Only If You’re Lucky Author Stacy Willingham Talks Female Friendship, Unreliable Narrators, and More

We’re a little over a month into 2024, but one of the year’s best thrillers is already on shelves. Only If You’re Lucky is the latest novel from Stacy Willingham, author of buzzy titles A Flick in the Dark and All the Dangerous Things, and it’s a twisty, propulsive story of female friendship at both its warmest and most damaging. 

The story follows Margot, who has just finished a lonely freshman year at South Carolina’s Rutledge College. Still reeling from the death of her best friend Eliza the summer before, she’s yet to find a place for herself on campus. But when she catches the attention of Lucy Sharpe, a popular and charismatic girl from her dorm floor, she finds herself invited to live with her and her friends Sloane and Nicole in a house off campus. But as the summer’s booze-soaked partying with the fraternity next door continues, she finds herself drawn into a web of secrets and mind games. And when one of the boys next door—who happens to be Eliza’s old boyfriend—turns up dead with a now-missing Lucy’s blood on his clothes, the investigation into her disappearances reveals shocking truths. 

It’s difficult to talk about Only If You’re Lucky without spoiling its most entertaining and twisty reveals, but sufficing to say the story is both a propulsive thriller and a thoughtful exploration of the complex, messy bonds between young women, that can change lives forever. 

We got the chance to chat with Willingham herself about Only If You’re Lucky’s twisty narrative, the fraught complexities of female friendship, and lots more. 

Paste Magazine: Tell us about Only If You’re Lucky! What inspired its story? 

Stacy Willingham: Only If You’re Lucky tells the story of a timid college freshman named Margot who is unexpectedly invited to live with three other girls in a house off-campus the summer before her sophomore year. The ringleader of those roommates, a girl named Lucy, is eerily magnetic, the kind of person who makes it impossible to say no, and who not only successfully pulls Margot out of her shell, but starts to warm her up to some seriously destructive behaviors.A few months into the living situation, however, one of the fraternity boys who lives next door is murdered and Lucy goes missing without a trace, leaving Margot in the investigative wake as she tries to get to the bottom of why she was invited into their orbit in the first place.

The inspiration for this book actually came from the setting—specifically, the house I lived in in college. It was a quirky old place with a lot of eccentric details, and it was also owned by a fraternity, which means that the boys living next door were our landlords. Another piece of inspiration came from reading about the cult at Sarah Lawrence College. After learning about that case, I was really interested in how a bunch of college-aged kids living together in a house off-campus could turn so dark so quickly; I also found it both fascinating and terrifying that if any group of college students happened to fall under the spell of the wrong person like that, horrible things could happen without anybody really knowing about it. 

 Paste: Margot is technically the main character (sort of). How would you describe the journey she’s on over the course of this book?

 Willingham: I’m not sure I would call Margot’s journey a classic coming-of-age story, but her arc is all about her process of discovering who she is and what she’s capable of. 

In the beginning of the book, she is described as “vanilla, malleable, a blank slate.” The kind of person who other people can easily shape. Throughout the novel, Margot does get shaped, but probably not in the ways she, or the reader, might expect.

 Paste: I love a story about female friendship that’s honest about how messy and toxic and uplifting and necessary the best of them can be at any given time. How did you approach building the bonds between these characters?  

Willingham: Thankfully, these girls and their friendships are not based on any of my real friends, but because the setting of this story is based on real life, I used a lot of my own memories in that house to try and make their bond seem authentic. Ironically, it’s the really mundane stuff that sticks out as the most memorable to me—rainy days spent with my roommates watching movies in bed, groggy mornings in the living room laughing over the things we did the night before—and so I tried to use those little moments to show how precious and powerful female friendships can be. 

I also tried to speak to a common insecurity of being a girl that age, the desire to be both understood and accepted, and used that longing as Margot’s driving force. As Margot gets closer to the girls and that insecurity slowly chips away, she’s suddenly so desperate to keep what she’s found, she’s willing to do anything for the girls who gave it to her.

 Paste: Margot’s dead BFF Eliza is somehow the character who hangs over the center of this whole story even while only appearing in flashbacks. Did you spend a lot of time thinking about her and her arc as part of crafting the book’s larger story? She felt so….unintentionally tragic to me.

Willigham: Yeah, Eliza is a tragic character! She’s not in the story at all in the present day, yet she’s somehow always there, hovering over Margot’s every interaction. To Margot, Eliza is the epitome of everything she wants and everything she fears: someone who loves her more than anything, but also someone who suddenly leaves her. 

That’s one of the inevitable tragedies of female friendships, especially at that age: they rarely last forever, and when they do end, however that ending comes about, it’s incredibly painful. Eliza and Margot illustrate the extreme highs and lows of a close female friendship, and I really felt the need to show all of their backstory in order to explain why Margot feels such a gaping void once Eliza is gone—and why she is so drawn to someone like Lucy to fill it.

Paste: I’m fascinated by all the women at the center of this story but Lucy just blew my mind. Tell us a little bit about how you see her character and why she’s so successful at hiding so many secrets. 

Willingham: Thank you so much! I really love Lucy, too, though it’s hard to go into too much detail about her and her secrets without giving anything away. I think she’s so fascinating because everybody knows a Lucy—the kind of girl who is just so brazen, it’s impossible not to notice her—but it’s often those people who are the most damaged, maybe even with the most to hide, and that’s what I wanted to bring out in her.

Paste: I feel like pretty much everyone in this book is an unreliable narrator at one point or another, even at some points to themselves. How did you, as the woman wrangling all these liars, organize everything and make sure that you weren’t revealing too much to readers too soon?

Willingham: This was probably the most logistically difficult book I’ve ever written for that exact reason: everyone is an unreliable narrator, so all of their interactions had to be crafted so carefully in order to not give anything away too soon. 

I also believe there is a big difference between a narrator who is unreliable and a narrator who lies, so while these characters often lie to each other, and even to themselves, I was very deliberate about ensuring that they were never lying outright to the reader. To do that, I was very intentional about my word choice; oftentimes, I structured sentences to have double meanings, hoping the reader would pick up on one meaning and not realize the other meaning hidden within.

Paste: I know you probably love all your fictional children equally but did you have a favorite character to write or whose story particularly spoke to you?

 Willingham: I do love them all, but Lucy is by far my favorite in this book. She was actually inspired by a Beatles song, “Lucy in the Sky With Diamonds”, specifically the fourth line where they reference “a girl with kaleidoscope eyes.” That’s why her eyes are described as being so hypnotic, that icy blue color, and why there are Beatles references peppered throughout the book. 

More than her inspiration, though: Lucy is just an incredibly layered character. She is a lot more nuanced than you would originally think, and she is much deeper than she appears on the surface.

Paste: Only If You’re Lucky addresses some timely issues and very real problems faced by young college women—consent, hazing, alcohol abuse, gaslighting, sexual assault, that weirdly specific power and class imbalance that comes when you’re friends with people who have more money that you do—how important was it to you to include these elements of the story alongside some of the story’s more outlandish elements.

 Willingham: While the purpose of a thriller is primarily to entertain, I do work really hard to not only make my books as realistic as possible, but to also make them thought-provoking. When readers close the cover, I would love it if they kept thinking about these characters, what they went through, and why did ultimately did the things they did. 

When it comes to writing about those topics, I just don’t think you can set a book on a college campus without addressing that stuff, because the reality is, those are just the issues that young women face in that kind of setting. Not only that, but when they’re at a vulnerable age and away from home for the very first time, they often don’t know how to deal with that stuff, so the sudden presence of all those stressors in their lives can become powerful motivators for both emotions and actions.

Paste: What do you think it is about thrillers that draws so many readers to this particular genre over and over again?

Willingham: I think the obvious answer is that readers like to be kept guessing; a book becomes fun when you never really know where it might go next. 

Deeper than that, though, I think thrillers are good at giving a peek under the curtain at some of our deepest insecurities and fears. It allows us to get close to the things that scare us without getting too close; it’s basically voyeurism from a safe distance.

 Paste: What’s next for you as an author? Are you working on anything you can tell us about?

Willingham: Yes, I’m currently working on my fourth book! It’s another psychological thriller set to be released in 2025. I’m still in the early stages, so I don’t have a lot of detail to reveal just yet, but I’m excited to share more as the year progresses.

Paste: And my favorite question, always—what are you reading right now? Any 2024 releases we should make sure to keep an eye out for?

Willingham: There are so many good books coming out in 2024! I’m currently listening to Blood Sugar by Sascha Rothchild (not a new release, but very entertaining) and reading an early copy of a book called The Ascent by Allison Buccola; it’s a cult thriller coming out later this year and I’m really enjoying it!

I’ve also been lucky enough to read She’s Not Sorry by Mary Kubica and A Talent for Murder by Peter Swanson, both of which I know readers will love when they’re out.

Only If You’re Lucky is available wherever books are sold. 

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Lacy Baugher Milas is the Books Editor at Paste Magazine, but loves nerding out about all sorts of pop culture. You can find her on Twitter @LacyMB