Author Confessions: Susie Orman Schnall

The dark side of how far women will go to get ahead.

Anyone who knows Susie Orman Schnall would agree: She’s a force. In her career, for sure, but also as a person. If she has an idea, like a television series, she commits to getting it done. I mean, she climbs mountains in her spare time for goodness sake! So it was particularly fascinating to jump into her fifth book Anna Bright is Hiding Something because it’s as full of energy and excitement as Susie herself.

I read Anna Bright in a few sittings, which is a rarity for me, and I found the story compelling, seductive and smart. The book is about a feisty ambitious journalist named Jamie Roman who gets a tip that the enigmatic female founder Anna Bright isn’t the model of perfection many believe. Anna’s company is poised to go public, but Jamie is intent on exposing the dark secret that Anna is keeping. Kirkus Reviews says, “Fans of the Hulu streaming miniseries The Dropout, about the scandal involving biotech company Theranos, will enjoy this page-turner . . . An entertaining suspense yarn about complicated, success-driven women.”

Let’s all welcome Susie to Dear Fiction!

I remember you telling me about the idea for this book last year, and then the story came to you fast and furiously. It was like you had to write it. How did you come up with the idea? Why did it take hold of your imagination?

After I finished We Came Here to Shine, my historical fiction novel about the 1939 NY World’s Fair, when I was trying to decide what to write my next novel about, I was fascinated—still am—by news stories about female founders. Then I read Bad Blood: Secrets and Lies in a Silicon Valley Startup about Elizabeth Holmes from Theranos, and well, there was no turning back. My novel took off from there. I still have the email I wrote to my agent proposing the idea to her. I wrote, “I want to embrace the energy of this topic, and its orbiting topics, through fiction.” 

The book is told through the voices of two very ambitious women: one is a journalist and the other is the founder and CEO of a biotech company. What parts of their characters were the easiest for you to write and which were the most challenging? 

For Jamie, the journalist, the part about her being ambitious and wanting to break a story were the easier parts of her to write because it tracks with how I’ve progressed through my career, head down, do the work, pay your dues in the hopes of advancing and succeeding. The more challenging parts were her sneakiness, because when I was in the corporate world, I was more of a rule follower. For Anna, the biotech CEO, it was more of a challenge to get into her headspace because she does some unethical things. But that was also the easiest part about writing her because it was so much fun to imagine what she would do and say.

There are so many insightful moments in the book that capture just how challenging it is for success-driven women like Anna Bright to start/grow a tech company or rise to the top of one. The journalist character is also overlooked for a big promotion. Both women end up going rogue (in very different ways) to get what they want in their careers. Is that what women have to do to get ahead? Bow out of the rules to some extent?

Yes and no, and it all depends. I think a lot of women have had to make up their own rules as they go along, depending upon their industry and their boss and their personal makeup. Certainly following the traditional “rules” as they were fed to how women were “supposed” to behave in the corporate world has not always (ever?) worked out for women. In fact, many (all?) were meant to keep women in an inferior standing. The systemic injustices are just too ingrained. At least for women of my generation and older. It’s exciting to see younger women, who didn’t grow up with the same media and societal influences we did, go in wildly different directions and break all the ceilings. Women have always had to be cunning and work around the system to accomplish great things. 

Can you tell us about some of the struggles you’ve faced in your own career? How being a career-driven woman has worked for or against you in male dominated work situations? What have you learned about navigating the work world as a woman?

I see my career as two distinct phases. When I graduated college I worked in corporate communications for magazines, advertising & PR agencies, nonprofits, and Internet companies. I had six jobs in ten years because we moved around a lot for my husband’s job and graduate school. So, challenge one was never staying anywhere for a long enough time to dig in. While men mostly ran the companies I worked for there were many women in senior level positions, so I never really felt as if I was in a male-dominated world as I would have felt had I been in finance or law or the like. My main challenge, though, at that point of my life was my uncertainty about what I truly wanted for my career. I wanted to be accomplished, I just didn’t know at what.

The second phase of my career started after I had my kids and I started writing freelance for magazines and websites. That eventually led to my aha moment when I decided I wanted to be a novelist, an industry filled with women. But also an industry with its own long list of issues. My biggest struggle in publishing has been learning to deal with all the rejection the industry throws at authors. I’m amazed at what I’ve learned to handle. But it’s also balanced by the many wonderful benefits offing a novelist - the friendships I’ve made, the true feeling of accomplishment I have after having five novels published.

Anna Bright is a character you love to hate, but I found myself feeling sympathy for her. What parts of Anna’s character did you empathize with? 

When I was writing Anna, I wanted the reader to have some empathy for her. So I did a lot of research on narcissism, looking into some of the root causes, some of the childhood situations that narcissists experience. And then I added all of that into Anna’s character, showing interactions with her mother, for instance, so that the reader has an understanding of why Anna is the way she is. It certainly doesn’t excuse her actions, but it makes her more three-dimensional. 

Lastly, do you see yourself in Anna Bright or Jamie Roman? Why or why not? 

I’m definitely a Jamie. I’m way too much of a rule follower to be an Anna!

Don’t forget to pre-order Susie’s novel! Thanks, Susie. xoxo Next up on Author Confessions: Natalie Jenner talks about her latest novel. Woot! Woot!