“Every time I wrote a tough scene in this book, I had to stop and go, ‘Oh my gosh, I just read about that, you know, two days ago in the newspaper,’ and it just made me think. “As I started to write the story, particularly because I had these two sisters, I had some room to explore a lot of these issues. “It wasn't that I set out and said, ‘Yeah, I want to do these topics,’ but I thought, ‘Wow, these seem to be running themes of problems that we are still grappling with today,’” she says. In addition to tackling racism, she explores religious attitudes toward gay people, a woman’s right to choose, and domestic abuse. Morris highlights how we continue to grapple, as a society, with the same problems.

Though the book has a historical setting, it deals with contemporary issues. She also listened to music from the period to help get her into the right headspace. The magazines helped her develop an ear for how people spoke back then. I also read a ton of old magazines, like Life and Ebony, Jet and Tan.” “They kind of opened up these floodgates of books and papers and all sorts of resources that I could tap into and research voting rights and racism in the Jim Crow South in the ’60s. “Once I decided on my topic, I walked in there, and I told the librarian what I was doing, and he said, ‘Ah, I got you.’ And they really did,” she says. She spent hours at Atlanta’s Auburn Avenue Research Library on African American Culture and History (AARL) doing background research. Morris did comprehensive research to make her 1960s setting feel as accurate as possible. “It's kind of like a little Easter egg for people who have read All Her Little Secrets, and they're like, ‘Wait a minute, I've heard that name before.’” The tie isn’t explicitly revealed until several chapters into the book. As an accomplished presenter and leader, she previously served as President of the Georgia Chapter of the Association of Corporate Counsel. “ decided not to market it as like a prequel because they don't want people to make the assumption, ‘Oh, I had to read one before I could read the other’ because they really are both standalone novels,” Morris explains. Morris is a corporate attorney, having worked in the legal departments of some of Americas top Fortune 100 companies.

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