Author Susan Wiggs discusses 'Wayward Girls,' eras and readers in Q&A

Susan Wiggs knows a good title when she sees one.

For the New York Times bestselling author's most recent novel, "Wayward Girls" (out in paperback July 7 from William Morrow), Wiggs spent time poring over records at the Buffalo History Museum in New York. One day she came across an 1886 article from the Buffalo Daily Republic. The headline was all she needed for the new book: "Wayward Girls."

"I never thought of this book with any other title," Wiggs said.

The novel follow six girls at the Home of the Good Shepherd laundry and Catholic reformatory in the 1960s. Mairin O'Hara lands at the home, modeled after a real Buffalo institution and other forced-labor Magdalene laundries in Ireland, after her brother gets drafted and her stepfather becomes a dangerous presence at home. She forms friendships with a small group of girls at the school -- committed to the home for their sexuality, pregnancies and mental health status, among other things -- and makes repeated attempts to understand what's really going on with the Sister of Charity nuns who operate the home.

Wiggs lives in Washington and has published 60 books across nearly 40 years of writing, including most recently, "The Twelve Dogs of Christmas," "Welcome to Beach Town," and "Sugar and Salt." "Wayward Girls," originally published in July 2025, took Wiggs nearly two years to write. It tackles a more serious subject than some of her other books, she says, as the characters search for justice after years of abuse at Good Shepherd.

The following conversation touches on Wiggs's research process, the reaction from readers and what it was like to write a book that spans generations. It has been edited for length and clarity.

This book is rooted in a very specific time and place. How did you end up coming to this story? What was the process for this book like?

It was a bit of a turn for me. Because normally it starts with: what beautiful beach or locale do I want to write about that's going to give me a great research trip and sweep my readers away? And so, often there's a reason that they take place in Sonoma or by a lakeside cottage or somewhere like that. But this one is in a pretty brutal industrial town, very no-nonsense. My brother and I went back to this little town in Western. New York, where we were both born and we lived until I was 10 and he was 12. Then we moved overseas. It's a very sleepy little small town called Olean. It's famous for a basketball school -- Saint Bonaventure is there. We went to a Catholic Church and it was one of those old stone Gothic churches. And I remember I turned to my brother and I said, "John, were you ever an altar boy?" And he said, "yeah, for about 5 minutes...one time, my sleeve caught on fire because of the incense." And so that's why early on in the book, this boy that Marin, the main character, has a crush on has a similar incident and it coincided with me needing something very concrete and relatable.

That was the very first thing that came to me and I thought: why am I thinking about Catholic girls in schools in the 60s? But I remembered I had a babysitter. Her name is Betty. And she was my favorite babysitter. And she just one day she just went away. And when she came back, it was months later and she was just kind of different and nobody talked about where she had been or what had happened to her or anything. And I just dismissed it.

I found a picture on Facebook of this Magdalene laundry and I discovered that it is still there [in Buffalo]. And so I started researching that and one thing led to another. I had the dilemma of telling my literary agent and my publisher that I was going to write a book that's a bit of a departure from my usual feel good Susan Wiggs books.

"Wayward Girls" is rich with historical details. Where did you start with the research process?

I always start at the library. Even with the Internet in front of me, it's the Public Library. I came across a really great librarian at a specialty library. The Buffalo History Museum actually employs a librarian. And she helps with people looking at Buffalo history. She sent maps and anecdotes about that area. And it helped too, that the actual building is still there. And it still looks like an armed camp or prison. It really helped that I had a specific address and that the building is still there. So public libraries, private libraries, there's a there's a Frank Lloyd Wright library there in one of the most beautiful things that he ever designed. And so those and then obviously as many first person accounts as I could find. And I found a couple that were quite useful in Facebook groups.

Is there one document or piece of research that you think of as the founding document for the book?

For this book not really, because there wasn't one thing that summed up all of the all of the pieces that I needed. And that might be one reason that it took me longer than normal to write this book -- I was putting together the pieces of a puzzle. But there was one memoir called "Girl in the Tunnel" by Maureen Sullivan. She's Irish and her experience was quite similar in some ways to Marin's experience, except it took place in Ireland. And that probably gave me the emotional authenticity of the girls. But mostly it was putting together the pieces of the puzzle. And they were mostly from newspapers, articles, magazines and anecdotes.

Can you talk about writing the different voices in "Wayward Girls" and how you kept track of the characters in your process?

One of the things that's really challenging when you write is to make each character distinctive, because it's not the reader's job to make notes and remember everything -- it's the writers job to make them easy enough to recognize. And so that was one of the goals. And the other goal was that I really wanted the characters to each represent a real situation.

Helen, a Chinese-American girl, is based on something that someone told me in my research. Not everyone realized what kind of place this was, and they thought that if you had to go out of town or you got assigned overseas or something like that, the girl could stay there. Her parents naively thought these nuns would look after their kid for a couple of weeks. There's somebody who failed out of the social welfare system for whatever reason, or the foster care system. There's poor Kay who had neurological differences. And then Denise came from a rough background. And the race riot that I described for Odessa really did take place.

I was real conscious of trying to make each character distinctive and representative of someone who would find herself at this place. I didn't want them all to be pregnant girls and I didn't want them all to be runaways.

Later in the book, Mairin and her mother have a very poignant moment of connection (to avoid spoilers, we'll leave it at that). "[Mairin] realized her mother was a wayward girl. Like her," you write. Can you speak about the connection between Mairin and her mother?

I was I was a teacher for 11 years before I became a full time writer. And I remember watching my students and their parents – it's the most powerful foundational relationship of your. I really wanted to dig down in that, especially for the main character and make that feel not just real, but dramatic enough to make it worth reading about. And also to honor that we're all flawed parents and children. There's no such thing as a perfect parental-child relationship. And also, unlike a lot of the books that I write, this one spans a lot more time and relationships do change. I look back at me and my mom or me and my daughter, and I see how it's sort of a wavy road -- there are times when you come together and you pull together and times when you're distant. And so I tried to depict that as a natural relationship. We come to different levels of understanding depending on where we are in our lives and how old we are.

The timeline of this book spans years and generations. What was it like to write a book that occurs over so much time of life?

It was real different and I loved doing it, but it probably feeds into why this book took me about twice as long as another book. All my first drafts are in hand in notebooks. I'm very visual, to the point that I need something up on the wall that says: in 1968, here's how old everybody was.

It also kind of directed where I wanted the girls to go. I can show them when they're 16 and when they're in college and when they're adults and when they're old. And it was, as a creative exercise, super gratifying because you don't always get that chance to have that kind of grand scale.

We're talking more almost a year after the book was originally published. What have you heard from readers since the book came out?

Since the Internet, that's one of the things that has changed so much about being a writer. My first book was published in 1987 and I would celebrate when I got four handwritten paper letters after a book came out. And now it's a flood. I have 36,000 Substack subscribers and so you get to hear from a lot more readers and it's always gratifying and it's always very touching that somebody's going to sit down and write and say, "I've read your book and here's what I thought."

Probably the most powerful letter I got was from a diocese in Ohio. And she said she's just carried it all her life and she was so troubled, but she was grateful to read about it in my book because it kind of validated what had happened to her.

This one was really unexpectedly meaningful In that they related personal experiences that I had no idea were out there. I had a very ordinary and privileged upbringing where I wasn't facing the things that the characters in the book faced. And so I wasn't expecting that, and that was very gratifying. And one thing I love about the paperback version of this book is there's a reading group guide. Book clubs are so cool, because everybody has read the same book. But they all have their own personal differences with it, because it's a creative activity.

Wayward Girls by Susan Wiggs. William Morrow Paperbacks. $19.99, 400 pp. July 7, 2026. 9780063118263.

Upcoming Events:

• Susan Wiggs will be in conversation with Lynn Brunelle at Eagle Harbor Book Co. (157 Winslow Way E. Bainbridge Island, WA 98110), on Wednesday, July 8 at 6:30 p.m. Information for the event can be found at eagleharborbooks.com.
• Liberty Bay Books (18881 D Front St, Poulsbo, WA 98370) is offering a promotion for "Wayward Girls': preorders before July 7 will receive a sticker and a free signed mystery Susan Wiggs book. More information can be found at libertybaybooks.com.

Zachary Fletcher is a trending news reporter with USA TODAY Network's Washington state team. Keep up with him on X (@zdfletch), BlueSky (@zfletcher.bsky.social) or reach him at zfletcher@usatodayco.com.

This article originally appeared on USA TODAY: Author Susan Wiggs discusses 'Wayward Girls,' eras and readers in Q&A

Reporting by Zachary Fletcher, USA TODAY / USA TODAY

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This story was originally published July 7, 2026 at 8:07 AM.