Author of the week: Marisha Pessl

last updated 8 January 2015

Marisha Pessl keeps getting more perfect, said Emily Witt in Elle. Seven years after her debut novel made the then 28-year-old the literary It Girl of 2006, the “preternaturally telegenic” author is back with another dazzling page-turner and a new determination to avoid oversharing. She still remembers the backlash, after all, that followed the big contract and early hosannas she won with Special Topics in Calamity Physics. The Associated Press labeled her “very easy to hate.” Gawker.com spent weeks deciding whether she was “TV hot” or merely “book hot.” Pessl wound up needing to let the noise die down. “I felt totally unprepared for it,” she says. “When you’re a neophyte, you’re so excited to have a book out there that you don’t really have your guard up.”

Not that Pessl has become a shrinking violet, said Nitsuh Abebe in New York magazine. The young woman who was sending manuscripts to top agents from her college dorm showed the same kind of fearlessness while crafting her current book. Night Film opens with a homicide linked to an acclaimed director of horror movies, and Pessl says she eventually wrote the rest by simply following her gut. “That’s also a way to live—less structured, less of everything being so perfect,” she says. “It’s so much better to leap off the cliff, not knowing if you’re going to find something to land on. You hope that you do. And if you don’t, you just kind of go to the hospital and start over.” Fear of failure was never an option. “In the end, we’re all just food for worms,” she says, “so what are we so worried about?”