The Berkshires Triangle

Location As Character

In my last post, I talked about the science that inspired The Girl in the Lake—the verified, clinical cases of children who remember too much. But today, I want to talk about the place where those memories live.

For me, that place is the Berkshires. Specifically, a stretch of semi-rural Massachusetts centered around Stockbridge/Great Barrington that I have nick-named the “Berkshires Triangle,” in a nod both to the OG Bermuda Triangle and to both the “Bennington Triangle” and the “Bridgewater Triangle,” both sections of the Northeast famed for mysterious events, disappearances, and UFO sitings.

The book is divided into Past and Present sections. In the Past, we are with Kate Willis, the protagonist, at camp. There is a specific kind of atmospheric pressure that exists in a summer camp setting. It’s a closed loop of time where the outside world ceases to exist, and your cabin-mates become your entire universe. It’s where we make the kind of pacts that only fourteen-year-olds can make—the forever kind.

In the Present, Kate Willis returns to the site of her childhood camp twenty-six years after her best friend, Becca, vanished into the water. (Supposedly.) The woods there are described as gnarled, claustrophobic, and ancient. I wanted the setting to feel like a character in its own right—a vault that has been holding onto the truth since 1999.

Writing this felt like a homecoming. At the time, I was living not far from where the book was set, deeply inspired by the landscape of hills and gulleys and old growth forests, and by the ghosts, legends—and secrets—that inevitably grow in all wild places, as if the external becomes a mirror of the internal, and vice versa.

Becca McGuire had a term for these shadow-places and hidden secrets: collateral. To her, secrets weren’t just burdens. They were a currency. They were things you traded to stay close to the people you loved.

But what happens when the collateral becomes too heavy to carry?

As Kate navigates the ruins of her past, she realizes that the lake isn’t just a body of water—it’s a grave for childhood beliefs, for childhood innocence, and for all the versions of ourselves we will never be allowed to become.

A question for you: Is there a place from your childhood that feels “frozen” in time? A place you’re almost afraid to return to because you’re worried the version of you that lived there might still be waiting?

The Girl in the Lake is NOW OUT! Thank you for all your incredible launch week support. I’ve been blown away by the early reviews. Please grab your copy if you haven’t already, and don’t forget to tell all your friends!!