Lillian, the antiheroine of Kirsten King’s A Good Person (Putnam, Mar.), goes to extreme, some might say stalkerish, lengths to turn the man she’s been hooking up with into her fiancé. After he breaks it off, she puts a drunken hex on him. He’s stabbed to death shortly thereafter, and Lillian becomes a suspect. The novel is set in Boston, though King, a Los Angeles–based screenwriter with a full-length film credit (2022’s Crush), drew inspiration for Lillian’s winning sociopathy from Hollywood. “I’ve met so many narcissistic people here who are very charming,” she says.

Some of King’s friends and early readers described Lillian’s antics as “cringy,” which King says suits her fine. “I don’t necessarily want the novel to be a completely cringe-free reading experience.” Lillian puts forward her best, or fakest, version of herself to the world, but there is pathos in her struggle to “project an image of goodness and just totally failing at it,” King says. “As someone who grew up fairly broke in Boston around a very specific type of WASPy person, I think this is relatable.”

Born in Georgia, King spent most of her childhood in Massachusetts and briefly worked for a Catholic charitable organization run by nuns after college. “They were so lovely they managed to cure my childhood Catholic trauma,” she jokes. In 2014, King moved to Los Angeles for an internship at BuzzFeed, then branched out into freelance writing for publications like Teen Vogue. Screenwriting was her goal, and in her spare time she pored over movie scripts and a screenwriting manual.

Made anxious by the Writers Guild of America’s 2023 strike, King found an outlet in writing A Good Person. “I always wanted to write a story like this about a character like this and was in the dark headspace to do it,” King recalls. Having worked on or pitched numerous projects, she is no stranger to critical feedback, but her first novel feels different. “It’s the most direct version of my voice that I’ve ever put out there,” she says. “There’s no one to hide behind.”

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