Issue #2: Android launch, Mad Mabel’s Sally Hepworth, and a new East of Eden adaptation

Mad Mabel’s been trending on our most-finished charts since it came out. What made you turn that book event moment into a full-fledged plot?
It’s very rare for an old woman to be a murderer, although the numbers are higher if you include old women who had a male accomplice. Children are very low; little girls even lower. That got me thinking: I hadn’t seen a book that covered that idea, and it’s always the why that drives me to dig into a book.

The funniest thing I landed on was: what if they are actually murdering people all the time, and they’re just really good at getting away with it?! Old ladies with big hearts are the most dangerous people in the world. When they’ve got nothing to lose, they can right the wrongs of the world. 

How do you strike the balance between playfulness and things that can be quite dark?
I’m the one who will try to lighten up a bad situation. A slightly morbid story: my girlfriend invited me to come with her for a scan to confirm a miscarriage. She said, “I know you’re not going to hold my hand and say, are you all right?” I said, “Cool, I can be that person.” When the scan confirmed it, and they walked out to give us a minute, I said, “The real clincher is when they’re going to get you to pay five hundred bucks for the scan.” We both cracked up laughing. She said, “That’s why I wanted you to come, Sal.”

That’s my instinct as a writer. With these books, certainly with Mad Mabel, we go to some dark places. People who do terrible things have had terrible things done to them. You don’t add levity to the terrible things themselves, but you can add joy and laughter and hope around them, even around something like a miscarriage.

Mad Mabel is also about female friendship, right?
There’s a line in the book about how there’s no purer love story than that of platonic female friendship. That was exactly where I was at the time of writing this book…

This classic’s been popping up a lot on Margins as people race to finish it before Netflix’s Oct. 1 adaptation with Florence Pugh. Steinbeck wrote the brutal family saga as a letter to his young sons about the Salinas Valley farmlands where he grew up, drawing on the Genesis story of Cain and Abel. It’s a sprawling book that, for readers like soggyrice3, requires a plan; hers is blocking distracting apps just to get through it. The payoff is worth it: Steinbeck felt that East of Eden was the best thing he’d ever written.

Anulekha is a fervent reader from India, now living in Singapore, where she’s getting her PhD in experimental petrology, a branch of geology. Her library card turned a habit of 12-20 books a year into over 100. She reads “everything but romance,” discovering books through award lists, trusted bookstore picks, and sometimes BookTok. She’s currently reading Mistborn by Brandon Sanderson: “The characters feel genuinely human, and I love that overthrowing a government isn’t treated as some simple heroic mission.” Follow Anulekha to keep up with her rich reading life.

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