Laura Sims: Streamline Your Life To Make Writing a Top Priority
In this interview, author Laura Sims discusses the real-life midcentury photographer that inspired her new novel, The Man.
Laura Sims’s previous novels How Can I Help You and Looker have been featured on Best Books lists in The New York Times Book Review, Vogue, People magazine, Entertainment Weekly, Real Simple, Publishers Weekly, and more. An award-winning poet, Sims has published four poetry collections; her essays and poems have appeared in The New Republic, Boston Review, Lit Hub, and Electric Lit. She lives in New Jersey, where she works part-time as a children’s librarian. Follow her on Twitter, Facebook, and Instagram.
In this interview, Laura discusses the real-life midcentury photographer that inspired her new novel, The Man, her advice for other writers, and more.
Name: Laura Sims
Literary agent: Chris Clemens
Book title: The Man
Publisher: G.P. Putnam’s Sons
Release date: July 7, 2026
Genre/category: Literary psychological suspense
Previous titles: How Can I Help You and Looker
Elevator pitch: From the highly acclaimed author of How Can I Help You, a New York Times Best Thriller of the Year: A singular take on the domestic suspense novel that follows a 1960s housewife turned amateur photographer who begins to fear for her life when she notices the dark silhouette of a man in the background of her self-portraits.
What prompted you to write this book?
I've been drawn to the photography of Vivian Maier, the so-called "nanny photographer" from the 1950s, since her work went viral in the early 2000s. I'm a huge fan of her self-portraits, many of which she took in storefront windows and other uniquely urban reflective surfaces. She's known for her street photographs too, but to me her "selfies" are the most striking and resonant—maybe in part because we see her, a "powerless" woman in the culture of the time, asserting herself and her worth as a subject—all while living a very private and ordinary life. All of this eventually came to inspire The Man. Maier's work, life, and the story of her discovery mingled with two bizarre stalking cases from the 1980s to produce my main character, Judith Stanley, and influence the path of the narrative.
How long did it take to go from idea to publication? And did the idea change during the process?
I started to draft the novel early in 2022 and found the right voice for Judith by April of that year. The book sold to Putnam about two and a half years later, then published in July of 2026. It sounds like such a long road when you account for the ramp to publication. Sometimes it feels very long ... and then suddenly the book is out!
The idea for the novel did change as it developed. At a certain point, I realized my story had outgrown its original bounds and needed something more. This turned out to be a dramatic POV shift that splits the novel in two and (hopefully) renders the whole more layered, expansive, and thought-provoking.
Were there any surprises or learning moments in the publishing process for this title?
I'm always surprised by the process of letting go that begins with sending your book to your agent and continues once you've sold the work. It can be wonderful, really, to hand it over to people you trust, to people who take excellent care of your work—like my agent and the team at Putnam do. But it can be challenging, too, to let it go out into the world and become something else, something new, to each and every reader.
Were there any surprises in the writing process for this book?
Surprises always come up in the novel-writing process—and they often prove fruitful in the long run. While writing The Man, I realized that in using Vivian Maier as something of a model for my main character, I could also use the story of how her art came to the public eye. This led to interesting developments in the second half of my novel that changed the whole shape of the narrative for the better.
What do you hope readers will get out of your book?
First and foremost, I hope readers will be deeply immersed in the book and feel attached to its characters and invested in their storylines. I hope they come away from it thinking about the ideas and experiences woven into the story: what it's like to live, as a woman, with pervasive fear; how art-making has been and remains a channel for transcendence and power for women artists; and how everything, really, comes down to perspective: our thoughts and beliefs, our conduct, our lives.
If you could share one piece of advice with other writers, what would it be?
Streamline your life to make writing a top priority. I'm not suggesting you neglect relationships or quit your day job, but don't take on unnecessary extracurricular work (there's a lot of it in the writing world) if it detracts from your focus on the real work of writing. You can also streamline by harvesting your everyday life/work for material; I have done this through the years, and it not only enriches the material I'm working on but also enriches my daily life. Life and art become more enmeshed when life informs art (and vice-versa).
