The best-selling nonfiction author chats with Shondaland about the inner workings of her foray into fiction.

Inherently, twins are mythological creatures. Throughout history, they’ve inspired storytellers to weave myriad wild tales about their unique connection. With the new novel Where You End, it was no different for the infinitely imaginative writer Abbott Kahler, though she’d witnessed the magic of twins since birth — her mother is a mirror twin, and her father is a fraternal twin.

Set in the 1980s in the circumference of her native Philadelphia, Where You End demonstrates how Kahler, the author of four New York Times best-selling narrative nonfiction books, is no stranger to finding inspiration in her periphery and digging deep into the past to tell stories. She was inspired to write Sin in the Second City after searching for an ancestor who went missing in 1905, weaving the experience into a true story about the battle to shut down two of the world’s most famous brothels, run by two sisters. Her grandmother’s stories about Gypsy Rose Lee’s performances in the ’30s and ’40s led to American Rose. Living in Atlanta for six years led to Liar Temptress Soldier Spy — a story informed by the ghosts of the Civil War. An interest in the HBO show Boardwalk Empire led Kahler to bootlegger George Remus, the subject of The Ghosts of Eden Park.

As prolific as she is at writing nonfiction, a pivot to fiction was always in the cards for Kahler. “When I was 11, I sent a few creepy stories I wrote to Ellery Queen and Alfred Hitchcock’s Mystery Magazine in the hope I might get published,” she tells Shondaland. “I remember one story about an old widow. Every day, she would make tea and have conversations with her friend Mr. Roper [a name inspired by the Three’s Company landlord]. She’d have these one-sided conversations with Mr. Roper, and you couldn’t tell if he was just quiet or [she was] monopolizing. At the end of the story, it became clear that Mr. Roper was a corpse she’d drag out of her pantry every day,” Kahler laughs. “I don’t know how my mother didn’t throw me into therapy after that!”

With Where You End, Kahler’s latest “jawn” (Philly-speak for a thing, place, person, or event) is a page-turning nailbiter of psychological intrigue. A hint: After young adult mirror twins Kat and Jude get into a serious car accident, all Kat can remember is Jude. When Kat begins to question Jude’s explanation of their past, she embarks on a quest for answers that plunges them both into the rabbit hole of their dark past and all its unfinished business.

Kahler took some time to hop on the horn with Shondaland to share what inspired Where You End, what went into writing it, and her creative process.

VIVIAN MANNING-SCHAFFEL: What sparked the idea for Where You End?

ABBOTT KAHLER: While I was writing my historical nonfiction books, I would find really interesting characters or incidents from history. I’d see diaries, memoirs, archives, trial transcripts, or juicy, heavy source material, and I would just put them in a folder as fodder. But in 2019, I was watching a documentary called Tell Me Who I Am, and it tells the story of British identical twins Alex and Marcus Lewis. When he was 18, in 1982, Alex suffered a motorcycle accident. When he woke from his coma, the only memory he had was his brother’s face and name. He had nothing else. He knew nothing else. He was a complete blank slate. So, in this tragedy, Marcus saw an opportunity. He was going to completely reinvent their lives, giving them a history that bore little resemblance to the one they had. I thought this was fascinating! It also made me think of my mom and her identical twin. They were very, very close and were mirror twins, which I write about a lot in the book. My aunt was left-handed, and my mom is right-handed. They parted their hair on different sides. They had different facial markers, one on each side. I wondered what they would have done in this situation. It just fascinated me so much that I decided to write a book about it. So, the story was born of a fact. My mom is Katherine, and her twin is Judith, so I even named the twins after them. Also, my dad is a fraternal twin — his name is Ronald, and his twin is Donald — their names got in there as well.

Where You End

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Credit: Henry Holt & Company

VMS: What went into your research when you started researching brain injuries and amnesia?

AK: Marcus and Alex never talked about exactly how traumatic brain injury affected them in any interview that I could read; I read their book and watched their documentary. In any interview I ever read about them, they never explained the sort of brain misfiring that caused this unusual form of amnesia. I asked a few experts, and there didn’t seem to be any consensus on it other than the brain is such a mysterious entity. It’s always changing, and we don’t understand so many of the mysteries about it. It could be that he actually did forget the traumatic childhood. People do repress trauma, and one of the explanations I read was a more intensified form of repressing trauma through this accident he had.

VMS: Without giving away too much, who, what, where, when, and why inspired the cult you developed in the book?

AK: I did a lot of research on that on cults. I researched EST and the Forum and read accounts of children who had to take these seminars. They weren’t given a lot of food; they were told to talk about traumatic memories and tried to sort of recalculate the way they processed these memories to look at them differently. That inspired the catchphrase “What you think is,” which carries through a lot of self-help thinking we’ve grown up with, like The Secret. Also, I wanted to set the book in that time period because it was that era of massive self-improvement — groups were springing up everywhere. Emerging from the ’60s, people were looking for focus and community in a way. What I tried to convey was these weren’t drug-addicted hippies — these were corporate people, businesspeople, professionals. They wanted to use these tools to further themselves economically. It wasn’t exactly a free-spirited commune — there was an end goal in sight to improve your lot in life through whatever means necessary, attracting vulnerable people.

VMS: Children!

AK: I didn’t want to write mustache-curling villains. I wanted them to be much more subtle than that. Back then, some people thought there wasn’t any harm in what these very young teens ended up doing. It was legal! It wasn’t considered anything untoward, salacious, or damaging. These things are unacceptable today but were just not viewed in the same manner back then.

VMS: The separation of the twins at one point was a clever plot twist and a critical-mass point where we get to know their mother, Verona, and dig into their origin story.

AK: I wanted people to be conflicted about her. Obviously, she was a completely crazy narcissist, but I think as much as a narcissist is capable of love, she genuinely thought she was doing what was best for her girls.

VMS: You managed to create a whole universe where this wild circumstance and level of dysfunction are feasible. How did you decide to toggle between Kat’s and Jude’s voices and also the jumping back and forth in time? How did you land on those creative decisions?

AK: I thought about the structure of the book quite a bit, but I think it was the hardest thing I was wrestling with. I was initially thinking about their childhood in brief flashbacks. To have these girls be justified in their choices, I had to spell out what had happened. I didn’t want to skim over it. Given the extent of what Jude was trying to hide and the extent of her own trauma, I wanted to get a point across that Jude was not only giving Kat a gift in her mind, but she was also giving herself a gift if she could rewrite their history. It would ease some of the burden she’d been carrying alone since Kat had her accident. I also thought Jude should be third person. She’s more detached, more cautious, and more guarded. Kat is more open, boisterous, and willing to take chances.

I also struggled a lot with the question of nature versus nurture. When Kat was erased as a blank slate, how much of her old self did she retain? I read a lot of books about that. One was The Body Keeps the Score: Brain, Mind, and Body in the Healing of Trauma, which is a really brilliant examination of what traumatic experiences and generational trauma can do, and how it can or cannot imprint on the body and on the mind. It was very important to me that even if Kat forgot everything, her body was always going to remember. The muscle memory of the mind is imprinted within the body, which is why she could kick ass. I did want to make sure that her general spirit was retained, but her body was definitely keeping the score.

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VMS: How do you approach writing? Are you a channeler or an outliner?

AK: I am an obsessive outliner — it’s a holdover from my nonfiction work. I think the outline from my most recent book about the Galapagos was 130,000 words, and the book is, like, 90,000. So, the outline is always longer than the book.

VMS: Do tell! Can you give us a hint at what might be next for you?

AK: It’s called Then Came the Devil. It’s a true story of a group of people from Germany who fled to the Galapagos Islands in the years leading up to World War I or World War II in hopes of creating a utopia. Things went incredibly awry! It should be a really interesting beach read … I hope! Right now, it’s slated for May of 2025.

VMS: Not to get meta, but how did you land on the ending of Where You End?

AK: It took some back and forth, but my editor Sarah Crichton at Henry Holt and I agreed there was no other way the book could end. But I wanted the ending to be ambiguous. And I still don’t even know some of the key answers myself.

VMS: You do kind of leave us hanging, which is great.

AK: I want people to draw their own conclusions, but I think after the accident and after losing her memory, Kat doesn’t have the same anger anymore. The instincts are there, but the anger is not. It went back to nature versus nurture: How much can you really coax out of your old self back into your new self? I just really wanted that to be an open question because one of the things I always write about in fiction or nonfiction — and especially in this novel — is reinvention. I think it’s very, very interesting to examine what people choose to bring with them when they reinvent themselves and what they choose to leave behind, what they lie about, what they choose to say, and what they don’t say. I think lies and omissions are just as telling as what people present about themselves. I wanted that all to be in play in terms of exactly what Kat had coming out of this accident. How is she similar to her previous incarnation, and how is she different? It’s a question all of us have: How much have we changed over the years? How much was that willful? How much of it was a result of things that happened to us, and how much of it was us seizing the chance to change?

VMS: To borrow from the book, there’s also that whole “reject and release” thing, looking at different aspects of your life and trying to figure out what you want to carry with you and what you want to compartmentalize.

AK: It’s so interesting to take a look at memory and how it’s a literal compartmentalization or an erasing of trauma, how the body and mind react to that, and how often people react to that.

VMS: What part of the book presented the biggest challenge, and how did you overcome it?

AK: I think it was figuring out who should tell what part of the story and how to integrate the past with the present in a way that seems plausible in context. There are some fantastical elements, but I wanted them to feel very possible and very real. I wanted it all to be very present and grounded and sort of visceral, and convey that on the page in a way that was accessible. It was a challenge to do that while incorporating some of the crazy elements of the cult, but I think if you are in a world like that — and I’ve talked to people who have been in cults — it sounds crazy when you recount it after the fact, or to a lay person who has no experience with it, but it’s absolutely 100 percent real while you’re in it.

This interview has been edited for length and clarity.