Author Shari Lapena on the art of coming up with ideas, the threat of AI and how reader appetite is shifting

Nine years ago, Shari Lapena sent a cold e-mail to a literary agent to see if there’d be any interest in a book she’d written. Turns out, there was: That manuscript became The Couple Next Door, an international bestseller that changed everything for this former English teacher and lawyer from just outside Toronto.

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“It feels like it was just yesterday, but it also feels like it was two decades ago. It’s hard to explain,” says Lapena, who published a few well-received-but-not-big-outside-Canada quiet literary comedies before she turned her hand to domestic noir. “So much has changed. I feel like a different person in a completely different life. I almost don’t recognize it. And yet, the time seems to go by so quickly.”

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And while that decision changed her life, Lapena isn’t one to indulge in any kind of sliding-doors existential hand-wringing.

“I’m always just moving forward. I’m glad I did it when I did,” she says. “Sometimes I wish I’d started writing earlier in life, but then I think, ‘That was my moment.’ Maybe if I’d started publishing thrillers 10 years earlier, maybe I wouldn’t have hit with Couple at the moment that seemed to be right for that book. There’s a lot of luck involved with all these sorts of things. I’m just grateful.”

Nearly a decade later, Lapena remains at the top of what has become an increasingly crowded field: Her latest, She Didn’t See It Coming – about a woman who disappears from her luxury condo in the middle of the day – was an instant No. 1 bestseller in Canada and the U.S. when it came out this summer.

The Globe spoke with Lapena about artificial intelligence, internet sleuthing forums and whether fandom has changed the way she writes.

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As a writer, how do you metabolize everything that’s going on in the world right now?

Writing is an escape for me, my happy place. But, I’m obsessed with what’s going on in the world. In my latest book, some of that awareness of what people are capable of, and a society that’s falling apart, does creep in. Through the psychologist partner of my detective, I talk a little bit about how quickly this veneer of civilization can disappear. But I try not to be hitting people over the head with it.

She Didn’t See It Coming includes a nod to the true-crime forums. Are you a lurker on those yourself?

I’m not. I actually had to go in and look at some of those forums because it’s not something I typically do. I do find true-crime stories interesting. That’s usually what interests me in the news, you know, disappearing children, weird murders. But I’m not a true-crime aficionado. I’ll watch the occasional documentary, but I’m not obsessive about it.

In another lifetime, if you hadn’t been a writer, do you think you’d be queen of one of these forums?

Who knows? The thing about these forums is that, like everything, they can be good or bad. People can solve crimes but they can also cause a tremendous amount of harm. People go on there and accuse people based on nothing but emotion and ruin lives. I tried to bring that out in the book.

Internet forums are fascinating, because you have people from all around the world gathered in these places, all with anonymous identities. You don’t know who is saying what.

And they have no filter, so you see what people are really like. It can be quite an eye-opener.

Is there an anxiety du jour among authors these days?

Everyone is upset about AI. Several of my books have been used [to scrape data for large language models]. It’s really scary what AI is doing. I think it should be kept out of the arts. There’s a good place for it in medicine and so on, but maybe it should just be doing science, and with lots of controls. It needs to be much more controlled than it seems like it is now.

Are you concerned as a thriller writer?

I don’t think AI is there yet. I don’t know if they’re ever going to be able to say to chatbot, “Write a thriller in the vein of Shari Lapena.” If they can do that and it’s as good as mine, I’m cooked. That’s what a lot of people fear. I know publishers are very against the use of AI now, but there’s nothing to stop somebody who’s not a traditional publisher from doing it.

Where are you getting your ideas these days? Obviously, you’re not saying, “Hey ChatGPT, give me an idea for a novel.”

A lot of it is from the news. For She Didn’t See It Coming, it was inspired by the documentary [Cecil Hotel] about the woman who went missing in the Cecil Hotel. That was such a sad case. She was in this large hotel, and they couldn’t find her. They were pretty sure she hadn’t left, and they finally found her on the roof in the water tank. That made me think, what about a woman going missing in her condo building but there’s no real evidence she ever left?

Do you think the appetite among your readers is shifting? Is what they respond to changing?

They’re becoming more and more enthusiastic with each book. They seem to like the darker stuff. They like the psychopaths. I’m moving away from domestic suspense – husband, wife, cheating, that kind of stuff – and doing more crime novels with a lot of darkness.

Do you think book fandom has changed over the last decade?

There’s a whole industry of book lovers and bookstagrammers. A lot of them follow me on Instagram, and they’re all spreading the love. It’s become a hobby for people to share what they’re reading and do buddy reads and book clubs.

Does that affect how you do your job? Authors today have a lot more feedback than they used to.

I don’t think it’s changed how I write at all. I get a lot of people asking for sequels, and for the first time I’m thinking about doing one. Maybe I’m not finished with these characters, and I’ll do another book with detective Jayne [Salter, from She Didn’t See It Coming.] I still approach my books the same way. I wait to get that one idea, and I jump in. I don’t think about who I’m writing for. I’m writing it to figure out the story.

This interview has been edited and condensed.