When the seemingly happily married couple Angie and David Sheehan become culpable for a murder in their home, they must rely on an old friend who comes with complicated ties to Angie. Kristin Koval’s travels between past and present, unearthing the intricacies that lie deep within Angie’s past relationship with Julian, her ex-love, in the midst of solving her and her husband’s legal issues.
Penitence is a suspenseful thriller filled with complex characters. It's also your debut novel. What drew you to write this story?
I’ve had powerful experiences with forgiveness, both being forgiven and forgiving others. I used to think of forgiveness as a gift a wronged person gave to a wrongdoer, but I’ve realized that, at least for me, when I’m able to forgive someone, it’s a gift that’s given to me, not from me.
There’s an old saying—sometimes attributed to Buddha, sometimes to Nelson Mandela—that holding onto anger or resentment is like drinking poison and expecting the other person to die, and I think it’s accurate. Forgiving a wrongdoer, while complicated, can have an incredible and lasting impact on the person doing the forgiving, and I wanted to write about that experience in a way that might inspire others to rethink forgiveness. I struggled with how to do so until I realized the story of a family in crisis after a fratricide would enable me to highlight how complicated forgiveness can be, yet how rewarding, because a fratricide put the parents in both the hardest and the easiest position possible to forgive.
What was your writing process like with Penitence?
I started with several months of research—research about fratricide to figure out why and how most cases of it happened, the circumstances (they tended to follow certain patterns), the criminal justice system and how it would handle a 13-year-old accused of murder (it was not what I expected), and medical research related to the physical health of Nico and the mental health of Nora. Once I finished the research, I figured out which people in the 13-year-old’s life I would need as characters in order to tell this story, then used a trick from being an estate planning lawyer: I drew diagrams exploring how each of those characters were connected. When I was finally ready to write, I stocked my house with dark chocolate and whiskey and stuck a Post-it on my office door that said “2,000 words,” as a reminder that I couldn’t stop writing each day until I’d written 2,000 words.
Two of the story's main characters, Angie and Julian, share a secret and an attraction that’s happening in the midst of a murder investigation. What was your favorite thing about writing their history?I loved imagining who Angie and Julian might have been in the past and exploring the circumstances, settings, and experiences that shaped their present. It was especially fun to experiment with how different choices might have affected their current struggles, and to add in some of the more lighthearted joy of youth to an otherwise challenging novel by focusing on when they were in love and had most of their dreams in front of them. Writing Angie and Julian’s chapters helped me develop understanding and empathy for them in the present and hopefully helped me lead readers to that same understanding and empathy.
