Sophia Lambton reached out to me, a book reviewer, to review the first book in her series, The Crooked Little Pieces. Researching Sophia for one of my CLP reviews, I found out that she also writes music critiques, which at the time, my son, a frequent concert-goer, thought he might also like to try his hand at, and I asked for her advice. We struck up a correspondence that has grown into a friendship.  

Sophia has also published a consummate biography of Maria Callas, and September 2025 saw the release of The Crooked Little Pieces: Volume 5. (The interview has been edited for brevity).

Do you write with appeal in mind? That is, do you think about what people want to read? How do you decide what subject to write about?

I don’t write with this in mind, but I also don’t write with a view to counteracting it. I’m quite neutral. I’m not one of those artists who’s all about what I do with myself. My fiction comes from my own very intense emotional reactions either to stories or to real people and my immediate feeling is that I want to share this story or this character with the world. That’s the same feeling you get when you meet someone wonderful in life; you want to tell your friends or your child or your lover. It’s the same feeling, just in a different medium. It is an innate belief that people care but of course not everyone’s going to care. It’s an intrinsic belief, I think shared by most artists out there, except for very fringe or niche ones, who don’t care about connecting with readers.

How would you describe the relationship between the sisters in CLP?

I think the negativity of their relationship comes from the fact that they are very alone in the world. Basically they have an unloving mother who’s crazy, their father dies… so they find themselves at a young age moved to a different country which also doesn’t help. They grew up speaking different languages. Isabel spoke German and Anneliese spoke Dutch with her father, so their relationship was much more fraught than it otherwise would have been if they’d grown up in a loving family, if their father had survived, if they hadn’t had to move countries, or had moved even younger, so they’re really scared of being alone and that prompts the insecurity, the lack of understanding between them. Instead of thinking, “I need to be patient and understanding of my sister,” it’s this defensive instinct of “yeah, I don’t get this and you’re upsetting me, so I don’t want to think about it” which is what we do when we don’t want to be hurt. This just occurs to me: they’re sisters. They know the other isn’t going anywhere. Between friends or lovers, there’s doubt the relationship will be sustained so you put in more effort. In a family, no one’s going anywhere. There are patterns in any relationship that reoccur over time. They’re stubborn and afraid to find out something about the other they won’t relate to, which will make them feel insecure, alone, misunderstood, but they also mature to a point where they care less about how different they are. They grow up in their own lives. Now that we’re approaching the release of volume five, they’re at a point where they don’t take their differences personally. They’re independent and stronger.

There seems to be a reason there are two women, two focal points to the story and not one, is that true?

I think that’s more a narrative mark than it is commentary on their relationship because I prefer to have different characters and different relationships in my sagas; it allows me to switch the moods, especially when Anneliese is with Charles Anthony [her patient] and Isabel is leading choir sessions [at the girls’ school where she teaches music]. That gives me an opportunity to explore light and dark more than if there were just one. I’ve written this saga and am writing a current one in a way that gives me huge opportunities to find out what’s going to happen next. If you have three central characters, what’s the most that can happen without introducing natural disasters or something? Introducing an ensemble cast helps me navigate between physical and emotional landscapes and also prolongs the tension.I prefer anthologies where the story is told through several people’s minds. Diverse characters give me the richness I like. I didn’t set out to write a sister saga. I write relationship sagas, primarily romantic relationship sagas, where there’s a lot of drama around that. And it was when I got interested in creating a separate relationship that I decided to give Isabel, who was the second sister, a whole massive arc. At the very beginning, she was just a sister, not meant to be at the forefront. But I’m so glad I did put her there, otherwise it would have been a completely different saga.

Are the places, the book’s settings, background and context, or do they relate directly to the books’ point?

The places inform the story because of their ambiences, the pace of the city. In the upcoming story, Isabel takes the girls to Venice and Venice is claustrophobic, very small; there are legends about it, fears of it sinking… I choose the places because I know they’ll match the story. I don’t choose them just because they’re beautiful scenes on a postcard. For instance, I originally had the idea of Isabel taking the girls to Lisbon, but I went there and I didn’t like it at all. I didn’t see how it would connect to the story. I scrapped that plan. I don’t have to love the places that are settings. They have to match a mood or be responsible for a turning point of the story. It is tremendous fun to research the settings.

New York had that effect in the last story. It was so much fun.

Yes, it brought out the freedom in both Isabel and Richard [her boss]. She needed to travel. Anneliese doesn’t need to go anywhere. It’s a characterization. She’s science-based. She might read a novel over watching a movie or a tv show. She’s not interested in the excitement of New York, so why would I move her around? I come at a place from a characterization perspective; it’s about me finding out who these people are, and that is a lot of fun.

Talk about Charles Anthony, a patient of Anneliese’s. Is he crazy? What draws you to him?

He’s not crazy because he knows what he’s doing. His daughter is crazy. She’s schizophrenic. Everything depends on the backdrop of the novel, and I prefer dramatic backdrops like the opera. And in opera, killing is par for the course. I’m not writing a dark Stephen King novel about psychological mania. Charles Anthony describes himself as a Romantic hero. He is trying to rid society of scourges. But, of course he’s morally grey to the reader. As long as there’s logic, as long as someone isn’t sadistically taking pleasure in someone else’s pain, then I can understand that fictional character. But everything depends on the gestalt or zeitgeist, the shape or feel of the book. In the current saga, I don’t have anyone like Charles Anthony. He grows up around a lot of violence. It is more normal for Anneliese [and the rest of the cast] than for a lot of modern readers who’ve not known world wars or civil wars. I find it interesting to explore a situation where someone might kill under adverse or extreme situations. I’m giving multiple answers here. What kind of story is it? Operatic. What kind of time period is it? A war time. Not our time of preventative measures. It is a period with more death. It’s less shocking for them than for us.

I’m interested in people in extreme situations because that’s where truth is exposed. You and I don’t know how we’d react in extreme situations. We live in very sheltered times, where we are geographically and financially stable, for the most part. Many places around the world, there’s unprecedented comfort, and that may lead to people maturing far more slowly and coming into themselves far more slowly. I’m not saying people should be subjected to terrors or killing or physical suffering, but there isn’t as much of a fear of mortality, which kids growing up around a war did. I don’t know that I’ll ever write about today because the stakes aren’t high enough. Yes, there are wars, but I want to write in English and not in English about non-English speaking people [and the English-speaking world isn’t at war]. I don’t think I’ll have the inclination. My previous novel was set in 2004 and 5, but it was older than its setting because it was about the loss of small town life, a town taken over by big corporations. It’s set in a boarding house when there were almost none.

Did you fall in love with any of the characters? As in, “I’m liking you more and more the more I write about you”?

No, I fall in love with other fictional characters or real people that I don’t know, usually, that inspire my characters. Writing about Maria Callas, I got used to Maria Callas, I got to know her, and eventually I got kind of bored of her because I knew what she was going to say. I still love her. This is a different kind of love, this is, “you’re my sister, I know you.” This isn’t “wow, you’re so fascinating” because you get to know someone. Now, characters can do things you don’t expect them to. I never know them so well as when I’m writing for them because things happen that I would not have found, little side comments, little touches, and it enlightens me. That was my insight about the thing that inspires them. The goal is to share. Then, when it’s over, then that’s it. I don’t have any desire to tell you what inspired me about CLP because it’s all over. That’s said, but it’s all done.

– Mari Carlson