Kepnes acknowledges that for SEO purposes one-word titles aren’t ideal, especially not one of the world’s most common words. In true deadbeat-dad style, Joe runs away to the Pacific Northwest in book three, You Love Me, which Kepnes says was supposed to be the collective title of the trilogy up to that point, but a Judd Apatow Netflix series threw a spanner in the works and forced Kepnes to change the name of the sophomore novel to Hidden Bodies. Now that’s going to be one effed-up kid if he’s ever privy to who his father is. Love is one of the only, erm, love interests who get away, but not before she and Joe have a baby together. Hidden Bodies is the next entry in the series and follows Joe to Los Angeles, where he meets and falls in love with Love, a bougie grocery store chain heiress. “I had to go back in and really kill Guinevere Beck, and it was really painful, like I was killing my new best friend,” Kepnes says of her reluctance to end Beck’s story line. Penn Badgley stars as Joe Goldberg in Netflix’s You. The events of You follow New York City bookseller Joe Goldberg as he meets, falls in love with (to the extent that a sociopath can), entraps in his infamous glass cage, and kills Guinevere Beck, a somewhat aimless and entitled writing grad student herself but one who didn’t deserve to die.

Writing was a coping mechanism of sorts, and Kepnes enjoyed writing the first book, simply entitled You (which was optioned for the Lifetime-turned-Netflix series of the same name), so much that she knew she had to write another one.

“Whether you lose someone suddenly or know they’re going to die, it’s their absence in the months after that’s this hollow shock that you can’t be prepared for - someone that’s been speaking to you since you were in the world to no longer be reaching out to you,” Kepnes tells Shondaland. Her father was dying of cancer, and she wanted to create a character she knew would appeal to his dark sense of humor and who would be a balm to Kepnes and her family when they ultimately lost her father. Kepnes first conceived of Joe 10 years ago after writing for entertainment magazines and a stint as a screenwriter for 7th Heaven and The Secret Life of the American Teenager. In the latest entry in Caroline Kepnes’ You series, For You and Only You, out April 25, Joe Goldberg takes that phrase literally when the former bookseller turned serial killer tries his hand at writing a novel after he somehow gets into a prestigious MFA program at Harvard, because Joe is nothing if not an upward failure.īut let’s backtrack a bit. “Kill your darlings” is a mantra for writers whereby they take the proverbial red pen to characters, plots, paragraphs, and lines that no longer serve the story arc.

Caroline kepnes you series book 4