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Katie Gutierrez Books In Order

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Publication Order of Standalone Novels

More Than You'll Ever Know (2022)Description / Buy at Amazon

Katie Gutierrez
Katie Gutierrez has an MFA from Texas State University, and her writing has appeared such places as the Washington Post, TIME, Harper’s Bazaar, Longreads, and more. Katie is a National Magazine Award finalist.

“More Than You’ll Ever Know” was recommended by Good Housekeeping, Los Angeles Times, Parade, Washington Post, Audible, Popsugar, Goodreads, CrimeReads, The Millions, NBC News, and Library Reads, along with more. It was also a Good Morning America Book Club Pick, a Radio 2 Book Club Selection.

Katie’s always been fascinated with the ways that we compartmentalize ourselves, the ways that we change depending on who it is we’re with. We can be one person with our husband, another with our best friends, with our kids, our moms, with strangers. We’re all constantly presenting different parts of ourselves depending on how comfortable we are or what we want.

While she was in her MFA program, around 2011, she read about this man leading a double life that had been with his wife up to that point for thirty years. Once she died, he married this other woman two weeks later. At that time, people began asking “Who’s this woman”? turned out that he had this whole separate family with this woman. They lived 20 miles apart. He had two kids with both woman, and they all attended the same school at different times. The guy bought each wife the same exact white Lexus.

The fact that he could compartmentalize himself this well was this extreme version of what she’d always been interested in, yet she wanted to explore this from the point of view of a woman that was living a double life. She feels as though women are particularly forced to compartmentalize themselves. Katie wanted to take this idea of the multitudes, and take it to such an extreme, the ways we all do every single day.

This double life story was probably the initial seed. While she was working on her thesis for her MFA, which was a collection of short fiction set in South Texas. She had this idea of a woman living a double life and of there being this frame story with the reporter, however it felt like a larger story, so she shelved it. After getting her MFA, she had a full time job as an editor for a number of years. When she stepped away to focus more on her writing, she was working on a completely different book, which took a couple of years, and when that novel did not sell, this double life story was still in the back of her mind.

She began playing with the characters, attempting to figure out who they even are. Who’s this woman leading a double life and how does she pull it off? Especially when we’re all online and everything’s connected? It felt obvious that it’d be set in the past. Which also created the chance to explore the truth in another way, what if the events known to have happened did not quite happen that way, or what if there was a deeper story behind them?

She grew up hearing about this time during the 80s, with the peso devaluation. Katie liked the idea of setting it in Laredo and playing with this doubleness idea in this city she grew up in, it’s a border town. The city itself exemplifies duality.

Before beginning the writing process, she likes having fifty to sixty percent of the book kinda outlined. Katie used Scrivener for this, and used the cork board feature to take any scenes she could envision already in like a one-line synopsis and order them all in the way she believed they would go.

The structure of this novel changed fundamentally across about twenty different drafts. Draft one was just a mess, and was six hundred pages. First 150 pages were all from Lore’s perspective before switching to Cassie for a hundred. Katie’s agent told her none of it was working. There was a lot of work to do in order to braid both of their stories together and attempting to make sure that both women were equally compelling. Katie realized that she didn’t know Cassie nearly as well as she did Lore. Over the course of the writing, she learned a lot about Cassie. Lore too, but she came to Katie whole for some odd reason.

“More Than You’ll Ever Know” is the first stand alone novel and was released in 2022. An evocative drama featuring a woman that gets caught leading a double life after one husband ends up murdering the other, and the true crime author that gets obsessed with telling the woman’s story. This masterful work of literary suspense marks the debut of one extraordinary new author.

The dance turns into an affair, which turns into a marriage, which turns into a murder.

In the year 1985, Lore Rivera marries Andres Russo in Mexico City, despite already being married to Fabian Rivera in Laredo, Texas, and they share twin sons. Lore, through her career as an international banker, splits time between two families and two countries. Which ends on a baking hot day in 1986 when then the truth is revealed and one husband gets arrested for murdering the other one.

In the year 2017, as Cassie Bowman (struggling true crime writer) trawls the internet for the latest, most sensation news reports, encounters an article that details this tragic final act. Cassie is instantly enticed by what’s not explored, such as: Why would a woman, a mom, risk it all for a secret double marriage?

Cassie sees this as an opportunity, and plans on tracking Lore down and capturing the whole picture, the deceptions, and the decisions which all led to disaster. However the more time that she spends with Lore, the more that Cassie begins questioning the facts surrounding the murder itself. Before long, her determination to uncover the whole truth might threaten to derail her now quiet life, and expose all the secrets that both women are hiding.

Told through alternating timelines, this is both a wrenching family drama, and a gripping mystery. It presents a window into the hearts of a couple of incredibly different women, and explores the many conflicting demands of motherhood and marriage, and the impossibility of ever really knowing somebody, particularly those that we love.

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