Alexandra Andrews did not breeze into her second novel. She false-started it three times, wrote thousands of words she threw away, and stared into the white void of the blank page while two toddlers tore through a locked-down New York apartment with no childcare in sight. The result, eventually, was The Fine Art of Lying, a Reese's Book Club pick that Scarlett Johansson optioned before Andrews even sold the manuscript to a publisher.
But first came the wreckage.
The Three Novels She Abandoned
Andrews calls the process of writing her second book "horrific." After the success of Who Is Maud Dixon?, she had ideas, plural, and no ability to commit to any of them. "It's easy for me to come up with ideas," she says. "It's hard for me to commit to them."
So she started three different novels. Wrote huge chunks. Abandoned each one. COVID hit. The city emptied out. Schools closed. She had two kids under five and a looming deadline and no idea what the book was supposed to be about. Second-book syndrome arrived right on schedule.
"I started three different novels and wrote huge chunks of them and then abandoned them and didn't know what to do after that." Alexandra Andrews
What finally broke the paralysis was motherhood itself. Andrews kept circling the same question: what if you made a life-altering decision while you were out of your mind with exhaustion and isolation, the kind of decision that defined the rest of your life, but you weren't yourself when you made it? That became the seed. The art-world setting came later, after a visit to the Metropolitan Museum in 2021 when the galleries were packed and the streets were still empty and Andrews felt, viscerally, how much people need art when everything else has been stripped away.
She tells Olivia Ponton she never spoke to Margot Robbie about the Maud Dixon adaptation that never happened, which is "so frustrating." This time, when Reese Witherspoon's team reached out, Andrews was watching the Olympics. Her husband asked if Lindsey Vonn needed her leg amputated. She said no, Reese's Book Club just picked the book. He did not ask follow-up questions.
The Daughter Who Made Her Write
Andrews grew up on the Upper East Side and worked in advertising copywriting before she ever finished a novel. The idea of writing one felt "prohibitively daunting" until she met her husband, also a novelist, and realized: if a regular person can do something that seems impossible, maybe she could too.
But the real kick came when she got pregnant with her first child. She looked at the advertising job and thought: do I want my daughter to see me doing work I don't care about because I was too scared or too lazy to try the thing I actually wanted? The answer was no. So she quit and started Maud Dixon.
Now her daughter, who must be around eight, goes straight to the acknowledgments page of every book to make sure her name is there. "She's like, 'There I am,'" Andrews says. "She's great."
Andrews still reads two hours a day. She cannot sleep without reading first. She is currently working through Lily King's back catalog after arriving late to Euphoria, and she has a habit of obsessing over one writer and reading everything they've ever published in sequence. She did it with Kazuo Ishiguro. She's doing it now with King. She says Ishiguro's early novels are "so much weirder than you'd think."
She does not read many thrillers. "I feel like it's part of my job, and I don't want to do my job when I'm not doing my job."
Morally Gray Women (Because Writing Men Is Boring)
Both lead characters in The Fine Art of Lying are morally gray women: Claire, the young mother trapped in a gilded life she chose but does not want, and Florence, the art dealer with secrets to burn. Andrews says she finds the female experience "endlessly fascinating" and has no interest in writing male protagonists. "I don't think I can write a man," she says.
She also finds morally gray women more fun. In Maud Dixon, the character Helen was supposed to disappear early, but Andrews kept her around because "what she says is insane." In real life, Andrews tries to be polite and accommodating. On the page, she gets to be the person who says the worst possible thing.
"In my everyday life I try so hard to be polite and nice, but there's like a deep part of me that wants to be crazy and say the worst thing." Alexandra Andrews
She did worry Claire might be unlikable. The character cheats on a husband who is not a villain, just... not enough. He can give her the apartment, the stability, the life her own childhood lacked, but not the work or the autonomy she gave up to have it. Andrews wanted that tension to be complicated, not excusable. "If he was just a bad person, then she's allowed to cheat on him," she says. "I wanted it to be more complex than that."
Ponton, who read the book in a fugue state over two days, says she kept thinking: wait, five minutes ago you didn't care about him. That's the point. Claire's reckoning is not logical. It's the knock-on effect of a choice she made when she wasn't fully herself.
The Villain She Had to Rewrite
Andrews wrote an entire draft of The Fine Art of Lying with a different killer. Her agent read it and said: this feels redundant. So she started over. The new villain changed everything, but it took Andrews months to work out the mechanics. She worried the final reveal was too complicated, that readers would get lost in the details of who knew what when.
She was wrong. The twist lands. The pacing is relentless. The art-world backdrop (a composite of the real MoMA and fictional artists, including the invented minimalist Blake Whipple, who replaced the real Agnes Martin because Martin's paintings are too big to steal) gives the whole thing a gloss of insider plausibility. A gallerist friend told Andrews: the stories you hear about this industry are insane. It is unregulated. This stuff happens all the time.
Andrews does not use Post-its or plot boards. She keeps messy lists in notebooks. Ideas for twists arrive mid-to-do-list: "Gabriel embezzling question mark." Then she has to figure out if she can fit it in, and if not, find a different idea. It's like a jigsaw puzzle until suddenly it isn't.
Scarlett Johansson's production company optioned the book before publication. Andrews learned via a call from her agent, the same way she learned Margot Robbie wanted Maud Dixon. She has trained herself not to get too excited. Hollywood, she says, is a place where you can never bet on anything. Maud Dixon was supposed to be a movie, then a limited series. Neither happened. So she is thrilled about the Fine Art of Lying adaptation and also deliberately not thinking about it.
What's Next: No Bodies
Andrews told her agent the third book will not be a thriller. Her agent said okay. Andrews is not sure she believes herself. "I said that about the second book too, and sometimes I just can't resist putting in a body."
Right now she thinks it will be historical fiction. She is excited to do research again, to have structure and facts and quotes, the way she did when she was a journalist. Writing a thriller in a white void, with no scaffolding, sometimes feels like being in the white room from The Good Place. Research is a reprieve. If the writing is hard, she can read. She can take notes. She can keep moving.
She is also reading 4000 Weeks by Oliver Burkeman, a time-management book about how you want to spend the finite hours of your life, and finding it "very inspiring." Ponton, 24 and not pregnant, says she still thinks about questions like that all the time. Andrews nods. "You have this number of hours. What do you want to do with them? What's important to you? And live accordingly."
It is advice she followed when she quit copywriting. It is advice that got her through three failed novels and a pandemic and a book that is now, against the odds, a Reese pick and a Scarlett Johansson project and the thing people Google when they want to know what happens when a thriller writer writes herself into a corner and has to start over.
She did it. She just had to throw out 60,000 words first.