“Gosh, I sound like my father, don’t I? But that’s what you get from this particular Daddy’s girl.”
—Ivanka Trump, The Trump Card: Playing to Win in Work and Life

Well, some book genesis stories are weirder than others. This is probably my weirdest. I started writing All the Pretty Things shortly after watching an interview with Ivanka Trump in early 2017. She seemed to me like a strange, beautiful doll with a pull string. I wondered what she could possibly be thinking beneath all of that perfect hair and makeup, all of those rather automated-sounding lines generally supporting her father but essentially saying nothing at all. Politics aside, I wondered what it must have been like for her to grow up with a father like hers.

I started envisioning Ivy Cork, a vaguely Ivanka-ish character in an nonpolitical setting—a teenager whose father runs an amusement park. I’m obsessed with doughnuts, so I added doughnut shops to Mr. Cork’s entrepreneurial endeavors. I tried to make Ivy’s story her own, but inevitably some material was drawn from very general observations of our current First Family—and from research about children of narcissistic parents.

There’s a tragedy, and a mystery to solve. Mr. Cork, meanwhile, becomes preoccupied with an absurd vanity project. Ivy has to deal with both, and try to look nice and smart and dutiful doing it.

And then I gave it the most cathartic ending I could think of.

More disciplined writers than myself might say you’re not supposed to write a book as catharsis. In this case, I admit that indulgence. I hope it finds readers who need a similar catharsis right now.

Thank you for reading.