BOTH THINGS ARE TRUE
by Kathleen Barber
(Lake Union Publishing, 1 September 2025)
Interview by Anna Roins
𝐅𝐨𝐫 𝐭𝐰𝐨 𝐞𝐱𝐞𝐬 𝐰𝐡𝐨 𝐦𝐞𝐞𝐭 𝐚𝐠𝐚𝐢𝐧, 𝐦𝐨𝐯𝐢𝐧𝐠 𝐨𝐧 𝐢𝐬 𝐦𝐨𝐫𝐞 𝐜𝐨𝐦𝐩𝐥𝐞𝐱 𝐭𝐡𝐚𝐧 𝐞𝐯𝐞𝐫 𝐢𝐧 𝐚 𝐟𝐮𝐧𝐧𝐲 𝐚𝐧𝐝 𝐡𝐞𝐚𝐫𝐭𝐟𝐞𝐥𝐭 𝐫𝐨𝐦𝐚𝐧𝐭𝐢𝐜 𝐜𝐨𝐦𝐞𝐝𝐲 𝐚𝐛𝐨𝐮𝐭 𝐬𝐭𝐚𝐫𝐭𝐢𝐧𝐠 𝐨𝐯𝐞𝐫 𝐛𝐲 𝐭𝐡𝐞 𝐚𝐮𝐭𝐡𝐨𝐫 𝐨𝐟 𝐓𝐑𝐔𝐓𝐇 𝐁𝐄 𝐓𝐎𝐋𝐃, 𝐧𝐨𝐰 𝐚 𝐦𝐚𝐣𝐨𝐫 𝐀𝐩𝐩𝐥𝐞 𝐓𝐕+ 𝐬𝐞𝐫𝐢𝐞𝐬!
Vanessa is a yoga influencer living high in New York. But after her crypto-entrepreneur fiancé ruins both their lives by fleeing the country amid fraud allegations, Vanessa’s only choice is to start over―by flying home to Chicago and moving in with her sister.
Just as Vanessa puts her life back together, she bumps into Sam. Years ago, they fell hard for each other and too fast. Their relationship ended in heartbreak after an impromptu Las Vegas wedding officiated by a Dolly Parton impersonator―and an annulment that was just as sudden. Now, Sam is co-owner of a solar company with a promising future, a future Vanessa wants to be included in. But she can’t shake the whiff of scandal from her AWOL fiancé, and to protect Sam’s reputation, she’s keeping her distance. Then again…
If anyone can turn a negative into a positive―and a first love into a second chance―it’s a young woman with influence.
AUTHORLINK: Kathleen, welcome to AUTHORLINK! We are so happy to discuss your latest release, about BOTH THINGS ARE TRUE. We really enjoyed it and felt the characters were realistically portrayed, thanks to their inner dialogue.
BARBER: Thanks so much! I’m happy to know that you enjoyed it.
AUTHORLINK: Were you inspired by anyone in creating Vanessa and Sam?
BARBER: None of my characters are inspired by anyone in particular; rather, they’re all a combination of different influences. Vanessa was primarily inspired by my interest in yoga influencers and what I see as a fundamental dissonance between traditional yoga principles and modern influencer culture. One is austere and focused on harmony; one is attention-seeking and tied to hyper-consumerism. Vanessa personifies that tension, and after her splashy public persona is tarnished, she has to figure out what is most important to her, deep down. Sam, meanwhile, is inspired by the idea that we might think we’re being brave and self-sufficient, but really we’re just getting in our own way. I don’t want to give away too much of the story, so I’ll leave it at that!
The one character who comes closest to having been inspired by a person is Jackson, Vanessa’s ex-fiancé. Jackson bankrupts his crypto exchange and flees the country amid allegations of fraud, a situation I was inspired to write about after watching the Fyre Festival documentaries. I was intrigued by the way the organizer—who comes across, at least in the documentaries, as an obvious con—clearly believed he was the hero of the story. I was curious what it would be like to be intimately involved with someone like that, and that involvement could derail your own life.
AUTHORLINK: Brilliant observation about traditional yoga versus modern influencer culture! You were a bankruptcy lawyer before publishing your first book…What made you decide to break out of law and try your hand at writing?
BARBER: I have always been a writer. I’ve been writing stories for as long as I could form sentences (I’m going to date myself here, but I used to write my The Baby-Sitters Club fanfiction on a typewriter), and I’d always dreamed of writing a book. I’m a practical Midwesterner, though, and so I didn’t believe writing was something I could do as a career. I decided to go to law school, figuring I could write in my spare time. What I failed to consider, however, was that once I became a lawyer, I wouldn’t have any spare time.
In the late aughts and early twenty-teens, I worked at a large law firm in New York. I slept with my Blackberry underneath my pillow, ate most of my meals at my desk, and worked every weekend. My then-boyfriend, now-husband, was doing the same, and after several years of that grind, we needed a change. We both quit our jobs, sold our stuff, and spent eight months backpacking around Africa. It was the hard reset that my brain needed, and when we came back, I sat down and wrote the manuscript that would become Truth Be Told.
AUTHORLINK: That is amazing! Bravo to you and to your husband. Sounds ideal and copacetic. Speaking of your first novel, it was adapted into the Apple+ series TRUTH BE TOLD, (one of our favourites), starring Octavia Spencer and Aaron Paul! That must have felt incredible to be produced by Reese Witherspoon’s Hello Sunshine!
BARBER: Having Truth Be Told adapted for television was a dream come true! It was so surreal to see the characters that had once existed only in a Word doc on my computer come to life on screen. It was also interesting because the show had some significant changes from the book. The most obvious was that the book’s protagonist is Josie, a woman whose father was murdered thirteen years ago, and the antagonist is Poppy, the true-crime podcast host who is reinvestigating that murder … but in the show, Poppy is the protagonist. The character of Poppy was also reconfigured to better fit Octavia Spencer, the (fantastic!) actress they cast for the role. Another big change was the ultimate resolution of Josie’s father’s murder, and I was told they changed the ending so that even people who read the book would be kept guessing. As an author, it was weird to see those changes … but it was also incredibly cool to see something so amazing inspired by my idea.
AUTHORLINK: We can only imagine. How did you find your literary agent? Did you have any challenges along the way to publishing?
BARBER: After I finished writing the manuscript that would become Truth Be Told, I wrote a query letter, compiled a huge spreadsheet of potential agents, and began sending out materials. Querying is a demoralizing process, with lots of rejections and complete silence (for most agents, no response means “no”), but I was overjoyed to get a few requests for my full manuscript. One of the agents who read the full offered me an “R & R,” which means “revise and resubmit.” She took the time to talk me through her issues with the manuscript, and I’ll always be grateful for her guidance. I pulled my manuscript apart and revised it per her comments—no small feat, but I could tell the revisions made it much stronger. I resubmitted to her and crossed my fingers … only to be devastated when she wrote back that while she thought it had potential, it still needed work and she didn’t think she was the right agent to help me get it into submittable shape. She did, however, offer to connect me to an agent she thought would be a better fit: Lisa Grubka. I revised again before sending it to Lisa, and lucky for me, Lisa loved it. (Even more fortunate for me, Lisa had the editorial eye to guide me through another round of revision.) Shortly thereafter, Lisa sold Truth Be Told at auction, something that exceeded my wildest dreams.
I was disappointed when the first agent passed, but now I know that things couldn’t have worked out better. Lisa and I have been working together for more than nine years now, and I hope many more! There are always challenges in publishing, and finding a good agent is one of the first—and biggest—challenges, but having that agent in your corner means that all the other challenges become much more manageable.
AUTHORLINK: What an amazing, and inspirational story to share with us! Thank you. Nine years is longer than some marriages. Ha ha ha! Which is your favourite genre to write? You have done mystery, thriller and more recently ‘second-chance’ romance.
BARBER: I don’t know that I can choose! I love writing dark stories, but I also love writing romance—which really came as a surprise to me! Not long ago, I would have told you I could only write dark stories. Then I went away for a long weekend with some friends for a self-styled writing retreat. The three of them were all working on rom-coms and book club fiction, and they looked like they were having so much fun. In contrast, I was struggling with a thriller I couldn’t quite plot and having absolutely no fun at all. I decided to set aside not only the manuscript I was working on, but the whole genre—at least for a bit—to try a rom-com, and I was surprised at how easily the story came together and how much I enjoyed writing it. In the future, I hope to write both: Sisterhood Above All, which comes out next year, is a thriller, and I’m drafting another rom-com right now.
AUTHORLINK: Great. We enjoyed the new ‘Rom Com’ you! Social media and influencers feature in some of your books. Why did you like to delve into these areas?
BARBER: I’ve always been a little suspicious of social media. Maybe it’s because I’m an elder millennial who didn’t get social media until college, or maybe it’s because I’m old enough to remember that “on the Internet, nobody knows you’re a dog.” Whatever the reason, I’ve always been interested in exploring the tension between the positives of social media (staying connected with friends and family, meeting new like-minded people) and the negatives (disinformation, bullying, privacy concerns). I’ve also long been intrigued (and lightly confounded) by lifestyle influencers. What compels a person to commodify their own life? And what happens when they lose control of their own narrative? That them in particular underscores much of my work: in Truth Be Told, Josie is dogged by armchair sleuths who gather online to discuss her father’s murder; in Follow Me, Audrey is stalked by someone who uses her social media presence to gain access to her; and in Both Things Are True, Vanessa harnesses the power of social media as a yoga influencer only to have online mobs ruin her livelihood after her ex crashes his crypto exchange.
AUTHORLINK: Very insightful. How did you become a certified book coach, and what made you get involved? What a great idea!
BARBER: I remember when I first started writing seriously and had no idea what I was doing. I had an idea and the burning desire to turn that idea into a book, but without any guidance, I was just stumbling around in the dark. I obviously did eventually complete my book, but it was far from the most expedient way, and I had so much doubt throughout the process. I love the idea of being a guiding light for emerging authors who feel as I did, and so I decided to become a book coach.
I was drawn to the Author Accelerator certification specifically because years ago, while at a Women’s Fiction Writers Association retreat, I saw the program’s creator and author of Blueprint for a Book, Jennie Nash, give the keynote address. Her Blueprint method, which encourages writers to really dig down to understand why you’re telling this story and what you hope your readers will take away from it, really resonated with me, and I started using it when drafting my novels. I wanted to be able to share her Blueprint method with my clients, and as a certified book coach, I can!
AUTHORLINK: How many writing courses or writing retreats have you attended? Can you recommend any?
BARBER: The writing course that has had the most significant impact on me was a writing sprint course that I took virtually through GrubStreet, led by Lori Goldstein. We met weekly via Zoom, and we’d start by sharing our goals for that day’s writing session. Then we would shut off our microphones (and cameras, if we wanted) and “sprint” for thirty minutes. During that time, we could only write. No checking email, no getting up for a drink of water. We’d have a quick check-in, and then sprint for another thirty minutes. Afterward, we’d reconvene and discuss our progress and our goals for the next session. The concept of adding small, session-specific goals to my larger project goals has made me so much more productive, and I met a lot of like-minded writers in that course, many of whom I still sprint with today.
In addition to that course, I’ve taken numerous one-off craft workshops hosted by Jane Friedman or one of the professional organizations to which I belong, such as Mystery Writers of America, Sisters in Crime, and International Thriller Writers, as well as courses through Gotham Writers Workshop and the now-defunct Catapult. The only official retreat I’ve attended is the Women’s Fiction Writers Association retreat I mentioned above, but as I said, some writer friends and I created our own retreat once by renting an Airbnb—and I highly recommend that!
AUTHORLINK: Thank you for sharing this very helpful information. We understand you have another book coming out next year, titled “Sisterhood Above All”, a thriller set during sorority rush that you wrote with #BamaRush, TikToker Amayah Shaienne. How was the experience of writing with another author?
BARBER: I have to be honest, I was nervous about writing with someone else! I’m used to making all the creative decisions, and I worried about having to compromise my vision. Once I started working with Amayah, though, I realized I was thinking about it the wrong way: my creativity wasn’t being hindered, it was being expanded by bringing someone else into the process. Amayah was a dream collaborator, and as someone currently living the sorority lifestyle, she brings an authenticity to the book that I never could alone. I’m so proud of the book we made, and I can’t wait for everyone to read it! Sisterhood Above All comes out on July 14, 2026.
AUTHORLINK: Ah! Lovely! Kathleen, it was such a pleasure to chat with you about BOTH THINGS ARE TRUE and your writing journey. Thank you for joining us. We wish you continued success!
BARBER: Thanks so much for having me!
ABOUT THE AUTHOR: Kathleen Barber is the author of TRUTH BE TOLD (adapted by Reese Witherspoon’s, Hello Sunshine as a series on AppleTV+), ‘Follow Me’, and ‘Both Things Are True’. A former attorney, certified book coach, and avid traveler, she lives and writes in Washington, DC, with her family. You can find more about Kathleen Barber at https://www.kathleenbarber.com/ and https://www.instagram.com/katelizabee.
