Julie Clark doesn’t have an MFA. As an undergraduate, she studied design, not writing or literature. But she always knew she’d be a writer. She just needed to bide her time—and acquire some perspective along the way—until she could make it happen.
“I truly believe that we know in our deepest selves what it is we are meant to do, and where it is we are meant to be,” she says via Zoom from her home in Santa Monica, Calif. “That’s how I felt about writing. I just knew it was something that I was going to do, and I knew that I’d be successful at it. I didn’t know how, and I didn’t know when, but I do believe that if you stick with something, you’ll get there.”
Clark has certainly arrived, having penned the bestselling thrillers The Last Flight (2020) and The Lies I Tell (2022). She grew up in Santa Monica “inhaling books,” as she puts it, while most of her friends were out on the water. “I tried surfing one time, and it was not my jam,” she says. Instead, Clark read every Judy Blume book she could get her hands on, but was particularly partial to Blubber, the middle grade story of bullying told from the bully’s perspective. Like many readers, she was taken with Blume’s ability to address risqué subject matter in a way that young readers could relate to.
“I was probably reading a lot of really inappropriate things for my age, but that was a very different time in the publishing world as far as what was being published for kids,” says Clark, 54. “I mean, Flowers in the Attic. Oh my God, that’s horrific. But whatever everybody else was reading, I was reading, too.”
Clark’s latest thriller, The Ghostwriter—out from Sourcebooks Landmark in June—also veers toward the horrific, featuring two murdered teenagers and the memories that haunt their surviving brother to adulthood. The novel follows Olivia Dumont, an author whose career hits a standstill when she lashes out at a bad-boy writer on a panel. Eager to escape from publishing jail, she takes an unusual assignment: ghostwriting a memoir for her father, legendary hard-drinking horror novelist Vincent Taylor, who has been diagnosed with Lewy body dementia. But Olivia hasn’t spoken to her father in years, largely because he was a horrible father and largely because it’s suspected that he killed his brother and sister when he was a teenager in California.
Born in 1971, Clark was raised by her mother, a real estate agent, and stepfather, a CPA. Clark left Santa Monica after high school to attend the University of the Pacific in Stockton, Calif. She says she didn’t study writing or literature for reasons that in retrospect seem slightly silly. “It wasn’t because I wasn’t interested in writing, or I didn’t think I would be good at it. It was because I didn’t think I could make any money at it. I couldn’t see a job where I would be able to do that and make a living, which is really comical, because why would I think I could make a living in graphic design?”
After college, Clark got a job organizing fundraising events for the UC Berkeley athletics department, then came back to Santa Monica to teach fifth grade, which she calls a labor of love. “I love those 11-year-olds.”
Still, Clark says, she felt the need to write. And in 2012, she found inspiration through tragedy: her best friend died of breast cancer, causing Clark to reassess her own life. “I thought about the things that she didn’t get to do that she always thought she had time to do, and then the things that I wanted to do that I might not have the chance to do,” she says. “And writing was the absolute first thing that came to my mind.”
So, Clark wrote a novel. “It was wild and fun and terrible,” she says. “I sent it out to agents. They did not like it.” Undeterred, she wrote another novel, The Ones We Choose, which Gallery Books published in 2018. The only problem: the book wasn’t selling well. Clark, who’d already finished her follow-up, The Last Flight, realized that without book sales her new novel might not see the light of day.
Clark immediately jumped into action and threw her own money—“Money I didn’t have,” she says—into a BookBub promotion. She also talked Simon & Schuster into slashing the e-book price of The Ones We Choose. Because of these efforts, the novel sold more than 10,000 copies and the runway was clear for The Last Flight. The novel, about two women who meet at an airport and agree to swap identities, proved to be a breakthrough bestseller. And since then, Clark hasn’t looked back.
In The Ghostwriter, Clark uses multiple narrators, zips from the present to the past and back again, and turns up both the suspense and the pathos. As Olivia works on the memoir and searches for the truth about her father, she must contend with deadlines, money troubles, and her father’s mysterious caregiver, a woman named Alma, whose vibe is decidedly similar to that of Mrs. Danvers from Daphne du Maurier’s Rebecca.
Soon Olivia realizes that finding the truth about what really happened to her father on that fateful night in Ojai, Calif., back in 1975 will be even harder that she thought: his dementia may be worsening and the events of the past and present are beginning to blur.
Shana Drehs, senior editorial director of Sourcebooks Landmark and Clark’s editor, says The Ghostwriter showcases the author’s growth as a novelist. “With The Ghostwriter, she’s exploring the father-daughter dynamic and career issues,” Drehs says. “There’s a lot going on with Olivia. I think Julie has deepened the emotions that she’s looking at while keeping that really tight plot.”
That tight plot stems from a similar murder case Clark heard about when she was growing up (“I’d rather not say when and where, to protect their privacy,” she says)—a story that’s haunted her ever since. “We would kind of talk about it as kids, but nobody was really telling us anything,” she recalls. “And so, of course, we just made stuff up. And it’s always just been something that lingered in the back of my head. I started imagining: What kind of damage did that do? What does that do to a kid? Who’d that surviving kid grow up to become?”
Clark, it turns out, is something of a survivor herself. In 2015, she was diagnosed with breast cancer and underwent treatment, which prompted further reflection. “It really helped me see that I only get one shot at what I want to do,” she says. “I had the opportunity to just look inward and really kind of take stock of what mattered and what didn’t.”
It’s little wonder Clark writes stories with strong female protagonists. She’s had to become one herself.
Chris Vognar is a freelance culture writer and was the 2009 Nieman arts and culture fellow at Harvard University.
