head, but I had to also write all these other characters and give them a lot of backstory.

So I had a lot of characters to get to know, whereas Hold Your Breath is really focused on Dr. Forester. And so, American Girl was a lot more exploring for me. Who are these characters? How did they interact? And how did they impact Charlie? It was much more similar to writing a full-length novel for print, in that the characters keep developing as you write.

NR: Great. Do you write with audio in mind?

WW: Yeah. Very much. After writing Hold Your Breath, which was my first Audible Original, I thought very carefully about how much dialogue would be in it. I tried to think about the places where it's hard for the performer. When you have one performer having to do a long stretch of dialogue between multiple characters. They're incredibly talented, the audio performers. But it's hard. If it's in a narrated chapter, how much actual dialogue I'm going to include will be different for an Audible book. And then having these scripted chapters that American Girl has was completely liberating because it's just dialogue.

So then you can let loose with the dialogue and really get into the voice of each character, knowing it's going to be performed by an ensemble cast. The actual voice and the sort of literary voice is going to come through for each character, through the listening experience versus on the page. So I do try to keep those things in mind when I'm writing for an audiobook specifically.

When I read a book, it's obviously being processed by a different part of my brain. So I can't read a book and also be looking at my phone, or looking around, or out on a walk, or a run, or in the car. Your eyes are focused on the words and you're absorbing the story and taking the story in through words. We do that all day long. We are very used to absorbing stories through voice and through conversation.

When I'm writing for an audiobook specifically, I try to think about that experience and how it's very different than if you and I were having this exchange through email, for example. 

NR: I really enjoyed your first-person writing. What do you like about writing from a perspective as the person rather than as if you're observing?

WW: It's so interesting, because I had never written in first person until I wrote All Is Not Forgotten. I'm not a trained writer. I was an attorney and an investment banker before that. So I have had to pick up tools along the way. When I was writing in first person, I felt this freedom to choose whatever cadence I wanted, to ignore grammar, to ignore sentence structure, to just write the way this person would be thinking. 

So when my character was agitated by something, I could make the sentences shorter and the words more acerbic. The best example for me, that I always try to keep in my mind is, my character could be saying, "It's a beautiful day. I'm walking down the street and feeling happy." And if that's true, then I might just write it like that in one long sentence. But if my character is lying and really is not happy and is maybe about to go kill somebody, then I would write it differently. It would be one-line sentences broken up, and the reader would wonder, "Why is this benign sentence about walking down the street and feeling happy broken up into three different paragraphs?" And it sends a message that maybe it's not the words that you should be paying attention to, but the way the words are being written.

With audio, the tools are a little bit different because you're not reading it, but I can write it in a way that tells the performer to read it a certain way: to read it a little bit choppier, to end the sentence with a little more emphasis, to pause in between what they're saying. And I think first person gives me that freedom to send these sort of secret messages to the listener or the reader that maybe the words that are being listened to or read, that's not the whole story.

NR: Coming from the investment banking and legal field, what would you say is your favorite aspect of writing? And what draws you to mysteries, specifically?

WW: I think what draws me to writing is that I am very much an introvert. I can be extroverted, but I work best when I am in a quiet space alone in my head, focused on this one project. I have always been that way. So investment banking, the best parts of that for me would be when I was crunching numbers or doing a spreadsheet and really focused on putting together a presentation or an analysis. The same thing with the law. Writing a brief I was much happier than being in court. 

I'm much more at peace when I am able to be analyzing and creating something from that analysis. I think what drives me toward thrillers and suspense is, that also lends itself to that type of thinking. So I like to know where I'm going. I'm a plotter. I plot everything out.

NR: And so do you find yourself drawn to any specific themes in your writing?

WW: When I look back on all of my novels—I think now there are six thrillers, and the seventh I'm working on now—all of them involve trauma to some extent. Trauma in childhood that has created problems in adult life, trauma that is happening now, that it has an aftermath.

They're very psychological, in that I try to have some strand of psychology that is real and that I researched. Whether it's narcissism, or trauma recovery, or attachment disorders, every novel has something in it that is realistic and that pulls together an event that has occurred in a person's life, to a situation that's happening now and how they are responding to it. 

That is very much a theme in American Girl, in many ways the trauma of her mother's past is threaded through to Charlie's life, and she has now gone through this trauma with the murder of her boss. That's what I loved about American Girl, was being able to really dive into these characteristics with some depth, because they are so important to the story. Charlie is trying to save all of them and they all mean so much to her. They are her sort of chosen family, the people in the sandwich shop.

The other aspect of that was by giving Charlie this lens that she uses to navigate her life, I was able to use her to break down all of the characters' psychological makeup, because she needs to do that to understand them. So in her doing that, she does that for the listener. She breaks down the psychology of all the people around her so she can understand them and predict their behavior.

When she does that, and shares it with the listener, the listener then gets drawn into the psychology and the backstory of each character and what might be motivating them. That was a lot of fun. So yes, for me, psychology and, in particular, the psychology of trauma have both been big themes in my writing.

NR: I was curious about the title American Girl. Can you tell us the story about how you chose that title?

WW: I was at a bar and there was a cover band playing songs from my teen years, with mid-to-late '80s and early '90s. The band was playing and they started playing "American Girl" by the amazing Tom Petty. And I had been absolutely obsessed with Tom Petty in high school and, in particular, that song. And what I find so fascinating about music is that it brings back a visceral reaction when you hear it. It's like a permanent time stamp, and it just brings out the emotions that you had around the time when that song burned into your memory bank.

But in any event, they started playing "American Girl." We got up to dance and I started remembering what it felt like to be a teenage girl. And that song is really about this sort of conflict of young love and the whole world out in front of you, pushed up against the realities of life, and hearing that song for the first time, to now being of a certain age, with children who are now teenagers and older, and realizing all of the things in life that made those dreams come true or stopped those dreams, and just the realities of life that we experience as we get older. The dichotomy of those struck me so profoundly in that moment dancing with my friends to this cover band playing "American Girl."

That song then became attached to this story, because that's when the story was born. I went home that night and thought, "I have to write about a girl who is on the brink of adulthood, who has everything in front of her and now something is stopping it." And that's when American Girl was born.

NR: I just love, love, love your answers. This goes into my next question: what are you working on next?

WW: I am in the process of revising a draft of another thriller. It may change. I always hesitate to say too much about a plot until it's been approved by my editor. But it is about a cold-case cop who is off-duty and gets pulled into a situation where she has to take someone's life to save others. There's a man whose life she saves and he starts to stalk her. So she has now saved a life, and that has caused her trauma because she's never done that before, and it's devastating to her. She has a family and she struggles with that trauma. But now this man whose life she saved has disappeared. He's become a ghost and has become obsessed with her and is stalking her.

It's very much a fast-paced thriller, because it's a cat-and-mouse game. He has studied everything that she's ever taught about forensic science. His obsession with her has led him to really have his own fascination with her work, and so the way he stalks her is using a lot of the techniques that she had once taught in a class and that she still posts about, in terms of evading the police. There's a lot of psychology in it, but it's also a really fast-paced who's-going-to-get-out-alive kind of thriller.

NR: My preorder finger is ready to click whenever it's available. Oh, my gosh. That sounds amazing. I love that plot.

WW: I don't know when it'll be coming out. I'm finishing a revision on it now, and just really excited about it.

NR: Wendy, thank you so much for chatting with me today. Listeners, you can get American Girl on Audible now.