Debut novelist Emily Culliton originally planned to write a book about a disaffected young adult whose mother wasn’t in her life. But when she was creating a plausible backstory for the absentee mom, tales of embezzlement flooded the media and her focus changed. In a boxed and starred review, PW called the resulting book, The Misfortune of Marion Palm (Knopf, Aug.), “ a wonderful and sharp novel... [that] signals the arrival of an exciting talent.”

“[As] I started thinking about why a mother would leave her daughter, I didn’t want this to be about grief,” Culliton says. “At the same time, I was interested in the ways that women commit crimes or transgress. There were a lot of stories in the news about people who seemed unexceptional and were embezzling money from institutions like schools and Little Leagues. The more I thought about this adult character, I realized this is way more interesting than the book I was going to write. And I thought, what if the mother embezzled and was caught? Where would she move from there?”

Culliton says that she enjoyed getting into the head of an embezzler and exploring the motivations of a mom who steals from her daughters’ private school, where she helps out part-time in the fund-raising department. “Marion wants to prove herself, that she is more intelligent and more competent than the people that she works with,” Culliton notes. “She’s been embezzling this money to save her family, and she takes some pride in that. It’s something she’s just good at, too.” She adds, “I’m also interested in the subtlety of embezzlement. It seems to be passive-aggressive.”

A Ph.D. candidate in fiction at the University of Denver, Culliton enjoyed collaborating with Jenny Jackson, her editor at Knopf. After writing in an academic setting, where she’s used to hearing criticism from both teachers and classmates and then has to decide which edits to make, Culliton found it refreshing to work with a single editor. “To have that relationship with one person, where they really know the book, are invested in it, and excited for it, was fantastic,” she says.

Today, 1:30–2:30 p.m. Emily Culliton will sign at the Penguin Random House booth (1921).