In Brody’s harrowing debut, Rabbit Hole (Soho Crime, Jan.), a woman is gripped by conspiracy theories about her sister’s disappearance.

What led you to the character of the book’s spiky narrator, Teddy Angstrom?

In some ways, Teddy is my doppelgänger. She’s the dark version of me. When I started writing the book, I was around Teddy’s age—mid-20s—and a high school English teacher. We share a lot of basic similarities: we have sisters, half brothers, dead dads, etc. I, too, spent some of my teens and early 20s grieving, moping around, and drinking too much. Teddy is the version of me who got stuck in that space, which felt, at the time, like a distinct possibility for me. Instead of digging herself out, like I did, Teddy digs in.

This book is, in part, about social media obsession, and you’re completely off social media in your personal life. What moved you to opt out?

When I opted out, around 2012, I wasn’t trying to make a statement. At that point in my life, I was already obsessing over my body, my writing, and my lack of money, so it was a practical move. If I had been able to compare my life to the curated version of everyone else’s, I might have never left my bed. Nonetheless, I’m anthropologically fascinated with the depersonalization that occurs on social media platforms. Rabbit Hole looks specifically at voyeuristic true crime communities on Reddit, where there is nothing too intimate to comment on, and no conspiracy too outlandish to posit.

Rabbit Hole plays with thriller tropes, but it doesn’t adhere to any neat formula. How do you see the book’s relationship to genre?

I have been calling it a “literary thriller,” but that might be cheating. I think of genre functioning like a container. It provides the structure for me to dive into my obsessions: families, grief, bodies, whatever. But the genre itself is never the heart of the story. I definitely feel more at home in literary fiction than in the thriller space, because I gravitate more towards character and language than plot. I am lucky to have a great team on my side in that department. My agents and editors helped me shape the book from its shaggy early drafts into something tighter and more propulsive.