For Tracey Lange, community and family are at the core of both life and work. “I’ve always been interested in people and what makes us tick,” she reflects via Zoom from her home in Bend, Ore. “That’s why I love to write. I love to put myself in someone else’s shoes. I think we could use a bit more of that. Listening and trying to understand someone else’s perspective. Just making connections and having empathy.”
Lange specializes in messy family dramas, often writing about the relationships between parents and kids, siblings, and husbands and wives. Her first two novels, We Are the Brennans (2021) and The Connellys of County Down (2023), touch on loyalty and secrets, the redemptive power of love, the bad decisions we sometimes make with the best of intensions, and the ways we’re shaped by the past but never defined by it.
Lange’s new novel, What Happened to the McCrays?, out in January from Celadon, centers on Kyle and Casey McCray, a divorced couple from Potsdam, N.Y., who reenter each other’s lives two and a half years after their split. The pair were married for 16 years when circumstances—not revealed until late in the book—caused Kyle to abruptly leave town. But when Kyle’s father suffers a stroke, he returns home to care for him and gets a job coaching a kids’ hockey team at the school where Casey is a teacher. As the story unfolds, the circumstances around the couple’s breakup are revealed, along with the secrets the two have kept from each other. Lange moves back and forth between present and past to tell the story, which explores the intricacies of marriage and the ways people cope with trauma and tragedy.
Before Lange sat down to write What Happened to the McCrays? she spent a year thinking about the characters. That’s been her strategy since her first book: develop the players first, then the plot. A child of divorce, she says it was only a matter of time before she tackled a book about a broken marriage, but she was unprepared for where What Happened to the McCrays?—with its devastating twists—would take her. “I had to sit with some really dark stuff for sustained periods of time and it was hard emotionally,” Lange recalls. “My husband would tell you I was definitely a little crazier and more emotional when I was writing this book. Crazier than usual.”
Deb Futter, Lange’s editor, praises Lange for her ability to create deeply felt stories that can often bring readers to tears. “I think Tracey has gotten better with each novel, which is saying a lot,” Futter says. “This book hits a new emotional high level. It keeps you utterly riveted. I’ve read it at least three times, and I have never not cried.”
Born in 1970 in the Bronx, Lange moved to Manhattan as a kid when her father, an immigrant from Ireland, and mother, a New Yorker with Irish roots, got jobs as superintendents of an apartment building on the Upper East Side. Her parents separated when she was in middle school, and their contentious split had a profound effect. “There was a lot of drama,” Lange remembers. “It made life really rough, and my grades tanked. My parents loved me, but they were dealing with their own crap and there weren’t a lot of rules. The good that came out of it was that I had to learn to look out for myself.”
At 18, Lange moved to Pennsylvania to attend Allegheny College, and there met her future husband (they married in 1993). She attended Allegheny for two years, then dropped out, not sure what she wanted to do with her life. For the next two years she worked in day care and as a waitress. She then moved to New Mexico, where she resumed her studies at the University of New Mexico and got a degree in psychology in 1995. “Psychology always came naturally to me,” she says. “I worked at it, but I enjoyed it.”
After college, Lange and her husband, a teacher, moved around and got jobs in the mental health field. In Arizona, they helped run wilderness camps for city kids as part of a program for troubled youth, with Lange serving as a counselor. In Idaho, they worked at boarding schools for kids with emotional challenges. In 2001, they started their own behavioral healthcare company, providing psychosocial rehabilitation services and—as the company grew and a staff was hired—psychiatric services, therapy, substance abuse treatment, and developmental disability services. “I worked with people from all walks of life, gang members, ultrawealthy kids, and everyone in between,” says Lange, who visited clients in their homes and wrote evaluations and assessments. “Seeing that family dysfunction, being exposed to so many different kinds of people and struggles—it fuels my work even now.”
In 2014, Lange—by then the mom of two boys, born in 2001 and 2003—and her husband sold the healthcare company and moved to Oregon. Set amid lodgepole pine trees and sagebrush, the town of Bend—located on the Deschutes River and near the Deschutes National Forest and Cascade Range—has been their home for a decade. “We can walk most places and have nature right outside our door, so it’s the best of both worlds,” Lange says. “The town is growing but has a small-town feel, so you’re still going to run into friends and people you know, which is great.”
It was after moving to Bend that Lange decided to pursue a fiction career. She enrolled in the Stanford University online novel writing program, connected with a writing group, and worked on We Are the Brennans. “I don’t know how anyone writes without feedback and support,” she says of her trusted writing group. “They are a big part of my process.”
Stephanie Cabot, Lange’s agent, has represented the author since her bestselling debut. “Tracey is lovely on every level, both emotionally intelligent and fun,” Cabot says. “There’s something very lyrical about her writing. Her work is too well written to be sentimental, but it’s definitely deeply felt.”
As the publication of What Happened to the McCrays? approaches, Lange is feeling positive—if nervous. “The toughest part is that fear that comes in,” she says. “Brennans had such a lovely reception, but right afterwards I was like, ‘Oh my god, am I going to be able to do that again?’ I don’t take anything for granted.” She hopes the new novel—a celebration of love and family—resonates with readers and expands some hearts. “You can’t help but build empathy when you read. If everyone read more, the world would be a better place.”
