Page Fright
Hosted by authors Sydney Kain (Our Love Language is Murder: coming Feb 2027), and Liza Petrov (Pre-Query). PAGE FRIGHT follows the journey of Sydney and Liza as they find their place in the literary world. Each week they offer a unique take on the ins and outs of the publishing industry, discuss craft and the vulnerability it takes to be a writer, and they answer questions from fans. New episodes every Tuesday.
Page Fright
How A Book Title Triggered Fragile Men (ft. Katy Brent)
Use Left/Right to seek, Home/End to jump to start or end. Hold shift to jump forward or backward.
On today's extra special episode, please help Sydney and Liz welcome Katy Brent onto Page Fright Podcast! She is known for her dark comedy book series about vigilante justice, and was very recently the focus of a huge worldwide controversy. The reason? Men got mad at her book title.
CONTENT WARNINGS!
Threats of extreme physical and sexual violence
Katy walks us through how her book titled "How To Kill Men and Get Away With It" led her to receiving to anonymous threats after the initial viral incident in India, inspiring a women-led revolution to combat gender violence across India and other parts of the world.
This only makes us even more excited for her future works...and we even get a little look behind the curtain at her next book!
Join us in our conversation about combating societal norms through dark comedy and how to protect yourself in an online space.
Follow Katy on Instagram!
https://www.instagram.com/but_katy_did_it/
Buy Katy Brent's books here!
https://bookshop.org/shop/PageFrightPodcast
Follow us on Instagram!
https://www.instagram.com/pagefrightpodcast/
Well, we have the most amazing guest today, Katie Brent, who writes darkly comedic, amazingly witty, uh such fast-paced, propulsive, fun books. Um, the Kitty Collins How to Kill Men and Get Away with It series, right? So thank you so much for joining us today. Oh, you're very welcome. Thank you for having me. So I was thinking we could talk a bit about your books and then we could move into a controversy that you faced uh with these books, but I won't spoil it now. We'll get to that later. For those listeners that don't know about your books, tell us a little bit about Kitty and her very uh scandalous adventures.
SPEAKER_03So Kitty is, well, she was initially a kind of influencer. She was a very popular influencer. Her whole kind of thing was posting like gorgeous travel photos, and that was kind of how she made her name in her world. She had an incident on a night out where a man was a little bit too um handsy with her. He'd bought her some drinks and she'd said, Thank you for the drinks, good night. And he would not take that, and he ended up following her home, and there was a kind of a kind of it's almost like a comedic set piece, I think, where she accidentally kills him with the broken wine bottle. Um, and sort of rather than calling an ambulance, as you know, I I don't know most of us, I guess, would at this point, she sort of s steps over him and thinks No, you know this this is your this is your penance for for for sort of stalking me out of the club and you know, trying to to get what you want for for the price of buying me a drink, basically. So so that's sort of what gives her a and she gets away with it. Um the the the the newspapers kind of follow it up as this tragic accident where this guy has fallen. I mean, it's all uh a lot of the murders are completely ridiculous. You have to really, really suspend disbelief for them. And she kind of realises that she has this taste for sort of vigilante justice, and she she's she then starts sort of stalking Tinder for guys who are a little bit creepy. And then she's going through sort of newspapers and online stories about guys who have committed atrocities against women, like really, really awful crimes against women, and the judges have been like, Oh, well, you know, it'd be a shame to ruin this man's life, wouldn't it? Let's just, you know, give him some community service. And Kitty's like, no, hang on a minute, no. So she decides to take justice into her own hands, um, under the guise of being this. She's she's super rich, by the way. I should have mentioned that before. She's an heiress. This is very conveniently, she's an heiress to a kind of um I don't know what the US equivalent would be, but over here we've got Bernard Matthews, who is a kind of meat mogul, and he does a lot of like frozen turkey burgers and and that kind of thing. So she's fortunately she's got access to all these sort of abattoirs, and um, you know, it's a perfect place to get rid of these bodies. So, um, which is obviously very, very convenient for her. So um, she just sort of starts scrolling through the news, decides that she's gonna, you know, the judges aren't giving justice to these guys because a lot of the judges are also men, and decides that she's gonna get justice in her own in her own way, which involves dragging them to her her abattoirs and then putting them through the mincer.
SPEAKER_01It's I don't know how you make murder so hilarious, but somehow you do. And every time she would say, uh, yeah, I think this one's gotta go, I was like, Yeah, it does. It's gotta go. I was right there with her. And now you have your third one in the series coming out next week. Next week.
SPEAKER_03So in the US, I think it's actually out on the 25th for you guys. Um, and it's called To All the Men I've Killed Before. It's the last in the trilogy, which is very, very sad for me. Although, you know, I've kind of, without giving away too many spoilers, it's been left open enough for it to not necessarily be the end, the end, the end. But for now, I think for me it's time to kind of, I'm really wanting to move on and write other characters and other women, other very strong women who are doing other things. So um yeah, but so yeah, it's the third, so very exciting.
SPEAKER_01So the c thinking of this from like a writing perspective, so when you say you left it open, does that mean you're gonna see how well it's received or if there's a demand for more, and then you might go back later? Is that why you left it open?
SPEAKER_03I think it's kind of always because you never know how things are gonna respond. And it's all to do with kind of like, I mean, uh I hate saying that I was lucky with how to kill men and get away with it because I worked really hard on that book. And I'm always against whenever I hear a woman sort of pass off her success as saying, Oh, I was lucky, I'm like, no, you weren't lucky, you worked really fucking hard. Sorry, can I swear?
SPEAKER_01Yeah, yeah, go for it.
SPEAKER_02Yep, or a swearing podcast.
SPEAKER_03Just needed to.
SPEAKER_02This is actually one of my favorite parts of all podcasts when someone swears and they're like, Oh, can I do it? And like everyone's like, Yes, of course.
SPEAKER_03Of course you can. Okay, that's fine then. Um I'll I'll try and keep it, you know, level one swearing. Okay. Um, yeah, so like I'm always, if any of my friends or like any writers I know sort of say I was lucky, and I'm like, you know, you weren't lucky, you worked bloody hard. And that's why this has happened. But I think there is a certain amount of serendipity about what's going on culturally at the time. And I think with How to Kill Men and Get Away with it, it happened at a time that was we were very post-Me Too. I was querying it during the pandemic. And obviously, there were a lot of stories coming out during COVID about how like domestic violence had gone up. You know, there was over in the UK. I mean, you've probably heard about it over there, but we had a horrific merge of a beautiful young woman called Sarah Everard, who was killed by a serving police officer. It felt like it was a real seminal moment here for women. And I feel that that sort of bled into how angry women are and how just in, you know, we we're we're furious. We've had enough of it. We've had enough of not being able to walk home, of not being able to go for a run, of having to, you know, share our location with someone so they know where we are. You know, all of these, even to the point, oh my god, my daughter's gonna hate me for saying this, but she probably won't see it, so it is fine. But her school, so last year they've brought in a rule where girls aren't allowed to wear, um, so they used to be able to let uh be allowed to wear just you know normal school skirts. They're not allowed to wear those anymore. Now they have to wear these heavy duty kilts or trousers because skirts are distracting the boys. Oh my gosh. And I'm like, why are we teaching girls to adjust their behavior for boys? Why aren't we teaching the boys to stop looking at girls as sexual objects? That is what needs to be the lesson here. Yeah. Not girls stop wearing skirts. Like, yeah, what? It's you know, it's 2026. Yeah. That's supporting the like you asked for it um culture. Exactly that. And I've kind of gone to the school with this. I used to, but before I was, um before I was fortunate enough to be a full-time writer, I was a journalist and I was kind of like, I really want to write about this. Um, and I went to the school and they've kind of they said to me, they they've literally said to me that this is why they are doing this. And I'm like, are you so you're going on record telling me that you're doing this because of the boy, it's distracting the bullies. When you start looking into it and you start thinking about how it's just a very dark road that you go down where it might not actually be the peers, the bully peers, that are the issue. It's the other males around them who are old enough to know better.
SPEAKER_02There's also this concept of I was thinking about it the other day. There's a uh, you know, the famous saying, bigotry of low expectations. And there's a there's another side to that, which is the privilege of low expectations. Like they can't control themselves. Thus, the ones that can control themselves, the girls, must do it and must keep on doing it, must keep on covering themselves, must there it's just a slippery slope, you know? And it's like where do you end up?
SPEAKER_03Exactly. Where does it where does it end? And I think one of um one of my favorite quotes in I think it is how to kill men, and it's about men controlling themselves. And it's like, well, they manage not to shit on the streets.
SPEAKER_01Yeah, yeah. So it's like you said, it's so angering. Our power is taken from us so many times, and yet somehow you were able to write this book with a lot of uh humor where it's approachable, I think, to both sexes. How are you able to write this with humor when it's you know, this is something that's so triggering and makes women so angry?
SPEAKER_03I think I I've thought about this a lot, and I think without well, there's a couple of reasons actually. I think first of all, without the humour, it would be the most depressing for me. Yeah, totally. You know, it would just be horrible. But I also find it's interesting because I know since my books come out, there's been I'm I'm not sure how it is over in the States, but certainly over here we've had a sort of space of very similar, you know, there's a lot of, you know, vigilante serial killer books that are coming out at the moment. You know, it it obviously touched the nerve and it's something that's really important and and women are wanting to read it. But I always find it quite interesting that women have to almost kind of sugarcoat it with humour rather than just, you know, coming out and writing something super dark because I don't know how well that would be received. It's almost like we have to be like, even when we're writing about our rage, we still have to be hee hee hee.
SPEAKER_01That's a good point. Yeah. That is interesting. I've I've never uh considered that, but it's almost like our our angry emotions are too much for other people. I was even thinking that if you were to write this book with a serious tone, it would almost probably be perceived as a woman, like, oh, she's being like hysterical and dramatic and angry, and people probably would be put off by it. It's more approachable with the humor.
SPEAKER_02It's more approachable with the humor. Black humor has it's a long history of insightful commentary on the dark parts of of our culture, of society, and putting lading it with a little bit of humor does something that connects people to it. It kind of lowers people's walls.
SPEAKER_03It absolutely does. And I think it also makes subjects that are so horrible. I mean, you know, the the the the subjects that these books touch on are just they're so horrible. You know, you can talk about them because of the humour. It makes them almost palatable to to to be discussed, I guess. And that was the whole point. It's you know, we we want these books to be talked about, we want these issues to be talked about. It's super important that these issues are talked about. Um, I know when we were discussing particularly the title, which we will get on to very shortly, I'm sure, of how to kill men and get away with it, it was we did toy with the idea of toning it down and calling it something softer, but we ended up thinking, no, we want this to be a talking point. We want people to kind of look at this and think, okay, this is a talking point. Like, why, why does this book exist? One of the things I get all the time, and um it it is quite hilarious because it's always a man who's usually sorry, 99% of the time it's a man who says it. And he always thinks he's the first person to say it. And he'll say to me, but what if it was called How to Kill Women and Get A Women?
SPEAKER_01Oh my god. I've actually seen that comment. I've I've seen the comment about the book.
SPEAKER_03Every talk I do, there is someone who will say that. And I'm like, dude, that's the news.
SPEAKER_02Yeah, I know. It's also another book. It's American Psycho. You know, it's it's just a lot of really famous books about how to hurt women and get away with it.
SPEAKER_03There was an article recently in The Guardian over here. Um I can't remember, um, I should be able to remember the names, and I can't because I'm perimenopausal and I can barely remember my own name, quite frankly. But there was something very recently, and it was something to do with the Sunday Times top ten books, and something like seven or eight of them contained the murders of women. And it goes across all media. It's like, you know, you you you turn on a kind of a police procedure or, you know, something like, you know, any cop show, and it's the murder of a woman. So, you know, it's just it's it's it's flipping that, and men do not like it.
SPEAKER_01I wonder why men are so threatened by that. I mean, it's not like any man has to walk out on the street at night and think about, is anyone following me? Oh, is there someone coming on the same side of the street?
SPEAKER_03I've had so many men who have said to me, Do you not think it's dangerous for us to go out? You know, we're worried. Like men are also getting killed by like knife crime and stuff. And I'm like, yes, men are getting killed by that is true, but men are getting killed by other men. And actually, men's worst fear is probably okay, being killed by another man. You don't have the worry of being taken somewhere, locked away somewhere, raped for years and years by someone, no one ever being able to find you or your body. The fear is not the same. Not say not taking away from the fact that there is fear for men going out on their own, you know. Over here it's knife crime. I know you guys have got guns. Yeah. I don't know why I struggled to find that word then. I was gonna do the sign and everything. Gun guns.
SPEAKER_02Oh, I wish you had. That would have been great.
SPEAKER_03But you know, and and there's a lot of gang violence and things like that, but it is not the same fear that women have of being not not just murdered, but raped, murdered, never found. Your family's never knowing what's happened to you. Trafficked, you know, the the the the things that can happen to women are vastly greater than what can happen to men. And, you know, even if it comes down to it, if if a man is getting followed by another man at night, the man is able more than likely to be able to put up some kind of fight. A woman cannot do that for the most part. Even with the best self-defense training, if we've got a, you know, I'm five foot two, if a six foot three guy.
SPEAKER_01No chance.
SPEAKER_03No chance at all.
SPEAKER_01None. I I feel like we're kind of skirting around it, so why don't we just dive right into it? So after you published How to Kill Men and Get Away with It, some women were photographed reading it on a subway, right? And it created this mass controversy of men becoming so threatened and angry about this title and this book. And talk to us about what happened in the in the fallout and your experience about that.
SPEAKER_03Well, it was so weird because this happened, um, gosh, what are we now? August. So this happened sort of May, June, May, June, June, July, kind of over here. So at this point, uh it's almost four years old. It's three and a half years since it's been published in paperback. So, you know, it's not it it's not that much of a recent book. And it was such a I remember just it was a really nice day here in England, and I was sat out on my porch, just having a sort of read of um I can't even remember what I was reading at the time, and suddenly my phone started just pinging, ping, like going crazy. And it's always like, you know that fear when your phone starts going on, you're like, oh Jesus Christ, what happened? What the fuck has happened? Yes. So and it was somebody had tagged me in um a reel of um a woman on the Metro in Delhi. I I think I'm pretty sure it was Delhi, Delhi Metro, reading How to Kill Men and Get Away with It in public, just reading a book. And this clip of her had gone completely viral. And men in India were livid. Somebody made a wonderful reel that is on my Instagram, and it she she called it something like um the book that's enraged or or baited an entire gender.
SPEAKER_01I saw that. It's so great.
SPEAKER_03I love it so much. It's so funny. And I was kind of like, obviously, for me, this is just like a Tuesday in June, and I'm sort of like, you know, just sat at home four years after the books come out, and it's like, you know, it suddenly blew up massively. And it was just it was craziness because first of all, it was completely unexpected. And secondly, um, I had so much support from Indian women. It was amazing. I had like, you know, they were sending me messages, they were making reels, they were like, we're all gonna read this in solidarity on public transport because we should be able to do this. Wow, that's amazing.
SPEAKER_02I mean, they should be safe on public transport. Some of the stories that I've heard from India have been horrible.
SPEAKER_03So absolutely, absolutely horrible.
SPEAKER_02Like And those women are doing such great activist work. Like there there is amazing movement on the feminist side uh in India over the past few years, just seeing what they've been able to accomplish is is really something. So I'm I'm happy that they were inspired.
SPEAKER_03And it's amazing, like the the the bravery of them having seen the backlash that this I mean I don't I'm not sure that the girl or woman who was reading it was ever publicly identified. I hope she wasn't because, you know, I got I got enough backlash without like I said, the the the women of India were wonderful. They were were making these wonderful reels and tagging me in it and you know, saying, this is exactly what we need. We need books like this. I don't want to say all men because I had some wonderful support from from some Indian men who were a particular Indian bookseller who messaged me to say that he'd sold out of the books and um he was ordering more in because they were in such demand and he was, you know, we we the women in our country really, really need this kind of thing. But unfortunately, not like like India is it's so weird for me being from the UK because I'm really aware of like we're like this. Whereas obviously America and India are huge, yeah. And and the disparities between the different places in the country is are huge. So India is you've obviously got places that are very, very well educated and other places that are not so much. And some of the messages I got were like I I I've never seen anything like it. I've I've had obviously we knew the title was going to be provocative. It was one of the reasons that we decided to go with it. We discussed it a lot, and I was kind of like, no, we're gonna do it, it's fine. Knew that there would be some backlash. There wasn't anywhere near as much as I thought there was going to be. But every now and again I will get like somebody will pop in and say something quite nasty to me, and I will sort of block and, you know, move on. I was inundated with awfulness of rape threats, death threats, um, people saying things like, you know, you deserve to be raped to death.
SPEAKER_02I saw some of the messages that you sent over.
SPEAKER_01Let's go ahead and put some of those messages here on the screen. And if you're listening to this on one of our audio platforms, you can see these messages on YouTube. Yeah, but you can't see them on my page anymore because Instagram removed them. Yeah, so I I saw that that you were receiving these horrible, horrible messages. And then you posted them to raise awareness about what was happening to you. And then Instagram took them down. They took them down.
SPEAKER_03They gave me a 30-day ban on messages. And they've given me, this is the weirdest thing, a 335-day ban from going live on Instagram. Now, fortunately, I it's not something I do anyway, but like, what a weird number.
SPEAKER_00Yeah.
SPEAKER_03And this was just for saying I posted them to be like, this is what it's like to be a woman on the internet who puts her head above the parapet. This is this is the sort of thing that you get. And yeah, like Instagram were were the the guy who sent them to me, his profile is still active.
SPEAKER_01Oh my gosh. That is such that makes me so furious and enraged. Instagram, you should be ashamed of yourself.
SPEAKER_02Yeah.
SPEAKER_01You need to do better. This is so ridiculous. I hope that tons of people see this and that action is taken and that there is justice for you on this because yeah, this is the most discriminatory misogynistic example.
SPEAKER_03It takes a lot to shock me. And the messages, these particular ones that I think you're showing, it's beyond violent. It's like the who whoever I think what concerned me was like I've assumed that it was a guy in India who's been triggered by the the whole viral mo the whole viral moment. But also, because it's an anonymous profile, I don't know who it is. It could be someone who lives down the road from me. I literally don't know. And Instagram will not help me find out.
SPEAKER_00Yeah.
SPEAKER_03Um, which I find absolutely appalling. And also, you know, who whoever this guy, I mean, I'm assuming it's a guy, I can't cannot imagine for the life of being women writing something like this. But whoever this man is will have women in his life, you know, he'll have no doubt a partner, sisters, definitely a mother, a daughter, a daughter. And he's speaking to women on the internet like like this. And it's just, it's mind-boggling. I've managed to develop over the last four years quite a thick skin towards sort of internet hate and you know, but this really shook me, and it takes a lot to do that.
SPEAKER_01Yeah, we talk about, you know, we talk about how you have to have a thick skin as an author, like facing bad reviews, you know, in your work, but we have not discussed your life uh being threatened or a threat of sexual assault. How have you coped through that? How did you cope through this?
SPEAKER_03Basically went on lockdown on my Instagram, which was really like I hate I again, this is, you know, how we were talking before about women have to alter our behaviour because of the actions of men. It's like I had to, I shut down my Instagram messages so I couldn't receive messages from anyone who I don't know. When when I got those, I was kind of like, it was so shocking to me that I was like, I I wanted to come off Instagram completely. I wanted to just completely go dark and be like, and if it wasn't for the fact that I had this book coming out imminently, I I I probably would have done it. It it's not the answer, is it? It's not like women adjusting our behavior because of the actions of men is not what we should be doing. So I think I ended up thinking it's better for me to stay online and what I'm gonna do is raise, you know, I'm gonna post these, I'm gonna show people what I'm getting, I'm gonna, you know, pull these people out.
SPEAKER_02Yeah, the best thing to do in that situation is fight.
SPEAKER_03Yeah, and then meta met metacepted and they were like, no, you're not.
SPEAKER_01But I mean, yeah, it is a good thing to step in and fight, but that also takes a lot of bravery and courage. It does. And I'm sure you have a family and your own children that you're worried about. Did you ever have nights where you just thought about maybe leaving writing altogether?
SPEAKER_03Oh I think maybe one night I was kind of like, God, is it worth this? Is it worth getting these kind of the one particular message about a gun um really, really kind of hit me hard. But I think if it silences women, then they win, don't they?
SPEAKER_01Mm-hmm. Well that's that's what they're trying to do.
SPEAKER_03Exactly, exactly. And I'm, you know, all I've ever wanted to do is write, all I've ever wanted to do is be a writer. I wanted, you know, these books have always meant to be a talking point, and I think what I've had to accept, for better or for worse, is that with the positive talking points, there are going to be people who disagree. And they're gonna be people who disagree from angles, from from positions that maybe aren't that educated. And it's really just a case of just trying to block out that noise and not engage with them. Because there's only so many times where I can answer the question, what if this was called how to kill women and get away with it? Without me being like, oh my god, that's literally the news. That's literally what men have been doing for millennia. That's literally how many women go missing every single year and are never found. Men get away with killing women all the time. Also, the other thing about this book is um well, this is the other thing. It's like, you know, the a lot of men got very upset about the title. They haven't gone in and read it. They haven't gone in and seen the nuance of it and the fact that it's not a guide to killing any man you come across. It's just the case of, I mean, really, it should be called How to Kill Cishet Men Who Abuse Women are misogynistic and abuse women. But it doesn't trip off the tongue quite so easily.
SPEAKER_02The crazy thing to me about this is that you're you're following a grand tradition of rape revenge media. Yeah. That is a whole subgenre of movies. There are an vigilante dark comedy book, like Dexter, yeah, he's doing vigilante and Batman. Batman is a vigilante. You know, and so but back to like rape revenge movies, I think it's really interesting because if you look at that subgenre, especially ones from the 80s, a lot of the time it was angry fathers, angry brothers, uncles, lovers who were going after loos of men, mowing them down haphazardly or horri horrifically, gorily, you know. The woman's gone. You know, she was murdered just right today. Something something horrible happened. Horrible and they're getting the revenge. And it's it it is kind of a staple of tons of 80s B movies. It's it's amazing. Critically, uh, it's usually the man getting the revenge. And only in later years, I I'm I'm struggling to remember the name of it, but there the director that directed Oh God, guys, I'm so sorry. It was the one with Demi Moore. Demi Moore came out last year, The Substance. So her movie was a was a rate revenge movie where the the woman goes after her rapist. It was fantastic. I I I saw it uh to great acclaim in the theater. And what you're doing is like there's so many other examples of of it being done well, of it being well received. And I I find it very funny and kind of telling. It's just like you're not only if you're if you're asking about the title, like what if it's about killing women? Like you're not only revealing yourself as not being a very thoughtful person, but you're also revealing yourself as being media illiterate. This isn't new.
SPEAKER_03It's not no, it's not. It's not new.
SPEAKER_02It's like and it's also can you take a joke? Men, can you take a joke?
SPEAKER_03No, like come on. No not unless they tell it. If they're the one telling it, then that's fine.
SPEAKER_02Oh, if they're telling it about feminists, if they're telling it about women, then we have to laugh, just so you know.
SPEAKER_03But I think, you know, um the original I spit on your grave was like, what was that? The 70s?
SPEAKER_00Mm-hmm. 80s?
SPEAKER_03You know, that's a rape revenge where a woman is going out and getting revenge on the men who have harmed her. It's it's a genre. It's it's an old genre. It's like, you know, I'm not doing anything particularly new.
SPEAKER_02But you are doing something very witty. The humor in the book is very funny. It's very biting. I I don't know, I applaud you. I think that I really like the title. I like that you decided to just like punch out there and get attention and get a conversation going. It's a big conversation piece.
SPEAKER_03It is, it is.
SPEAKER_02That you did not deserve certain conversation to be had though.
SPEAKER_03No, no, no. That was that was completely unnecessary. But then, you know, the the guys that are messaging me like that, you know, they are not there for a conversation. They are just there to attack me. They're there to brutalize. If they were saying to me, okay, so why do you feel like this? Um, if they want to have a conversation, I'm happy to engage in a conversation with them. But it's absolutely not that. It's like, you know, they're like, you're a misanderist, and it's it's that's completely not the case at all. It's it's, you know, read the book, find the nuance, and then come back and tell me if you feel the same.
SPEAKER_02Actually read the book and then come back if you come back after. Yeah, nobody does. Everybody uh judges a book by its cover, literally.
SPEAKER_01And the title, yeah, absolutely. So what steps can writers take to protect themselves when s you know their book hits a nerve and then people start threatening them? Is there anything in particular that you would recommend to keep yourself safe?
SPEAKER_03It's all completely dependent on the writer, I guess. You know, we're we're all completely different people and some people I think because this was actually my debut novel, and I think if this had all kicked off maybe four years ago when it was my first book, and I didn't have any experience of the industry, I think I may have just gone to ground and not written again because it was very, very frightening. I think as you experience more of the industry, you do get a thicker skin. I think some people are generally m thicker skinned than others anyway. So some people might not feel like they have to protect themselves. Some people, I know a lot of writers are kind of almost gearing up for those conversations and those arguments, you know, they really want to have them. But I don't know. I think you have to just surround yourself with people who love you, you know, writers, your writer friends should know exactly what you're trying to do. Your family, shut your messages to people who don't know you, you know, if you can keep it so it's, you know, friends and followers only, then you're not gonna get the onslaught of vitriol, which is, you know, even for I guess the most thick skinned person. I don't know though, because some people can just let it wash over them a lot easier. I don't know, really. I think it's a really personal thing as to how you want to protect yourself. I mean, some people will leave everything open and just take it and either ignore it or say their piece back. Um for me, the safest thing felt to just, you know, shut those stranger messages down so I didn't get those. And then I can sort of pretend it's not happening. And also then, you know, the angry men are just sort of shouting into the void, and that's fine. Probably if you're a debut author, it's probably would be a lot harder. I think if this had happened, yeah, four years ago when the book came out, it would have been a very different story to how it is now. I don't think I would have handled it in any way near as well as I'm doing now. I'm kind of I'm I'm hardened to it.
SPEAKER_01It's probably hard to see it when you're going through it, but you've created a history-making book. You've added a huge shift in culture and society, and like you've delivered something into the world that has impacted like thousands and thousands and thousands, thousands of people. And so maybe that's something you could hold on to. It's like, yes, this is so hard, but I have created something that is changing women's lives. That's an amazing, amazing thing.
SPEAKER_03I did have a little joke with one of my wife, my one of my writer friends about it, and she was like, Oh, what have you been up to today? And I was like, Oh, I started a revolution, you know.
SPEAKER_01Exactly. No, but it's serious, really, that is such an amazing thing. Like, people are gonna remember your name and remember this book.
SPEAKER_03I think that's the other thing that uh going back to sort of the question you said about protecting yourself, is that for every horrible, nasty, vitriol, like violent comment, I probably had 20 really positive, wonderful ones from women who have found the book inspiring, who have the literary understanding to know that it isn't a how-to guide, but it's a kind of a way for them to to look at the world differently, I guess.
SPEAKER_00Yeah.
SPEAKER_03I think the other thing that I wanted to say that's really quite pertinent to how to kill men and get away with it in particular, um, as the first one in the series, is that all of the violent acts towards women in that book were based on real life stories. You know, I I'd gone and I'd done research into, you know, there was kind of a guy who had been released from prison after raping someone he'd met on Tinder. As soon as he was released, he was back on Tinder. Tinder didn't stop him. Yeah. Back on Tinder, there was another guy who had seriously beaten up his partner many, many times, often to the brink of death. And the male judge had said, Well, you didn't kill her, basically, those were his words. I think he got a very short jail time. So all of those stories were based on real events. Whereas Kitty's murders were almost, you know, they were comedic set pieces, you know, she stabbed someone through the eye with a blibbing Burj Khalifa piece of tart that came from holiday, you know, they were not serious murders.
SPEAKER_02Clearly not.
SPEAKER_03And to see Menging upset about this. Yeah. I'm like, you've really missed the point, haven't you?
SPEAKER_01You were so close, but but but no. How did your publisher respond to all of this? Yeah, that's a good question.
SPEAKER_03Yeah, no, they've been really they've been really supportive and great actually. They have been sort of the whole way through. I think one of the very first things, way back in, I guess, 2023, the the the third sort of example of this I had was this was horrifying for me at the time because I never experienced anything like it at all. But um, a guy on YouTube had made a video about the book and basically calling for me to be arrested for hate crimes.
SPEAKER_01Oh my god.
SPEAKER_03But the video that he made, he had like a QAnon mask on, and it was like, it was so creepy for you know, for me for my first book, having, you know, suddenly this guy making in this mask. And I'm like, what strikes me as so strange is that they do not see the irony of what they are doing. It's like you are the reason we need these books. Because look at you, you're making a video, a masked video, threatening a woman for calling out men who are threatening women. It's just it's mind-blowing. It really is.
SPEAKER_01Yeah, absolutely. You said you want to move on to writing other books.
SPEAKER_00Yeah.
SPEAKER_01Do you see yourself staying on this path or changing directions? What's your plans for the future?
SPEAKER_03Oh, I really I want to stay with thrillers. I want to always keep them a little bit topical, I think. In between the Kitty Collins books, I wrote another book called The Murder After the Night Before, which was a murder mystery about a journalist called Molly who had gone out or it was her Christmas works night out. I don't know if you have the same. In fact, I've had I have had some feedback from Americans who have said to me, What is this Christmas night out that you that you have? And over here it's like a really big thing. So like I don't know if it has been so much since COVID, but definitely sort of, you know, maybe, what a god, it's so long ago now, isn't it? Like seven to ten years ago. Your office would have a night out where the company would pay, they'd put money behind the bar, everyone would get absolutely annihilated, embarrass themselves, no one could show their face and work the next morning. You'd have someone lap dancing someone from ma higher management.
SPEAKER_02It was, you know, it sounds like we have Christmas parties, like office Christmas parties. Yeah, but they're not like that. I don't know. I guess some of them. I I don't work in an office, so I don't know how they are.
SPEAKER_03It's kind of a thing over here. So this so Molly had gone to this Christmas party and had got absolutely annihilated drunk and woke up the next morning not being able to remember a thing about it at all.
SPEAKER_02All I can think of is Bridget Jones singing at the beginning of the movie. Her Christmas party. That's what I'm imagining this character doing.
SPEAKER_03No, no, it's it's way worse than that. It's even worse.
SPEAKER_02Oh no. She sang really badly. She had tinsel antennas.
SPEAKER_03There were tinsel antennas, but it involved um oral sex in a nanny way in London.
SPEAKER_02Okay. You know what? Bridget Jones would do that though. I feel like I feel like she'd get caught in a very embarrassing way.
SPEAKER_01Totally.
SPEAKER_02Anyway, please go on to tell your story. But for Americans, that's the context.
SPEAKER_03That's the context. So anyway, she goes into work not realizing that she's gone completely viral in the worst possible way. So she gets into work, and work are all like, could you come and see the manager we need to talk to you? And she's like, Oh god, did I say something awful? Did I say something? And it's obviously much worse than that. And they show her Twitter, and it's kind of like it's quite fun because it's also things like this was, you know, when X was Twitter and it was quite fun before it became, you know, the cesspin it is now, but it's kind of like in amongst all of the sort of misogynistic comments. She also heard like comments from um like plastic surgery groups being like, Have you considered having lip filler? And sort of stuff like that. So she's having the worst, you know, it's the worst hangover of her life, and work says to her, You should probably go home. So she goes home, she needs her best friend, can't find her best friend anywhere. Her best friend's gone completely able, and eventually finds her best friend dead in the bath. Dark turn.
SPEAKER_02Um, but it's It was already pretty dark. And then I know I was like ripping through the pages.
SPEAKER_03How can I make this darker? But it was all to do with this podcast that I was listening to called Hidden Homicides, and it is basically about women who have been found dead and it's been ruled as an accident, even when the evidence is pointing to the fact that it is not an accident, it is murder, and it's you know, it's a lot of these women's families who are trying to fight for justice because they know that their daughter, their their sister has been murdered by a man, but for whatever reason the police have just passed it off as an accident. So this kind of becomes what Molly, the heroine, discovers is like she sort of pieces things together and she's like, the the police are like, oh, you know, she she was drunk, she fell asleep in the bath and she drowned. And she's like, that's not what she would, she would never do that. She would never get so drunk and get into a bath. And you know, the the bottle of wine they found next to the bath was like really cheap wine, and she's like, She'd never drink that.
SPEAKER_01So I'm my friend. She's a bougie bitch, okay.
SPEAKER_03She does not drink three dollar wine in the bath. That is detective work there. It is detective work, but because she's had this moment of going viral, the police do not take her seriously. Um so this is a standalone book. So I'm kind of looking to do, I guess, more stuff along those lines.
SPEAKER_00Mm-hmm.
SPEAKER_03With, you know, the the the book that I'm writing at the moment is called Date Night. And it's about a, I don't know how much I'm allowed to say about this. Uh let's just go for it anyway. Um so it's about it's about a British nanny who gets a job um working for a really wealthy couple in New York State. So it's a kind of um, it's a fictional town in West Westchester. She gets this job, and the couple are like, they've got some caveats. You know, it's kind of a bit billion dollar Nanese kind of vibes. And they've got some caveats to her to her contract. And one of them is that once a month she has to take their two children away to stay in like a super posh hotel for the night. Um and they call it date night. So she kind of at first thinks it's like, oh, they're they're swingers, you know, there's something sexy going on here, until she finds some blood, and then she realizes that actually what's happening is she's taking the kids out of the house and the couple are using this time to kill people.
SPEAKER_02Wow.
SPEAKER_01Oh, I cannot wait to read this.
SPEAKER_02It's so funny, Katie. All of your like plots, these books that you're describing are just exactly up Sydney's alley.
SPEAKER_03Like she she loves the murder you can laugh at kind of Yeah, and they are they're they're they're really the murders are kind of like they are pertinent and it's kind of that kind of you know, like what goes on behind the sort of white picket fences kind of thing. And it's Ellie, who is the nanny, kind of realizes that she's without realizing she's sort of feeding them their victims because she's going and talking to the nannies and she's coming back and she's gossiping over dinner about whose family's doing what, and um the couple are like Hmm. Wait, when is this book coming out? So this is scheduled for next summer. I don't have an exact date on it yet. I've just finished the first draft, so it's congratulations.
SPEAKER_02I think the pertinent question is can Sydney get her hands on it early? How can she really asking you?
SPEAKER_03Absolutely, absolutely you can. As soon as it's really funny because it's like I'll write a first draft and it's always like the second half of it is always much better because that's when I've got the voices of the characters and I know what's going on.
SPEAKER_01So Yeah, exactly. I do the same thing.
SPEAKER_03Then I'm having to go back and like rewrite a load of the the and sort of tie other things together, and it's like, you know, suddenly, just like suddenly you'll you'll kind of think of an amazing twist, and it's like, oh my god, I've got to get that in, and then you have to sort of go and weave it through the rest. And so I'm sort of at that stage at the moment. As soon as it's at a stage where my editor is happy with it, I will I will get you an early copy, no problems at all. But um I'm really excited about it, and I've had it's it's fun for me because it's it's something I I s really struggled at first, I think, because I've been in Kitty's head for so long. Writing someone else has been quite difficult and she's completely different, you know, she's very, very different character to Kitty. But the moment I sort of, I think I was about probably two-thirds of the way through the book before I finally sort of nailed her voice, and I was like, this is her, this is who she is, and that moment is just, you know, it's great when that, you know, you have the oh. I love that feeling.
SPEAKER_02Yeah.
SPEAKER_03It's such a good feeling.
SPEAKER_02Yeah, I've walked around in a daze after having that feeling where I was just. Yeah, I did it finally. I wrote two-thirds of the book first, but now I have now I know what I am doing with it.
SPEAKER_03Yeah. So it's um I always like everyone always says that the first draft is like like over here, it's like oh the shit draft, it's the shit draft. But I like to call it the discovery draft. Oh, that's so nice. I love that.
SPEAKER_02That's I call it the vomit draft.
SPEAKER_03That's also that's not quite so romantic, is it?
SPEAKER_02No. I think yours is yours is very kind.
SPEAKER_03Yes, yes. But it is, it is the vomit draft. It it is the you know, you're just vomiting ideas all over the place. And it's like some of them stick, some of them slide off like vomit.
SPEAKER_02Let's say yeah, let's let's get in there. Let's describe it. We're all right right here.
SPEAKER_03I'm really going with that metaphor there. Yeah.
SPEAKER_01The chunky, clunky sentences need to be sloughed again.
SPEAKER_02I'll just say, as a perfectionist, getting mean about the first draft actually helps me. Because if I call it vomit, then anything that's bad, it was never meant to measure up. It's okay. I can just pass it off. It's alright. That first two-thirds of the book where the care main character doesn't sound like themselves.
SPEAKER_03Yeah.
SPEAKER_02You know, but it's not a I like Discovery Draft too. I think it's kinder, and maybe as I get further in my career, I'll just I'll start being kinder to myself and start.
SPEAKER_03Be kind be kinder, be kinder. And also it's like I think you're discovering a lot of so this at the moment I've realized that I've written like so many side characters, and I'm like, I don't need any of them. So all of these guys go. Not go. But then nothing's ever wasted because you can always, you know, you can keep these people for later books and things like that. That's the other thing about a vomit slash discovery slash shit draft is that you know it's never wasted. You can you can you learn from it, but you can also use it in in other stuff later on.
SPEAKER_01So I love that. Well, Katie, thank you so much for coming on here and talking with us. Thank you for writing a book for women and empowering us. And if you want to read Katie's books, you can go to our page at bookshop.org where it supports any bookstores, and we have a list of all of our guest books. We'll have all of Katie's books there. Just thank you again, and hopefully we can talk to you soon on your next book that I am so excited about to read.
SPEAKER_03I mean, I'm really excited about it, Son. It's like, you know, sometimes when you write something and it's like you get the tingles. Yes.
SPEAKER_01Yeah. You got the tingles? Nice.
SPEAKER_03I've got the tingles. There was a certain bit that I was writing recently, and I got the goosebumps on my arms, and I was like, oh, that's a good skill. So happy. Yes. And it's horrible because this is another thing about women. It's like, it's, it's, I feel like we always like we try to be modest, don't we? And we're like, oh, well, you know, it's just, you know.
SPEAKER_01Don't be modest. Just tell us.
SPEAKER_03We should be like, no, it's good. And I'm I'm enjoying it. It's great. And it gave me goosebumps.
SPEAKER_02And I'm And it's gonna give you goosebumps. Yeah.
SPEAKER_01It's gonna give everyone goosebumps. Thank you for listening to Page Fright, and we will see you back here next week. You didn't say like and subscribe.
SPEAKER_02Oh, like and subscribe!
SPEAKER_01You just listened to Page Fright. Don't forget to like and subscribe and write to us at pagefrightcontact at gmail.com.
