Sara Gran: On Synchronicity, Girl Detectives, DIY Publishing, and Her New Book ‘Little Mysteries’
And why does life sometimes feel like we’re stuck in a mystery, with few clues and no solutions?
If you’ve ever wondered along these lines, Sara Gran’s new story collection is meant for you. (Yes, you.)
For more than two decades, Gran’s distinctive female protagonists have sought answers to the mysteries that haunt them: What is my purpose? What became of my best friend who vanished when we were teens? How do I get unpossessed by this goddamn demon? Gran’s latest book, Little Mysteries (Dreamland Books, 2025), further expands her universe of mystery-writing by paying homage to the stories that shaped her. Forms like Five-Minute Mystery and Choose Your Own Adventure are right at home in the table of contents, and classic influences like Nancy Drew and Miss Marple flicker in and out of the collection’s pages. Longtime Gran fans will also be pleased to reunite with beloved PI Claire DeWitt.
Gran’s writing swirls with an extraordinary alchemy of mystery and philosophy. In stories that both subvert and honor traditional genre expectations, Gran never turns away from hard questions, preferring instead to look the unknown right in its face. “The question is never Who did it?” Gran writes. “There’s always one question, and one question only: Who are you, and why are you here?”
The stories of Little Mysteries offer a profound reading experience—not just thanks to their writer’s skill on a sentence level, but also due to their deep resonance with our collective journey through this strange and mysterious thing called life. Yes, that’s it exactly, you might think as you look up from the book—laughing, with tears in your eyes. But how did she find those words?
I was delighted to speak with Gran about what detective stories mean and why we need them.
Abigail Oswald: Did you always want to write mysteries?
Sara Gran: I always wanted to write and I always liked mysteries. I think I always wanted to write a mystery in my heart of hearts, but it always sort of seemed not a path to go in. I published my first book in 2001, so I very much started my literary career in the ’90s, publishing a couple short stories and doing readings and stuff. Mysteries were still really looked down on then, kind of in the universe of romance novels or spy novels—pulp fiction. But then as I became more confident in my writing ability and in myself as a person, the idea of being a pulp fiction writer became way more appealing to me than being some fucking literary writer in New York going to book parties. And then at about that time, mysteries also were elevated in the public sphere. Sadly, the only pulp fiction outlet left is romance novels, which I love and admire, but I don’t know if I could write one.
AO: It’s been fascinating to watch the romance landscape evolve with the rise of self-publishing and social media. Romance writers really led the shift for the literary community in that regard.
SG: Yes, romance writers are the pioneers of self-publishing in terms of the technology and how to make it work. They are the ones who figured it all out for the rest of us, for sure.
AO: Little Mysteries is being published by Dreamland Books, the press you founded. Recently you sent out a newsletter asking some big questions about the mechanics of publishing and what it might look like if we did things differently. Why did you decide to start your own press, and what has that experience been like?
SG: I’ve always been a book person in addition to being a writer. Not every writer is. I’ve always collected books. I’ve always loved books as physical objects. I worked in bookstores for years and I always thought the book business was really interesting—both used and new. I used to sell rare books online. Some writers are only interested in the content of the book, which of course is totally fine. But that’s never been me. I’ve always been interested in the book as an object, and in publishing. So I’ve always had this dream of starting a publishing company. You know how you have your many versions of ideal lives? That was one of them. It wasn’t necessarily a realistic one. But it just started to make more and more sense to do it as a real thing at a certain point.
Most of my income comes from screenwriting and TV writing, and I was getting decent advances from publishers. I was one of the few people the system was kind of working for, but I just never really enjoyed the process. I don’t enjoy the culture of publishing, which is not a judgment. It’s just not an industry culture that works for me. Some writers, it’s fine for them and that’s great. Though, on the other hand, a lot of writers are really fucking unhappy. And like I said in my newsletter, I don’t understand why they don’t change things. I don’t understand why they don’t do what I did.
It does cost some money up front. And I think that’s part of the reason why. But then you have the potential to make more money. I have made about the same money I would have made going with a regular publisher. It has not been a huge bump or a huge drop in income. But I hope in the long term, it’s going to be a big bump in income. I think over a ten-year period, you’ll see a lot more money. But in that first year when you have all your expenses, the money’s about the same.
I’ve absolutely loved it. I mean, even the parts of it that I don’t like—the technical stuff, the production stuff—that’s a huge fucking drag for me. But is it more of a drag than sitting around waiting for someone at Random House to call you back? It is not.
And the whole book can be a creative piece. I’m in charge of the cover design. I’ve been working with a designer, but I’m learning how to do it myself because it’s another thing I’ve always wanted to do. Zoe Norvell is my cover designer. She’s amazing. She’s incredibly gifted. And she’s a great person because she works for all of the big publishing houses and will work for people like me and kind of treats everyone equally. She’s just wonderful. And she did the interior design, which I think she did a great job with as well. But yeah, to be able to have a vision for the entire book as a whole and how it’s presented to the world that is congruent with the contents is joyful for me.
AO: This collection is such a loving homage to the mystery genre. What do you think draws us to mystery stories?
SG: I think mysteries are a sort of machine for alleviating anxiety. There’s tension, tension, tension, and then there’s a resolution. And I think that’s true of genre in general. With things that stick to their genre, the more constrained genres, which are mystery and romance, I think—you know you’re going to get a certain ending. But then as a writer, of course, it’s incredibly fun to fuck with that expectation. And I really, really try, in every mystery that I write—a story or a book—to make sure that it obeys the conventions of a mystery novel, but also does it in a way that’s really unexpected. I don’t ever want people to be like, “Motherfucker! I wanted to know who did it, and now I don’t know.” But you never want to give people exactly what they want. That’s boring. If people knew what they wanted, why would they read a new book? They would just read the same book over and over again. No one knows what they actually want.
So I think there’s this anxiety issue. And I also think the idea of things having solutions is soothing. Most mysteries in life do not have solutions. We don’t know why we live. We don’t know why we die. In LA, we don’t know what’s going to happen tomorrow—we’re back on fire watch again. The whole city might burn down. We don’t know. So it’s nice to have this break from that, where you are going to get an answer. You are going to get a solution.
AO: Little Mysteries’s subtitle promises “Nine Miniature Puzzles to Confuse, Enthrall, and Delight.” I’m so enamored of this idea that we can call stories by other names, that language is a constantly shifting container full of possibilities. And then there’s the “Tool of Psychospiritual Divination” at the beginning—I got such a kick out of that.
SG: Thank you. Again, when you talk about having your own publishing company—to be able to make all those decisions was so much fun.
AO: There are definitely some fun experiments with form in these pages, like Five-Minute Mystery and Choose Your Own Adventure. How do you feel those forms have influenced you as a writer?
SG: When I was a little kid, I was very lucky, because my parents let me read almost everything. They were very neglectful in the best possible way. Like, “You’re reading a book, it’s fine.”
And I loved those Two-Minute Mysteries, Five-Minute Mysteries—I absolutely loved those. I loved doing the solutions upside down. I wanted to do it for this book, but the solutions were too long. It didn’t work out. And Choose Your Own Adventure is still the most exciting format in the world to me. I still want to write a book someday in the Choose Your Own Adventure format. I don’t know why more people haven’t done things with it. It’s rich with potential. Obviously the original books are silly and fun—they’re kids’ books, they’re appropriate for children. And a few people have done it for TV, but they haven’t done more for some reason. I think it’s an underexploited format.
AO: Do you think it has anything to do with the more logistical side of things? Ensuring that every thread tells a cohesive story seems a bit tricky.
SG: The math of it is super hard. The writing to me is the fun part, making sure they each form a story and go somewhere. But it’s really hard to make it all work and be like, wait, is page 15 actually page 20? But yeah, I think a lot more could be done with that.
I had written these things over the years, and then I realized, oh, they are an homage to the things that made me want to be a writer. I did not realize that at the time. It was only when I put them all together that I realized, ah, these are all the things that formed me.
AO: In the acknowledgements you thank the collective behind the Nancy Drew mystery series. I know when I was younger, I assumed that Carolyn Keene was just one incredibly prolific person, rather than a whole group of people writing under a penname.
SG: Me too. I think you were supposed to think that and we all bought it for a long time.
AO: Little Mysteries is chock-full of homage to the girl detective as a concept. How has Nancy Drew influenced your work?
SG: I was not a Nancy Drew reader growing up. I didn’t get them at all. They weren’t really part of my world. I grew up in New York City and they’re very suburban books. But now I definitely do appreciate them and enjoy them. And I think they were so in the air that even though there was no direct influence, everyone sort of understood the concept of this teenage upper–middle class girl. Her dad was a lawyer or something. And for some reason being isolated—there’s no other family, there’s no mother. It’s like the Murder, She Wrote question: Why are there so many fucking murders in your small town? What’s going on in this town? Why is Cabot Cove, Maine the murder capital of America? I should have included Agatha Christie in there too, because one of the stories is very much an homage to the Miss Marple stories.
AO: Another thing that interested me about Nancy and characters like her is that she never seems to age and so much of her little world stays the same. Girl detective forever. But she keeps solving these new mysteries.
SG: Yes. It’s this weird static never-changing suspension, almost like a Shangri-La. Like a spell has been cast over them in a fairy tale. They are just stuck in this town forever. And no one ages and nothing changes. But people keep getting murdered. The cyclic, repetitive nature of those stories was interesting to me. And it’s the same with all mystery series—again, Miss Marple, too. Why is there always a murder? Why is this the problem-solving tool people in your world are using? Do they not know that there are other ways to solve their problems? They always come back to murder in this weird little small town. Although I guess in Nancy Drew, they’re not always murders. They’re often just weird little crimes, now that I think about it.
AO: Your detective character, Claire DeWitt, explores all sorts of other possibilities for problem-solving…
SG: I think more and more over the years, she’s kind of grown disgusted with violence as a problem-solving tool. I think it’s a source of sadness and disappointment to her. Like, couldn’t you just make a phone call? And I think that does show through in the collection a bit—that she is growing weary of this. As we all should be.
AO: You’ve written three novels about Claire, and like you mentioned, she shows up again in the pages of Little Mysteries as well. How does it feel to write a recurring character, versus leaving a protagonist behind?
SG: It’s intense. It was one of the reasons why I started the series—I wanted to have that intense relationship where the character that you write changes as you change and you have a relationship with them as time goes on. It’s become harder as the years go on, for sure, because I’ve had so many changes in my life over the past few years. How does that reflect in the character while staying completely true to who the character is and completely true to who I am? It’s a tall order, but it’s a fun, interesting challenge to work on.
And I don’t want the books to be adapted. I worked on an adaptation for TV once and I was like, I never want to do this again because this character is so autobiographical. I really don’t want to hear anyone’s fucking opinion ever. I don’t want to have a conversation with anyone else about what they think the character might be like or what they would do, because it’s such a big part of me and I’m such a big part of the character.
AO: Can you say more about that resistance?
SG: When you work on TV or film, it’s always a collaborative situation. You’re one of ten or twenty people deciding what the story is going to be, even though no one wants to admit that or say it out loud. They’re like, “Oh, we’re just giving you a few notes.” They’re not just giving you a few notes, and it’s fine. You are, as a group—you, your producers, your studio, your network, your film studio, whoever—deciding what the piece of work is going to be. And I don’t want anyone’s opinion on this unless I’m really broke, in which case I will absolutely option it again. As I always like to say, sometimes in life what you need is money. At the moment, though, I am working and I do not need money. But yeah, it’s an intense and deeply rewarding relationship.
AO: It’s funny, I feel like I came to the Claire DeWitt books at just the right time in my life. One of those things where I’m not quite sure if I found them or they found me. The timing of it all was just so strangely serendipitous…
SG: I hear that from people a lot. I hear that from people all the time.
AO: Really?
SG: It’s interesting, because the books are about this mystery of synchronicity and timing. And I hear from people all the time… “I found the book in a weird way. I was having this weird time in my life and I was in a vacation rental and it was there with a bunch of old Bibles,” or whatever. And that makes me so happy. I’m glad it found you at the right time. I love hearing those stories.
AO: Has anything like that ever happened to you?
SG: Things like that happen to me all the time. I think if you make synchronicity the goal in life, you’ll get it, you know? I think that you don’t always get what you ask for in life, but some things you do. And synchronicity is one of those things. There’s a writer, Robert Anton Wilson. He was not a great novelist, but he was a great writer on magic and what he would call metaphysics, and a really, really great observer of how life works. And he wrote Cosmic Trigger—they’re big, fun, silly novels. It’s not my kind of thing. But he was a brilliant guy and kind of a hero of mine because he was incredibly open-minded, and he didn’t have any conclusions about what all of this stuff adds up to. I think that’s where you get into trouble. But he called it opening the doors of “chapel perilous.” Once you start fucking around with magic and synchronicities and these interesting things, if you kind of set those intentions, you don’t get to go back. So you open the doors and then that’s where you are.
AO: We’ve talked about this a little bit already, but how has your work in TV and film impacted your writing?
SG: The biggest way it’s impacted me is giving me the money to start my own publishing company. Like I said, it takes some money up front to hire a publicist and everything. Although there are ways to do it without money. You don’t have to hire a designer and a publicist and stuff like I did. So I don’t want people to think that’s a necessary fee for entry. You can do it for almost nothing if you want to. But I wanted to do it in kind of a fancy way and spend a lot of money. So that’s been the biggest way.
And again, the money just gives me the freedom to pursue my weird shit more than ever. It’s nice. I think the ways to make it as a writer are if you can make a fuck-ton of money writing your books, then you’re in that position. Or make less money and have your main source of income be something else. But money buys you freedom. Or it can. I mean, also a lack of desire for money can buy you freedom, right? I want to have a sort of middle-class lifestyle. I don’t want to be a wandering sadhu or a hermit who lives in a shed—although I’m sure those are awesome, maybe I will do that someday. But for now, I want a middle-class Los Angeles lifestyle. Screenwriting lets me do that. And then in my books, I can do whatever the fuck I want.
In terms of influencing the writing itself… not really. Like I said, what you do in Hollywood is collaborative. It’s just such a different thing. And I enjoy the collaborations in Hollywood too, because otherwise I’d end up spending literally all of my time alone, you know? So it’s fun to go into these group projects and know it’s a group decision and work with incredibly talented people like art directors and film directors and stuff. But that’s not writing. That’s more the social aspect of it.
AO: What’s a mystery that haunts you?
SG: Etan Patz.
In 1979, this six-year-old boy in New York City, his parents let him walk to the bus stop alone. Not a great decision, but of course what happened is not their fault. He left to go walk to the bus and was never seen again. There’s someone in prison for it now, but it’s really unclear what the evidence was. He confessed, but confessions are not evidence. So I don’t know.
And it gripped the city. Even more than true crime cases like JonBenét Ramsey or Scott Peterson—I mean, within the city of New York; I have no idea what the reach beyond that was. I was a little kid. I was born in ’71 and this was ’79. Everyone was gripped by it and continued to be gripped by it. And people my age still are. My mother was obsessed with it. We were both obsessed with it. And this was before true crime was really a genre. It was just a factor in life, because he just completely vanished.
I think you see that all over the Claire DeWitt books, with her friend just vanishing—this idea of someone just disappearing off the earth with no evidence. It’s so horrifying. And this was in SoHo, which wasn’t a good neighborhood or a bad neighborhood at the time. It was an empty neighborhood. It was not developed. It was just some artist lofts. It’s hard to explain to people now how many parts of New York City were just empty. The buildings were vacant. They were abandoned. So it was just this really, really empty part of New York City. And this kid was walking down the street, and he should have been fine, and he just disappeared.
Like I said, someone has since been arrested for it—just recently, within the past ten years. But it’s very unclear why this person was arrested and imprisoned for it. It doesn’t make sense to me at all. Although there could have been things that they held back from the press to make sure that more people don’t come forward. I just don’t know and didn’t understand it.
AO: It sounds like we know how it impacted you creatively, but how do you feel like that impacted you personally?
SG: Everyone in every sort of middle-class family in New York City, their parents had the talk with them. “If someone asks you to go in a car, if you’re ever in danger, if you see someone…” For kids of my generation, it was our big awareness that anything could happen at any moment. We all knew about normal street crime. That was a part of life. You knew that there were random people on the street who might mug people or pick your pocket. That was a big thing back then. But the idea that there was this other… Although at the time, of course, as children, we didn’t understand that. So it was nebulous. It was mysterious. Your parents didn’t want to tell you, “Well, someone will kidnap you because they want to fuck you and murder you.” Like, you don’t say that to a kid—that’s disgusting, right? So it was this big unspoken mystery as to why someone would steal a child.
AO: I have such a complicated relationship with true crime. I don’t know if I necessarily feel good about my consumption of it, but I’m so drawn to mysteries, and true crime offers these real-world examples of mysteries… so I continue.
SG: It’s tricky. I grew up watching Unsolved Mysteries, the TV show with Robert Stack, which I still watch all the time. It is still an obsession. Just that theme music is so exciting to me. And things were different then, because it wasn’t this huge industry. Most of the people who were on it chose to be on it. The families would reach out to Unsolved Mysteries and say “Hey, we need help.”
AO: Yes! It feels like a phenomenon borne of the monoculture, with fewer channels on TV and so many people watching the show. It was almost like watching mysteries get solved in real time, and you as a viewer got to be part of it.
SG: They had a phone number to call. And what was cool about that show was a mix of true crime stuff, historical stuff, and paranormal stuff. So really the concept of a mystery, now that I think about it, that very much defined my concept of a mystery, right? The unknown things that we cannot understand.
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Sara Gran is the founder of Dreamland Books and the author of seven previous novels, including Come Closer and the Claire DeWitt Series, and most recently The Book of the Most Precious Substance. Little Mysteries is her first collection of short stories.
