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The cold crept inside the body’s outermost parts first.
Thank you so much for reading THE HERD and for sharing your thoughts with other passionate bookworms! It’s been a joy to connect with people over this book. I hope you enjoy these annotations as much as I enjoyed writing them! I addressed popular highlighted Kindle passages, as well as responses to some of the questions I get most often...with a few fun facts thrown in for good measure. Thank you again, and if you enjoyed THE HERD, I hope you’ll check out THE LOST NIGHT, my debut thriller (pitched as THE GIRL ON THE TRAIN meets HBO’s Girls) andl keep an eye out for my new thriller, WE WERE NEVER HERE, out July 13, 2021—it’s about two globe-trotting best friends whose friendship is stretched to the limit after they kill a backpacker in self-defense on a trip through Chile. Okay, let’s do this!
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Kara Reynolds
They say anything frozen, in theory, could last forever. Beauty may be fleeting, the smooth skin and shiny hair of youth giving way to crinkles and crags, to thin, dingy locks. Taut thighs plumping out or growing weak and scrawny. But not this body. The subzero air surrounding every inch of it assured total preservation. A stopping of time.
When I was playing around with title ideas, I thought about calling this book SELF-PRESERVATION, a theme that comes out in many ways: frozen bodies, frozen assets, Gleam beauty products that are supposed to halt signs of aging and preserve youthfulness, and of course, all the lengths the people of the Herd (and their loved ones) go to to maintain their dignity, their freedom, and the appearance of success. It’s exhausting, the way women in particular are supposed to keep it all together and never break a sweat!
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My body tensed before I knew what I was seeing: strobes of red and blue, the universal sign of an emergency. I paused and squinted at the squad car across the street, its lights flashing, eerier for the lack of a siren. I breathed deeply, commanded my chest to relax.
At the risk of being called “hysterical,” women are taught from a young age to regulate their emotions. I wanted to start THE HERD with a burst of cortisol and adrenaline—familiar to everyone but especially women—and then have Katie quickly force it down.
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In the dim bar, Eleanor expertly commandeered two stools. The hook placement under the bar meant I had to straddle my laptop bag, and the chair’s dimensions were a poor fit, the lower dowel too high for my heels. I flopped around as Eleanor sat like a damn queen, smiling from her throne until the bartender approached.
The Herd came out on March 24, 2020—right in the first wave of shutdowns. I had no idea that so many of the scenes—drinking champagne in a crowded bar, sipping coffee at a bustling coworking space, attending a glitzy press conference at a restaurant—would feel so foreign by the time the book came out!
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Together, we gazed out at Eleanor and Daniel’s townhouse. The curtains were drawn across the bay window, with a strip of yellow light leaking through. They’d bought the place shortly before their wedding, and while it probably looked charming on normal evenings, tonight it was all angles and peaks, a haunted house.
Part of the fun of writing this book was subverting our notion that beautiful = safe (after all, it doesn’t get much prettier than the Herd’s airy interior). Here, a Brooklyn townhouse lauded for its beauty in an earlier chapter feels creepy and menacing.
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BIG NEWS I COULDN’T BE MORE THRILLED TO SHARE
In 2018, I was in a long-reads club—like a book club, only we read long-form articles—and one month we read a piece about an all-girls Adventure Camp. In the ensuing discussion, a friend talked about being forced to attend a co-ed ropes course in middle school and how her entire goal was to get through it without humiliating herself. I combined those two ideas into Eleanor’s blog post here (so, ironically, both tidbits are “borrowed”!).
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Eleanor doesn’t have more secrets than the woman who posts four hundred times a day. She just invests less time in hiding them.”
This is a popular highlight and it’s something I think about often: Social media accounts are curated, even when the poster’s “brand” is authenticity and realness, showing their #nomakeup selfies or screaming kids or messy kitchens. We’re always choosing to show our lives in a certain light!
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Why does thank you so often throw on a suit and stand in for fuck you?
This is the most-highlighted line in the book, which cracks me up. My Midwestern family hates how many swears my books contain, but this is how New Yorkers talk (and think)! The narrator of my next book, We Were Never Here, is from Minneapolis and lives in Milwaukee, so she swears FAR less often.
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“She gets shit done, so I can’t blame her for being controlling. When you’re dependable, everyone depends on you.”
I enjoyed switching back and forth between brash, outspoken Katie and mature, conscientious Hana because I vacillate between those two extremes myself; most women will recognize the urge to grab the spotlight and make everyone laugh, but also to be the organized, in-control grownup in high-stakes situations.
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Feeling like you don’t know what the F you’re doing shouldn’t trigger shame. It means you’re challenging yourself—stretching, learning, and growing. And that’s something to be proud of.
For the record, this entire chapter is TRUE! The researchers who brought us “impostor syndrome” really did recant their work. Stop calling it a syndrome! It’s just called being a human!
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He reminded me of the Cambridge cop who’d wandered over when, senior year, a bouncer with white dreadlocks had refused to believe my driver’s license was real. Mikki and Eleanor had made a scene, jabbing their fingers in his face as tears coated my eyes, until the officer had intervened and snatched the ID from the bouncer’s hand. Mikki and Eleanor had been so relieved—finally, an authority figure to set things straight—and their faces crumpled as the cop snorted, This is obviously fake and folded my (state-issued) Michigan driver’s license in his fist.
I had hesitations about writing a character who’s a woman of color, but I also didn’t want an all-white cast—and I wanted the opportunity to show how the Herd’s purported push for diversity and inclusion didn’t always pan out. I tried to infuse Hana’s chapters with observations, calculations, microaggressions, and things she has to think about that others don’t. This particular anecdote is something that happened to a Black classmate and friend when we were undergrads at Northwestern.
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As I headed for the bathroom, I paused outside Hana’s bedroom, and my eyes fell on the scrap of paper on her bureau. The note she’d mentioned, the numbers scribbled on top. It definitely hadn’t been on Eleanor’s big desk as Daniel unlocked the drawer below. Another memory, an echo of dialogue that I’d tucked away for later: Tuesday night, while the three of us were still panicking in the hallway of a tapas restaurant, Mikki had said, Who has Daniel’s number? and Hana had raised her hand and dialed confidently. Why did Hana even have him in her contacts? A thought like a whisper: What else are
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Because the book alternates between Katie’s and her sister’s points of view, we, the readers, can interpret conversations and expressions with context the characters themselves lack. I had fun playing with their suspicion of one another and having them misinterpret things (such as Hana later finding the folder of info about Eleanor in Ted's backpack).
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read it over one more time, although by now I could recite it by heart. The same page had been showing up in my own mailbox for a full year now. With practiced hands, I ripped it in two and rolled the first into a tight cigarette. I crossed the kitchen and turned the stove on, four even clicks and then the boorrsshh of a blue flame. As I had with three blackmail notes before it, identical but for the deadline at the top and the name on the envelopes they arrived in, I burned its halves one after the other.
I was SO SHOCKED when I wrote this! I had no idea! I love when my characters surprise me!
But a herd’s primary purpose is to keep the highest percentage of its members alive. Evolution doesn’t care about the individual, about survival of the least-fit. We team up for the most selfish reason possible: self-preservation.
I named the space “the Herd” because of the H-E-R wordplay, and I vaguely thought I’d eventually bring up the idea of “herd mentality,” or “thinning the herd.” I really didn’t consider the evolutionary biology piece until I wrote this line. But it’s true! Herds DGAF about the individual. When a lion is in hot pursuit, every member of a herd is just trying to outrun another herd member.
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IF STEVE WERE EVE: LANDMARK MOMENTS FROM THE CAREER OF APPLE FOUNDER EVE JOBS
A few readers have been like “WTF is this doing here?”, but it’s one of my favorite parts of the book. I like using ephemera to play with the narrative’s pacing, and I had too much fun writing this—all of the anecdotes about Steve Jobs are 100% real. But more importantly, I wanted to illustrate the theme that male CEOs can get away with all sorts of behavior that we’d consider grounds for resignation in women.
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I sat cross-legged and picked up a yearbook. Eleanor’s senior year, her photo bright-eyed and lovely. Below it, her chosen quote was from (who else?) Frida Kahlo: “I often have more sympathy for carpenters, cobblers, etc., than for that whole stupid, supposedly civilized herd of windbags known as cultivated people.”
I came across this excellent quote on a trip to Mexico City when I was almost done with a draft of this book. It's fitting, no?
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“If anything, I’ve always been jealous of how you can march to the beat of your own drum,” I added. Hana nodded. “You don’t need anyone’s approval, and meanwhile I’m constantly trying to talk people into loving me.” “Same here,” I said. “Only I’m trying to…impress them into loving me.” I rubbed my palm against Mikki’s back and she jumped, then looked up and gave us both a small smile. “Thanks. Sometimes I convince myself I’m the only one who feels like she’s faking it.”
This exchange is very important to me. I wanted all the main characters to have very different approaches to succeeding in a man’s world—basically, they all make a choice of whom they need to impress to be worthy, to be loved, to be acceptable women in a man’s world.
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“I’m not ready to be alone,” I said. Katie nodded. “Alone on Christmas Eve—it’s just too much. I know we’re not about to salvage the holiday, but I’d be down to order takeout and zone out to some bad TV.” “We could still try for Italian,” I suggested. “Our original plan from last week. Mikki, can we come over?” She shrugged and said sure.
It took me so many rewrites to get the choreography of the climax at Mikki’s apartment right. I had all of these revelations lined up and ready to go off like grenades with the pins pulled, but I kept rearranging the order. My very first draft led to a big police interview scene where the perp walked the cops through everything, but my editor rightfully called that scene cheating. So I had to take all the revelations and insert them into this section in ways that felt reasonable, with Katie and Hana separately making important discoveries—and finding themselves in danger as a result.
women unfairly can’t own up to their shit because they’re punished so harshly for not being perfect. Men can fuck up and move on, but not women. If you’re a woman, you’re always one mistake away from being worthless again. You go through life waiting for everything to be taken away, bending over backward trying to prove your worth, driving yourself crazy trying to get everyone to like and respect you.
I wish we lived in a world where women could “fail up” like men and keep getting the benefit of the doubt—and new chances to prove themselves! But in the corporate world, it really does feel like women face a one-strike-and-you’re-out policy.
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It was a woman’s voice, an adult, and she appeared above me with a phone pressed to her ear, and I pointed a shaking hand at the back of my head, sucked cold air into my lungs, and said the one word I’d been unable to utter for months: “Help.”
This is a tiny line but one I love—it gets at the idea that, as women, we’re taught that it’s weak or needy or unbecoming to express our shortcomings and ask for help. Some readers have complained that nothing that happens in the book would’ve happened if all the women had just been forthcoming with each other. Which is true...but that’s also the point! We bite our tongues and put on happy faces, and bad things come from that.
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“Here’s to a happier 2020,” it read. “Meeting you was a bright spot in an otherwise shit year.”
Ha, poor Bradley sisters! They have no idea what the new year will hold.
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EPILOGUE Karen sat in the kitchen, a fluffy white robe tied around her, practical cork-bottomed slippers on her feet.
I had the idea for this prologue and this final, effed-up twist at the very last minute, when I’d finished the rest of the draft. Then I went back and wrote the prologue, knowing it would match up with the epilogue, but might SEEM, at first blush, to be about a certain body on a cold rooftop.
First and foremost, I’m so grateful to you, the reader. You walked around in my brain and let my words leave little fingerprints on your mind, and for an author there’s truly nothing more incredible. Of all the books in the world (and all the things you could do with your time), you chose to read this novel, and that means more to me than I can say. I hope something in it felt true to you. Thank you, thank you, thank you.
Thank you so much for reading THE HERD and taking a peek at my notes! It’s an honor. If your book club is discussing one of my books, please use the Contact Me form at andreabartz.com to send me your group’s burning questions—I’ll join via Zoom or make a personalized video answering them that you can play at your meeting. I also hope you’ll keep an eye out for WE WERE NEVER HERE, which comes out in July. Again, thanks so much, and happy reading!
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