Jill Johnson
These times of uncertainty will someday, surely, make a great backdrop for a book by local author Julia Heaberlin. The Texas native has, after all, made a name for herself as a masterful suspense writer: Her critically acclaimed novel Black-Eyed Susans climbed up international bestseller lists and landed a television deal with Sony Pictures, and Paper Ghosts was a 2019 finalist for the International Thriller Writers award.
This month sees the release of her fifth novel, We Are All the Same in the Dark (Ballantine Books), a nail-biter about how tragedy and murder change the lives of people living in a small Texas town.
FW: Was there a particular incident or case that inspired this story?
JH: This thriller is not inspired by a real case, but I definitely wanted the novel to be haunted by that gritty true crime feeling. My book ideas always begin with a tiny visual in my head that won’t go away. In Black-Eyed Susans, it was a bird’s-eye view of a teenager lying in a Texas field of yellow and black flowers with a scattering of old bones. In We Are All the Same in the Dark, I was haunted by a lost girl, mute with only one eye, blowing dandelions by the side of the road. The Texas town nearby was wrestling with its own missing girl. So that’s all I knew when I sat down at the computer to write this book.
FW: How has your life changed as a writer, especially one publishing in a pandemic?
JH: It’s like living in a draft of a novel with an editor’s red scribbles all over the margins. “Unbelievable!” “Ridiculous characters!” “Too many people die!” “Where’s the redemption?”
Every fiction author I know feels guilty about promoting themselves on social media while ICUs are war zones and the national conversation about race is so important. Writers are trying to find the middle ground because people still want fictional books they can vanish into. Independent bookstores — please support them! — need our dollars or they will disappear forever. Many authors, especially debut authors — please support them! — do not make a lot of money and need to pay their bills like everyone else.
FW: We Are All the Same in the Dark is set in a small Texas town. What is it about small towns that makes them such great settings for books?
JH: I think small towns are microcosms of big cities, just more intimate and tightly bound. There is the same ratio of good to evil. But if a siren goes out in the night, you can know the next morning where it’s been. It’s still a hopeful myth that small towns are all cookies and milk with no blood on the picket fence. So, when a body is found strewn in plastic bags off a nearby highway — a true story from my childhood — it’s more of a shock.
There’s also something about the closeness, heat, and mystery of night in a small Texas town. The roses and velvet smell of it. I remember it floating through my bedroom window in Decatur while I read from a stack of library books. I specifically liked dark, moody British books like Rebecca (by Daphne du Maurier). I never dreamed back then that I would write a book that would be published in the U.K., where I’m oddly more popular than in the U.S. But I like to think the gothic seed was planted right there on the window seat my father built for me.
FW: Fort Worth figures in some of your thrillers, especially Black-Eyed Susans. Readers run into places in your books they know in real life. What is your emotional connection to Fort Worth?
JH: Fort Worth is tied with London as my favorite city. I love its arty culture, warmth, philanthropy, Western backbone, and that cowboy hats are as regular as baseball caps. When I was a kid living in Decatur, it was a big adventure to hop in the car with my family and head to Fort Worth. I roamed around the Amon Carter and tasted the wild dust of all those Russells and Remingtons many, many times. I saw my first plays at the Scott Theater and stood in awe when the Kimbell was built. So, it was fun to plant my heroine in Black-Eyed Susans in a Fort Worth neighborhood and have her wander familiar places.
FW: Since you mention Whataburger a couple times in your new book, I have to ask: What’s your Whataburger go-to?
JH: A large fry and medium Dr Pepper. Whataburger, hands down, has the best Dr Pepper “mix” and chewing ice. Those Dr Peppers have seen me through many long nights of writing. It’s a bonus if Ronaldo takes my order in the drive-through and calls me sweetie. Ronaldo is really the one you should be interviewing. He is a Whataburger fixture in Grapevine.
FW: You worked in the newspaper industry many years. How has the newspaper business inspired you as a writer?
JH: Making up stories and being a journalist are two very different occupations, no matter what some people say. I had a lot to learn when I sat down to write my first book. A few things carried over. My fascination with true crime. A compelling interest in knowing what happened to victims long after a trauma occurred. A desire to portray women as kick-ass as men. And an obsession for my research to be accurate. No matter what I’m tackling — dementia, hallucinations, the use of mitochondrial DNA to identify old bones, the Texas death penalty, living with a prosthesis — I want it based on facts. So, I’ve stood outside the death house in Huntsville during an execution. I’ve regularly bugged famous forensic scientists who helped me devise twists. Not that I haven’t messed up a couple of details in an 85,000-word book. Once was about a gun. And my Texas readers let me know so I could fix it. You know what? Those readers were from Fort Worth.
FW: If the characters in your books were real, which one would you want to sit down with and find out more about?
JH: This may sound weird, but I know my characters like I know myself. There are no secrets. The character I want to sit down with is the heroine in my next novel. I’m irritated that she hasn’t shown up yet.