When “It's all her fault” The author's middle daughter, Andrea Mara, was 5 years old and went to pick her up for a playdate. She drove to the address listed in the school directory and rang the doorbell. No answer. She called again. Still no answer.
Then she looked out the window – and her heart stopped.
“There was no furniture in the house. No one lived in the house. My heart almost jumped out of my chest with fear, and I immediately thought, 'Oh my God, my baby has been kidnapped,'” Mara tells TODAY.com.
Mara feared it was a fake game and her baby had been kidnapped. “I think a lot of parents probably understand that you're thinking about the worst-case scenario,” she says.
Then a neighbor poked her head in and said the owners had only moved a few weeks ago, so the printed school handbook had not been updated.
Mara was able to pick up her daughter at the correct address, but the script never left her. When she set out to write her fourth novel, she returned to the concept.
“I thought, 'Okay, I think I want to write this game book,'” she says.
That “playbook” became “All Her Fault,” published in 2021 and adapted into the drama “Peacock,” released earlier this month. starring actress Sarah Snook. In the book and series, Marissa and Peter Irwin's lives are thrown into chaos when their young son Milo goes missing while playing. It turns out he was kidnapped, just as Mara feared in her imagination.
In addition to unexpected turns, “It's All Her Fault” Starts Conversations about the division of labor and why women bear the brunt of responsibility for everyday life and are blamed when things go wrong. The show's main husbands, Peter (Jake Lacy) and Ritchie (Thomas Cockerell), range from sociopathic to inept.
“(My husband) watched the show with me and he was like, 'Come on. Please tell me this is not based on me.” And I told him, 'Look, you didn't listen to me, so I had to write a book,'” she says, laughing.
Although she says her husband is nothing like Richie, who leaves his wife to sort out all the details of his child's life, she often felt like the “default parent,” forced to take on more problem-solving work.
Mara, who calls herself an “overthinker,” says she uses her novels as a way to work through scripts.
“Writing is therapy, so I get it all out of my system and write a book and just offer it to other people,” she says.
She has a 28-page document listing ideas for crime novels inspired by real-life scenarios.
Her next book, It Should Have Been You, released in 2026, imagines what could happen if someone sends a rude message about a neighbor. To neighborhood group text. Then four people died.
“I have a big Whatsapp group here in the neighborhood and they think it's really funny that I made a whole book out of the messages they mistakenly send to our group. Everyone's like, 'Oh, be careful. She's probably reading these messages for her new book,” she says.
