"Society of Lies": Interview with Lauren Ling Brown
Lauren's debut novel is a Reese's Book Club pick and national bestseller.
Lauren Ling Brown received a BA in English literature from Princeton University and an MFA in film production with a focus in screenwriting from the USC School of Cinematic Arts. She currently resides in Los Angeles, California, where she works as a film editor. Her debut novel, Society of Lies, is a national bestseller and a Reese’s Book Club pick.
As someone who has been writing her own novel in the dark academia genre, I was fascinated by this book and devoured it very quickly over the holiday season. Here’s my quick summary: Set on Princeton’s Gothic campus, this suspense novel centers multiracial sisters Maya and Naomi’s involvement with a (thankfully fictional) secret society that promises remarkable social mobility and lifelong prestige—with a hidden price tag. The stakes are high—after all, the younger sister, Naomi, ends up dead. Bonus for my lawyer readers: there is a lawyer in the novel! I was thrilled to speak with the book’s amazingly-talented author, Lauren, and excited to share our conversation with everyone.
April: Let’s start by hearing a bit about you, Lauren. Obviously, a lot of us got to know you as a bestselling author. What’s your backstory? Where did you grow up, what aspirations did you have growing up, what was it like to grow up in a multiracial family, what did you major in at Princeton, and how did you think of your career path in and after college?
Lauren: I grew up in Los Altos in the Bay Area. My mom is Chinese and my dad is African American. It was always a household where my parents valued education and reading. And so from a young age, my parents would read to me at night. I know a lot of parents do that, but it just made me fall in love with books and reading at a young age. I was obsessed: I read everything that I could, and at night, I would read with a flashlight, or I would bring my book to the dinner table, and my parents never told me not to.
I went to Princeton in 2008 and I was an English major. I started off as an Economics major, but switched to English. I really found Economics fascinating, but I didn’t want to be in finance. I wanted to recreate that feeling from childhood of reading all the time. I took my first creative writing class at Princeton, and I really loved it, but I recognized that I had a long way to go. I wasn’t naturally one of the better people in the class, and I knew I needed to study it, and I needed a lot more experience, including life experience, in order to bring that into my writing. So then after Princeton, I went to USC School of Cinematic Arts and studied screenwriting and editing. I didn’t really know how to get a job in screenwriting after I graduated, so I went into post-production, where I worked as an assistant editor and then later an editor in everything from film and TV to commercials and documentaries.
April: That’s fascinating! A lot of us probably don’t know a whole lot about that world—tell us more! What do you do on a day-to-day basis?
Lauren: It varies. It’s pretty different for if you’re working on a TV show or film, or if you’re working on a commercial, but post-production is very intense. It’s like a 9am till 8pm kind of job and weekends, and you’re there for a really important part of the filmmaking process, where dailies will come from set, from production, where they’re shooting the film or TV. And then you go through them, and you sort them, and you choose the moments that you like the best, and you sort of weave and rewrite the story a second time because the story is written first in the script phase, or even before that in the outline, but then it’s written again on set and then for a third time in post. So there’s so much you can do to change the feel of a story, with music and sound effects and lighting and color treatment. I really enjoyed it!
April: That’s fabulous. Let’s now switch to discussing our main topic of the day: your page-turner, Society of Lies. I’ve heard that publishers nowadays like fitting novels into categories—mystery, thrillers, romance, literary fiction, etc. Do you think Society of Lies is a cross-genre work of fiction?
Lauren: My goal was to write an entertaining suspense novel that also brought some of my own truth in how I grew up and see the world and experience growing up as a multiracial woman into this story. So I drew a lot from my personal experience having a sister and being raised by a Chinese immigrant mother and an African American father. I sort of combined that element of what normally would be kind of contemporary fiction with a fast paced, entertaining thriller.
April: This novel also fits in the “dark academia” genre. As a huge fan of this genre, I’m curious what led you to write a novel in this genre?
Lauren: My first two novels were also thrillers. One was a domestic thriller, one was more of a sci-fi thriller, and for the third one, I had tried to write a similar story 10 years earlier when I was in my last year of film school at USC. I returned to that story, which was basically about an outsider at Princeton getting involved in a fictional secret society, what that would do to her, and what moral dilemma she would encounter if this secret society was corrupt and led by a corrupt individual. So that was sort of the moral dilemma that I really wanted to explore in the book. I guess it became dark academia because it was set at a university and I don’t know at what point I decided, okay, I’m going to write a dark academia novel versus I’m going to set this story at a school that I’ve experienced myself so I can bring some real details to the story.
April: My next question shares the same theme as my Substack. As someone who grew up in Asia under a lot of international influences, I find the various Asian/Asian American characters fascinating in your novel. For example, the character Kai is from a rich family in Hong Kong, Ben is from Singapore but very much is not a “crazy rich Asian,” Amy is from Mainland China, and Maya and Naomi are half-Chinese and half African American. While crafting these characters, how did you avoid stereotypes? What kind of authorial choices did you make to craft their distinctive characters, families, and voices?
Lauren: That’s a really good question, and I think my main goal is to populate my books with characters who remind me of people I know. So I have a lot of friends who are international, who were born in another country and then immigrated to America and also people of all different ethnicities and races. I try to represent these experiences as authentically as possible. And I’m not perfect, and this is my debut novel. I hope to even grow further in this area. But my goal is to make each character have a full life and a backstory and something that feels real for their choices and their personality, and not just rely on their racial background. I also share my writing with a lot of friends: I really tried to use my closest friends as as a sort of brainstorming bounce board, to bounce ideas off of them and to have them critique my characters so that they sound real and authentic. I want them to be honest with me when they’re reading my work and tell me if something doesn’t feel true to them or feels offensive in some way. So that’s another way that I try to avoid stereotypes.
April: Another feature of the novel that stood out to me is that I thought the way you wrote in the Economics professor’s lecture portions was deliciously executed—I won’t spoil it for the reader on the details. I sometimes find that in novels that focus on relatively niche topics such as the law, it can be difficult to balance, on the one hand, the wish to please a general “lay audience,” and on the other hand, be technical and accurate about what can be “boring” details. How did you make decisions on when to focus more on students’ social lives in the book, and when to zoom in on more academic aspects like classes, professors, research paper nuances, etc.?
Lauren: The main scenes, the partying and that kind of thing, the social life and social dynamics and relationships, that’s all there because I want it to feel kind of cinematic and for you to watch it and picture these scenes and have a lot going on, and be able to visualize it as if it were a TV show or something like that. So that’s why there’s all the partying, and that is definitely not realistic. Nobody drinks that much, hopefully! The other aspect that you asked about, which I’m glad that you enjoyed, it was in the lectures, I like to introduce topics that I’m really interested in. So I am obsessed with behavioral economics and Daniel Kahneman, just as a topic that I find fascinating. I’ve read a lot of non-fiction books about that subject, and so I’ll just drop in little bits in the lecture portions.
April: While still on the question of academics, I’m curious if your experience with creative writing and academic writing skills can help with one another.
Lauren: Yes, definitely! I think that the same type of research that goes into non-fiction research and academic writing is the same kind of research that you can use in your fiction/creative writing. I’m the type of person who likes to read a lot on whatever subject I’m writing about. So if I’m writing about skiing in the Alps, I’ll read about it as much as possible. For this novel, I read a lot about the history of Princeton, the architecture, the history of the eating clubs, secret societies at other universities, and so forth, to just sort of have a framework and background; and then I just set those books aside. When I went to write the book, I just wouldn’t look at them directly, but all that knowledge would be in my head when I was making the scenes.
April: Let’s now zoom-in on the character Kai, the Hong Konger who becomes a lawyer after graduating from Princeton. What stood out to me in particular was her conversation with Naomi regarding the realities of BigLaw advancement. I’d love to hear more about why you decided to make Kai a lawyer and what you think the reader should learn from Kai’s experience.
Lauren: I made her a lawyer because my dad is a lawyer, and worked at a Biglaw firm as one of the only Black partners there. And so I got to hear from his experience, as well as from other friends who worked in Biglaw who are women of color. I wanted to just comment a little bit about the the way that there’s not enough diversity in that field yet, in my opinion. The scene with Kai and Naomi serves as a metaphor for how success and advancement can help certain people and disadvantage other people.
April: I think throughout the novel, we get a clear theme of not only the thirst for belonging, but a general internal debate about whether to give in to the addiction to prestige and ambition. This is illustrated by Maya’s decision, for example, to join both Sterling and Greystone [secret societies], despite the red flags that were already present very early on. I’d love to hear more about your thoughts on prestige and the pursuit of ambition through your own journey.
Lauren: One impression that I got from going to Princeton was that everyone was very smart, and they wanted to pursue knowledge, and they wanted to be successful. Some people wanted to become doctors and civil rights lawyers and really change and help the world and others. I think we’re more motivated by maybe family pressure to be successful, but for whatever reason, I’m definitely also one of those people who want to achieve highly and I don’t know where it comes from. What drives me is that I want to have more diverse female perspectives in novels and in the media in general, so in TV and film, and I want to encourage other writers, especially women of color, to pursue their own stories.
April: Several times in the book, I read about decisions of whether to pursue the arts or do the conventional path of getting a Wall Street job that one may not be as passionate about. What are some lessons do you hope readers can glean from reading this novel?
Lauren: I hope that people realize that the novel could take place in any city, anywhere at any university, and Greystone represents more of a metaphor and warning against what could happen if someone with bad intentions created a small, sort of insular group that infiltrated different industries, and they try to just be aware of that and talk about that so that it can be prevented. So that’s one aspect, and then another, on an individual level is that I hope that the takeaway from Maya’s lesson is that people stay true to their morals rather than sacrificing their beliefs.
April: Shifting to the topic of novel writing techniques, I loved the twists in your novel—at some point, I thought everyone was suspicious. What are some techniques for plotting that you experimented with while mapping out your plot?
Lauren: That’s a good question. I spend a lot of time—months and months—plotting before I start writing, and during that plotting process, I’ll create these mystery threads, so starting at the very most basic level with a plant and a payoff. So I’ll plant some mystery thread like, let’s say it’s a conversation between someone’s brother who recently got out of jail and one of my main characters. During that conversation, they’ll be talking about something that is later paid off much later, near the end of the novel. I’ll just keep layering in over and over, and I’ll pull out the ones that aren’t really working, or I never get a chance to tie up in the end. Right now, in my Book Two that will be coming out with Penguin Random House, I’m in that process where I have the whole thing written and I’ve been working on it for about a year and a half. But there are too many threads to tie them up all neatly in the end, so I have to start pulling some stuff out and rewrite the ending.
April: Wow, congratulations on Book Two! So productive! Are you a perfectionist?
Lauren: I am, in some ways, I definitely am a little bit type A and a little bit OCD! I always like to be working, like I bring my Kindle everywhere, and . . . oh my gosh, you would not believe the drafting process that I use, because it sounds mental, but I’ll make a draft 10 point 1.2 and then I’ll keep iterating on that, like three and 10 point 1.4 for smaller variations. And then when it’s a bigger variation of the whole manuscript. I’ll change it at a different decimal point, and I’ll send that to my Kindle and just read it back, looking for certain things. Right now, I’m very specifically trying to solve the past murder that goes unsolved for 20 years, and so I’m reading it back on my Kindle, only looking at those points of the manuscript.
April: Super interesting indeed! My last question today also focuses on the writing technique/process side of things: have you experienced writer’s block? What are your strategies to overcome it?
Lauren: I guess I think of writer’s block as more of being stuck in a certain plot point. So if I’m drafting, I’ll just skip it and keep going with a different scene and just try to get to the end and not let writer’s block completely deter me from writing. But now that I’ve written the whole book, I do feel a little bit stuck with the ending, and so I try to just write down in a different piece of paper, just like in a journal, different scenarios, of ways that it could end or be tied up, or different options, so that I’m not actually writing the scene, because I’m not ready to write it, but I’m writing more of an outline of what it could be.
Lovely chatting with you, April and best of luck with your writing!