Gaylin: Elsa is such a fascinating and complicated character. How did you first come up with the idea for her?
Ellis: My mother had just died rather unexpectedly, and writing about someone grappling with unresolved issues with a dead parent felt like an imperative at the time. It was just so overwhelming and I had to write it out, so I gave it to Elsa. Poor Elsa—because as the drafts piled up her own conflicts became worlds more dire than mine ever were, in every way.
Gaylin: There are actually two powerful mysteries playing out within A Map of the Dark—that of the girls who go missing and that of Elsa’s dark past, yet neither one overshadows the other. Was it difficult to achieve this balance, and either way, how did you do it?
Ellis: It was something that evolved as I set out to write the book. I began to realize that there were distinct storylines that needed to resonate against each other as the novel developed: the plight of the missing girls and Special Agent Elsa Myers’s search for them in collaboration with Detective Lex Cole, and Elsa’s personal story in which her father’s terminal illness triggers devastating childhood memories that begin to inform the ongoing case. It was a tricky balancing act, and I ended up writing the storylines individually and then weaving them together. I’d never approached a novel that way before and wasn’t sure if it would work, but I found that it allowed me to fully inhabit each distinctive voice before moving on to the next one.
