Cassandra Neyenesch’s debut novel turns a taboo affair into a backward-running murder mystery

Cassandra Neyenesch’s first published novel, A Little Bit Bad, arrives with an unusually long backstory: she has been writing fiction for more than 30 years, yet this is the first manuscript to make it into print. In a Public Books conversation with Sharon Marcus, Neyenesch said the book is now being released by major publishers in the United States, United Kingdom, and Canada, with German rights also sold — a rare outcome after decades of work that never quite found the right shape.

The novel itself is built around a provocation. Neyenesch described it as the story of an affair between a 40-year-old woman and a young roofer that ends in murder, with the murder placed at the beginning and the rest of the book moving backward to explain how the relationship unfolded. That structure did not come easily. She said she first drafted the book as a straight chronological first-person narrative, then tried an epistolary version before eventually settling on a nonlinear form centered on her narrator, Perdita. The change, she suggested, came from realizing she had been burying the most important event instead of foregrounding it.

Marcus used the interview to trace the long path behind the publication, and Neyenesch described years of writing every day while struggling to finish work she felt ready to submit. She said she had not really learned how to edit early on, and that many of her novels stalled because they “ended up nowhere.” Workshops with Laurie Stone helped her develop those skills, but she also said she eventually had to seek ketamine therapy to break out of what she called a manic editing spiral and address the fears that surfaced each time she sent out a query. The breakthrough came when British agent Caroline Dawnay quickly placed the book in Canada, then the United States, and then the United Kingdom.

The novel’s domestic tensions are rooted in Perdita’s marriage and in her experience of motherhood. Neyenesch rejected the idea that her heroine is simply “crazy,” saying Perdita seems normal to her: she believed she had entered an egalitarian marriage, only to watch her husband become what Neyenesch called an “angry provider man” once the couple had children. Marcus noted that the novel treats children as fully individual people rather than abstract symbols of parenthood, and Neyenesch said that was deliberate. She wanted to show motherhood as emotional labor as well as physical labor — the work of learning children’s personalities, understanding that they are not extensions of the parent, and negotiating with their needs while the father does none of that work.

Style, in the interview, emerged as another way the book reveals character. Marcus pointed to Neyenesch’s sharply observed descriptions of clothing, including the way the narrator reads men through what they wear. Neyenesch said she likes the idea that straight men could be more playful and flamboyant in dress, and she cast current masculine blandness as the product of inherited cultural pressures. Clothing, in the novel, becomes part of a female gaze that assesses men’s social position, self-presentation, and hidden aspirations. For Neyenesch, that attention to fashion is not decorative; it is one of the ways a character learns who someone is.

Music functions similarly. The novel gives Perdita and Nando, her younger lover, a shared language through songs, bands, and theories about sound. Marcus highlighted scenes in which the narrator listens to his music online and finds herself deeply moved by its atmosphere, while Neyenesch said she wanted those passages to mean something because music matters so much to the characters. She also said that music helps bridge the age gap between them: Perdita comes from a generation for whom taste could mark you as cool or uncool, while Nando’s generation is less invested in those boundaries. That difference becomes part of what makes their connection plausible — and unusual.

That age gap is one reason the book feels timely in the current fiction landscape. Marcus compared it to recent novels by Jen Beagin and Miranda July, but Neyenesch stressed that her own story is not about polyamory or open relationships. Instead, it is about a relationship in which two people simply like talking to each other, a dynamic she said she had not seen often in narratives about older women and younger men. Set partly in San Diego, and informed by her interest in noir and true crime, the novel also folds in practical considerations of place, from canyon landscapes to the logistics of committing a crime in California. With A Little Bit Bad now published after such a long delay, Neyenesch appears to have entered a new phase: one in which she is not only publishing this debut, but also revisiting older work and recognizing how much she had already done without trying to send it out.