Corey Ann Haydu: I Try Not To Write From a Place of Judgment
In this interview, author Corey Ann Haydu discusses processing new parenthood in writing her first novel for adults, Mothers and Other Strangers.
Corey Ann Haydu is the author of several titles for children and young adults, and a professor of VCFA’s creative writing for children program. She lives in Brooklyn with her husband, and of course, her two daughters. Corey grew up outside Boston, Massachusetts, and earned her BFA in Theatre from New York University’s Tisch School of the Arts. Following a few years of acting and cocktail waitressing (and nannying, real estate agent-ing, pilates instructing and telemarketing), Corey earned her MFA from The New School. Corey’s books have been Edgar Award nominees, Amazon Books of the Month, RISE Honorees, Junior Library Guild Selections, Kirkus, PW, and SLJ Best Books of the Year, BCCB Blue Ribbon Honorees, and more. Follow her on Instagram and Bluesky.
In this interview, Corey discusses processing new parenthood in writing her first novel for adults, Mothers and Other Strangers, on honoring the subjective truth of our characters, and more.
Name: Corey Ann Haydu
Literary agent: Victoria Marini, Highline Literary
Book title: Mothers and Other Strangers
Publisher: Little, Brown
Release date: March 31, 2026
Genre/category: Fiction
Previous titles: Eventown, Lawless Spaces, Rules for Stealing Stars and the Zoomi and Zoe series.
Elevator pitch: Told in dual timelines, estranged childhood best friends Mae and Sydney reconnect when they discover they are both pregnant with daughters. But as they work to rebuild their lost friendship, they must also confront the secrets their mothers, Beth Ann and Joni, were hiding during the years their families became intimately and precariously entwined.
What prompted you to write this book?
I had been publishing YA and middle-grade novels for five years when my first daughter was born. So many of my books for children and young adults center female friendships and the strained relationships of mothers and daughters, but always from the perspective of kids and teens. I found that when I became a parent I had so much more I wanted to say about friendship, mothers and daughters, and how family histories become a kind of destiny. Newly postpartum, I started writing a book about estranged childhood best friends who were reconnecting as adults through their first pregnancies. I was inspired initially by the fact that my own childhood best friend was pregnant with a daughter at the same time as me, and how fateful and beautiful and grounding that felt to me as I entered this new phase of my life.
It was very much a side project at first, just a way to process new parenthood and have some fun in between contracts for my children’s books. Slowly, though, it really took over my mind, and I found myself wanting to spend as much time as possible with these characters and their complicated lives and messy truths.
How long did it take to go from idea to publication? And did the idea change during the process?
I started writing the book in 2018, so it’s been about eight years since I first started playing with the idea. Although the central relationship—estranged best friends who come back together during their pregnancies—didn’t change, the book itself has gone through a lot of evolutions. It took me years to figure out what sorts of twists and turns the two families at the center of the novel might go through, and I remember so well when I figured out one key element that really broke things open.
I was at a workspace I used to write at, pregnant with my second daughter, brainstorming in a notebook I was keeping about the novel, and I had a full-body reaction to an idea that popped into my head. From that point on, the writing of the book was much more focused and urgent, rather than the sort of slow exploration I’d been doing around it for years. That kind of epiphany doesn’t happen for every book, but I think it’s part of what keeps me motivated in my creative life—the promise that a huge epiphany might be right around the corner.
Were there any surprises or learning moments in the publishing process for this title?
Generally making the shift from children’s to adult has been full of new experiences and surprises. I was honestly the most surprised when I first showed my agent early pages of the novel. I was sure I was totally off base with what I was working on. Sending those early pages to my agent, I was haunted by a creative writing class in college that I was once denied entry to, and a conversation when I was getting my masters in writing for children, where I was discouraged from pursuing a dual focus that would include adult literary fiction. I think I expected her to say I needed to go back to the drawing board, or that the project was too ambitious. Instead, I was met with an enthusiasm and certainty that I was totally unprepared for.
Throughout the process I’ve found myself more off kilter than I had anticipated. I’ve been used to the niche I’ve carved out for myself in children’s publishing over the years. I teach in an MFA program in writing for children and young adults, I have spread my wings in all different age categories and genres in children’s publishing, and it’s been a sort of comfortable (and beautiful!) home for a long time.
And while at first, particularly while on submission, it felt so vulnerable to enter a new space, I’ve come to really celebrate getting the chance to do something truly different at this point in my career. I am always itching to push myself, and this is the biggest leap I’ve taken, which has been a thrill, in spite of moments of doubt. It’s actually really energizing and exciting to get to be a debut author again. Overall, it has been a really joyful experience, to overcome the vulnerability of venturing beyond what’s comfortable. I’m still a bit in awe, though!
Were there any surprises in the writing process for this book?
One of the things that came as a surprise, aside from the big plot beats that I mentioned earlier, was working in a new perspective. Most of my children’s books have been first person, present tense, and I always found myself very grounded and at ease in that perspective. There was a time it was unimaginable to me to write outside of that box. But as soon as I started playing with this idea, I found myself in a sort of roving third person, past tense, and I was surprised to see how much that changed the tenor and thrust of the story. The type of story I was writing was really influenced by shifting perspective in this new-to-me way. Perhaps it shouldn’t be so surprising, that getting out of a creative comfort zone would open up new paths, new ideas, new voices—but I do think it’s really easy to get stuck thinking there is one way a particular writer can write a book, and I had certainly bought into that myth for a long time when it came to tense and person. It was gratifying to see that I could find my feet even when I was challenging myself to do something new.
There were honestly quite a few plot surprises along the way, and so much of the writing of this book was about discovering something new in the characters’ lives and having to head back to the beginning of the novel to weave that new information through the foundation. The writing of this book was really a years-long layering of ideas and discoveries, and I hope the result is that the reading process is a bit like the writing process—an unwinding, a constant revelation.
What do you hope readers will get out of your book?
Above all else, I hope that readers will get to have an emotionally exciting time reading the story. There’s nothing better than the feeling of being unable to put a book down, and I hope I get to be the usher of that sort of immersive, unstoppable experience for readers.
I think the book is also really a celebration of friendship, while also being especially interested in the ways it can upend us, disappoint us, confuse us. I hope readers feel connected to the central friendships in the novel and find their way to compassion for all the characters, in spite of their mistakes and character flaws. Another lifetime ago, I was in theater school, and one of the lessons from that time that resonated the most with me was the idea that you can’t act from a place of judgment. I try not to write from a place of judgment either. I think most people believe they’re in the right, or at least see themselves in a hero role and never a villain one, and it’s my job in telling the story to honor that subjective truth. I hope readers’ minds get changed many times while they read. I hope they take different characters’ sides in different moments. That would mean I did what I set out to do.
If you could share one piece of advice with other writers, what would it be?
Stay open. When I’m teaching, I ask my students to let themselves write down every possible idea for their story, no matter how absurd it might seem. My best novels, and my most fun writing experiences, have come from the work of considering an idea that seems absurd or impossible or too hard to pull off at first. And often those impossible ideas come far into the writing and revising process, so don’t be afraid of honoring an epiphany that comes at an inconvenient time.
