This piece originally appeared on Shondaland.

Laura Lippman, the prolific crime novelist whose latest book, Prom Mom, is released on July 25, taught me the importance of reading the acknowledgments. To promote her previous novel, 2021’s Dream Girl, Lippman talked on a podcast about a novel called Heritage that influenced her claustrophobic meta tale of a writer who is being stalked. It sounded interesting, so I spent weeks trawling Goodreads trying to find this elusive out-of-print novel about a young novelist growing increasingly obsessed with her editor. Lo and behold, when I read Dream Girl a few weeks after listening to the podcast and reached Lippman’s acknowledgments, she spelled out that her inspiration was, in fact, A Novel Called Heritage by Margaret Mitchell Dukore — not a novel titled Heritage (face-palm).

So, when I got my hands on Prom Mom, you better believe I made a beeline for the acknowledgments this time, and I’m glad I did because Lippman lists the podcast You’re Wrong About and its host, Sarah Marshall, as big motivations for the developments of Prom Mom.

Lippman was inspired by a 2020 episode of the show about the 1990s sensationalism of teens who hid their pregnancies (either knowingly or unaware), gave birth at the prom, and promptly returned to the dance floor in a state of denial. Via Twitter, where many long-distance friendships germinate in our current age, Lippman and Marshall became friends and during Covid had meandering phone conversations while going on physically solitary walks.

“I’m friends with people who I’m basically old enough to be their mom! I’m definitely old enough to be Sarah’s mom,” Lippman tells Shondaland from her home in Baltimore, where many if not all of her 25 novels (as well as several short story and essay collections) are set. “I have a lot of friends in their 20s and 30s and 40s, and I’m 64. I feel that has been one of the most positive things I’ve ever done because it keeps me in touch with things. So when I’m writing a novel like Prom Mom where the characters are significantly younger than I am, I don’t worry about that.”

Presumably, the Covid-set phone calls between two of the characters in Prom Mom in tandem in their cars were inspired by Lippman’s calls with Marshall, but Lippman says she actually drew from a friend’s affair that occurred during the early days of the pandemic. “I don’t think he knows that!” she exclaims.

“I’m fascinated by people who, in the middle of a pandemic, would be like, ‘Yeah, I can have an affair,’” Lippman continues, adding how the human condition will rationalize just about anything when it comes to obtaining what we think we deserve, which is what we come to find out about Nice Guy™ Joe, one of three protagonists in Prom Mom, who “can justify pretty much anything he does.”

Lippman says, “I believe that people who identify as good are the worst people in the world! As soon as you’re like, ‘I’m good,’ I’m nervous about you.” It’s Joe’s wife, Meredith, a plastic surgeon who does humanitarian work in Guatemala and always reads the book for book club, as Lippman describes her, who scares her the most: “Meredith is the most terrifying person in the book because we agree on so many things!”

And then, there’s Amber, the titular prom mom who returns to her hometown, Baltimore, having fled decades ago, post-juvenile detention for allegedly killing the baby she gave birth to at the prom, whose father was Joe. “I have the most empathy for Amber,” Lippman says, but “those three people — ugh!”

This is not the only time Lippman has written about the taboo topic of alleged infanticide. Her first stand-alone novel outside of the Tess Monaghan detective series that kept Lippman busy (literally, as she wrote the series’ initial seven books while working full-time as a journalist at The Baltimore Sun) for much of the 1990s and early 2000s, Every Secret Thing, was about two 11-year-old girls who kill a baby, which her publisher and agent tried to dissuade her from writing about.

“If I were the kind of writer who was extremely calculating, I wouldn’t have written this book. No one wants to read about Covid; dead-baby stories are not good,” she says.

“[Every Secret Thing was] not a Tess book because it’s not about Tess. One thing that some crime novelists don’t really talk about is that when you have these serious protagonists, the books are always about them and not about the victims or the people affected. It’s about how the crime affected the investigator. I love those books too, but I feel like sometimes it’s more important [to focus on] the people who were directly affected by it. To write about two 11-year-old girls who kill a baby and have it be a Tess novel — no, it needs to be about them. What happened to them? And what happened to the mother of the child who died? Those are the people who matter.”

The reason Lippman hasn’t returned to Tess Monaghan since 2015 is twofold: Firstly, Lippman’s imagination “got a lot darker,” creating the likes of Amber, Joe, and Meredith, who “don’t fit the series.” Secondly, reflecting on what happened in Lippman’s own life when she became a mother at 51, the writer thought it would be “funny” to give Tess a baby herself, which immediately lowered the stakes as to what risks a detective could feasibly take. “I feel she has a responsibility as a mother and a spouse to be very careful, which is anathema to a suspense novel,” Lippman says. Tess Monaghan fans, never fear, though: Lippman foresees a trilogy to wrap up the PI’s story. “I just don’t know what they are yet.”

Lippman does know what her follow-up to Prom Mom is, though, which she’s currently writing. “After writing this book, I needed to write a book about someone super-nice.” Enter: Mrs. Blossom, a minor character from the Tess Monaghan series. Inspired by the 1963 movie Charade and the 1967 children’s book From the Mixed-Up Files of Mrs. Basil E. Frankweiler, the as-yet-untitled cozy mystery is described by Lippman as being about “this almost-70-year-old widow who’s gone on her first European vacation, and she somehow gets mixed up in this search for a missing Pakistani sculpture, an antiquity that should be repatriated, that went missing from a Baltimore museum years ago and is now believed to be somewhere in her proximity.“What I really wanted to write about is the possibilities of late life,” Lippman continues, saying she has “a responsibility to savor life” for her older sister, who has Parkinson’s and lives in a nursing home. She’s one of the reasons, along with Lippman’s 92-year-old mother, who is a resident of a continuing care community, Lippman has to stay in the U.S. despite “multiple moments — usually after mass shootings” but also in the wake of the overturning of Roe v. Wade, which one can’t help but be reminded of when reading Prom Mom — when she has considered leaving. Though Lippman, who is “not a prescient person,” she says, wasn’t conscious of the looming Supreme Court decision when she wrote Prom Mom, “maybe it was down there all along.”