When “All Her Fault” author Andrea Mara’s middle daughter was 5 years old, she went to pick her up for a playdate. She drove to the address listed on the school directory and rang the doorbell. No answer. She rang again. Still not an answer.
Then, she peered inside the window — and her heart stopped.
“There was no furniture in the house. Nobody lived in the house. My heart nearly jumped out of my chest with fright, and I immediately thought, ‘Oh, my God, my child has been kidnapped,’” Mara tells TODAY.com.
Mara feared it was a fake playdate and her child had been taken. “I think lots of parents can probably relate to that, that your mind goes to the worst case scenario,” she says.
Then, a neighbor popped her head out to reveal the owners had moved just weeks prior, so the printed out school directory wasn’t up-to-date.
Mara was able to pick her daughter up from the correct address, but the scenario never left her. When she was looking to write her fourth novel, she returned to the concept.
“I thought, ‘OK, I think I want to write that playdate book,’” she says.
That “playdate book” became “All Her Fault,” published in 2021 and adapted into a Peacock drama released earlier this month, starring actor Sarah Snook. In the book and series, Marissa and Peter Irvine’s lives are thrown into turmoil when their young son Milo goes missing during a playdate. It turns out he’s been kidnapped, just as Mara feared in her own imagination.
Beyond the unguessable twists, “All Her Fault” is starting conversations about division of labor and why women bear the brunt of the responsibility for day-to-day life and are blamed when it goes awry. The show’s main husbands, Peter (Jake Lacy) and Richie (Thomas Cocquerel), are on a spectrum of problematic, ranging from sociopathic to inept.
“(My husband) has been watching the show with me, and he’s kind of like, ‘Come on. Please say this isn’t based on me.’ And I said to him, ‘Look, you weren’t listening to me, so I had to write a book,’” she says, laughing.
While she says her husband is nothing like Richie, who leaves his wife to figure out all the details of their child’s life, she did often feel like the “default parent,” forced to do more of the problem-solving.
Mara, who describes herself as an “overthinker,” says she uses her novels as a way to work through scenarios.
“Writing books is therapy, so I get it all out of my system by writing the book and just pushing it on to other people,” she says.
She has a 28-page-long document with a running list of ideas for crime novels inspired by real-life scenarios.
Her next book, “It Should Have Been You,” out in 2026, imagines what might happen if someone sent a mean text about a neighbor to the neighborhood group text. Then, four people wind up dead.
“I have a big neighborhood Whatsapp group here, and they think it’s very funny that I made a whole book out of the messages they send in error in our group. Everyone’s like, ‘Oh, be careful. She’s probably reading these messages for her new book,’” she says.
