A Thriller with Heart and Humor

This Story Might Save Your Life by Tiffany Crum

What doesn’t kill you makes you…a survivor.

Joy Moore and Benny Abbott have been best friends for a very long time, although the relationship has had its ups and downs. Right now, it’s definitely up, though there are other worries.

A Podcast Built on Chemistry and Chaos

In Tiffany Crum’s This Story Might Save Your Life, the two have a hugely successful podcast of the same name. It’s a comedy survival podcast, one of them proposing a seemingly impossible dire situation and challenging the other to figure a way out of it, but mainly it’s a platform for the kind of riffing and chemistry that has earned them 35 million downloads per month and a potentially life-changing distribution deal.

The negotiations have been dragging on, though, and they have other problems. Joy has been coping with narcolepsy; her producer-husband Xander has gotten increasingly controlling, and he’s always been a little weird about Benny, anyway; there’s been blowback about an ad partner who’s apparently been shipping out toxic food; and someone seems to be stalking Joy and posting candids of her all over social media.

And then comes the morning when Benny arrives at her house to tape a recording, and finds the place empty – no Joy, no Xander, a window shattered, leaves blowing around the living room. And a text on Benny’s phone from Xander: WHAT HAVE YOU DONE?

The police want to know the same thing. The night before, someone using Benny’s login had tried to withdraw a very large sum of money from their corporate investment account and put it in Benny’s own account. Benny knows it wasn’t him, but what the hell is going on? And where is Joy? Frantically, he scrambles for answers, but everywhere he turns, the mysteries only deepen.

Joy – his partner, his best friend, the woman for whom he’s never allowed himself to express his true feelings – has been keeping secrets piled upon secrets. Not that he can blame her. He’s been keeping plenty of secrets himself. And so, he discovers, has everyone else around him.

Where it will all lead is a place that neither he – nor you – will guess.

This Story Will Save Your Life is told through different perspectives and timelines, and even chapters of an incomplete memoir. Filled with twists, surprises and characters that leap off the page, it has plenty of tricks up its sleeve, but, more than that, it has a story that will strike straight into your heart.

Maybe that’s the biggest surprise of all.

Writing Heart and Thrills

“I’d written a few practice novels before this one—quiet, literary stories that didn’t sell,” says Tiffany Crum, “and I was starting to feel like maybe I’d wasted a big part of my life on this writing thing. I decided to give it one last try and write the kind of book that would make me happy, packed with everything I love.  

“At the time, I was bouncing back and forth between thrillers and rom-coms. I’d listen to audiobooks with adorable banter during the day, and at night I’d curl up with twisty thrillers full of tension and reveals. But what I really wanted was a book that could do both—heart and humor and that propulsive, can’t-look-away pace, all in one story. So that was the challenge I set for myself. 

“I wanted to write two people you couldn’t help but love, and then do something absolutely awful to them. (Oof, that would sound terrible out of context.) I was deep into several true-crime and survival podcasts at the time (shout-out to My Favorite Murder), so that world naturally found its way in, too. I drafted the book in six feverish weeks—it just poured out of me, all hope and excitement and love for these characters. I adored every minute.”

It helped that she had a lot to draw upon – her bio, for instance, says that she’s had “various jobs in the film industry”:

“My experience working in Hollywood helped me build Xander’s character—he’s a failing producer, and anyone who’s lived in LA knows at least one of those. I mostly worked as an executive assistant for difficult people, and later as a bookkeeper for my husband’s small production company. He did a lot of behind-the-scenes shoots with A-list celebrities, and that definitely gave me some fuel for Joy and Benny’s sudden rise to fame. There are a lot of perks that come with celebrity, but it can be a very difficult life too. I wanted to capture that mix of glamour and vulnerability that comes with being watched.

“Living in LA surrounded by creative people was a unique experience, though. So many of our friends are producers, directors or writers. It sounds so glamorous, but it’s really only glamorous for a select few. LA can be a hard place to live if you don’t have a lot of money, which we didn’t, and it was tricky for me to write about the city while I lived there. I always made the stories too gritty. Moving away, I could see its shine again. In a way, this book is my love letter to all the parts of LA I miss most.”

Some of the other character work, too, was close to home:

“This is going to sound extremely self-flattering, since I just said I set out to write lovable characters, but there’s a lot of me in Joy, and a lot of my husband in Benny. We have a banter like theirs. I even set the book in a house that resembles the Mount Washington home we lived in 18 years ago, complete with two of our former neighbors: a paparazzo and a judge. 

“Someone asked me recently if, as a thriller writer, I go into every situation looking for danger. I said, ‘No, I go into every situation looking for humor.’ That’s the Joy in me. But for the record, I think she’s funnier, and smarter, and a better writer (I’m pretty sure she wrote her own memoir).”

Research and a Long Road to Publication

Other things, though, still needed research:

“I spent countless hours researching narcolepsy through every stage of drafting and revision—countless. I was terrified of getting it wrong. But how does one get it right? As Joy says in her memoir, every person with narcolepsy has a different story, with different challenges and different ways of managing their care. There’s a saying in the community: ‘If you’ve met one person with narcolepsy, you’ve met one person with narcolepsy.’ The real challenge was deciding how much literary license to take. I agonized over that. I really, really wanted it to feel authentic. In the end, I feel like it’s a believable portrayal of Joy’s version of narcolepsy.  

“As for podcasts, I’m a day-one listener of My Favorite Murder, and their meteoric rise to fame has been wild to watch. I’ve learned a lot from listening to them talk about the joys and pitfalls of sudden success, and Joy and Benny’s trajectory draws a lot of inspiration from that.

“Regarding the survival stories, since they host a comedy podcast, I basically just googled ‘dumb ways to die’ and ran with it. Those bits were a delight to write. 

“What surprised me most, once I completed my first draft, was how much of TSMSYL is about control—how we lose it, how we fight to get it back. Joy’s narcolepsy is the most obvious example: her body betrays her, forcing her to find new ways to navigate a life she can’t fully command. But it’s her relationship with Xander that pushes that loss of control to its most insidious extreme—the kind that creeps in slowly under the guise of love and partnership. Writing her memoir becomes the way she takes that control back, reclaiming her voice after years of having her story shaped by someone else.

“I recognize that most thrillers grapple with questions of control in one form or another, but I didn’t set out to write about it. I think my favorite part of drafting is the way the subconscious takes over—things just start to feel right on the page, and only later do I realize why.”

Of course, “control” is the thing that writers have the least of, when it comes time to actually find a publisher for their book. For Crum and TSMSYL, though, it was an occasion for, well, joy. I’ll let her tell you about it:

“Every published author loves telling this story. I love mine so much I put it in my acknowledgments section. I’m going to copy that here, and then add a little more context: 

‘Eighteen years ago, while living in a small Spanish Revival in Mount Washington beside a paparazzo and a judge, I decided to give this whole novel-writing thing a try. I’d caught the fiction bug long before, but I was a Dutch dairy farm girl with a business degree. Far too practical to let myself believe I could ever make a career in the arts. That all changed when I became pregnant with my son Mason. As the pregnancy progressed, I kept a journal of wishes for him, and at the top of the list was my hope that he would have the courage to pursue his dreams. Only then did it occur to me: If I wanted to lead by example, then why wasn’t I doing the same? 
‘Cue montage of the next two decades: online classes, a handful of moves, a second son, an MFA. Three literary ‘practice’ novels. A couple of close calls. A big relocation to Atlanta in 2021, where I stopped playing it safe and wrote the book of my heart. And finally, in 2024, the deal that made it possible for you to be reading these words right now.

‘A month after signing my contract, in the most tear-jerking full-circle moment of my life, Mason wrote about TSMSYL in an essay for one of his college applications. The prompt was to discuss a book that inspired him, so he turned it back toward my publication journey—about how a lifetime of watching me chase (and finally achieve!) my dreams has given him the courage to pursue his own. (He got in.)’

“As you can see, it was a long road. Those three literary practice novels were with a different agent—the first book got me my agent, and the next two died on submission. When I wrote TSMSYL, I just knew it was the one. I drafted it in a joyful daze and did one major revision before querying. My agent, Stefanie Lieberman, was the first query I sent out. She requested the full within an hour and offered representation in less than a week. She and her two incredible assistants are insightful readers and highly editorial. Over the next year, we did two developmental revisions and one line edit. We went on submission during my birthday week, and the offers started coming in immediately. It was a mind-boggling, wonderful experience—a true dream come true in every possible way.”

Now, she’s working on another “big-hearted thriller – this one about the fragility of memory and how difficult it is to build something lasting when the foundation keeps resetting. It’s about righting wrongs, risking everything for truth and finding hope in what’s left standing.”

Tiffany Crum is definitely left standing. And who knows? This story might save your life.

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