For an author hailed as the “master of suburban scandal,” Aggie Blum Thompson isn’t quite what you’d expect. Given the settings of her books, it’s tempting to picture Thompson as a stereotype of her readers, or a minor character in one of her own stories. (Yoga mat, Stanley Quencher, Land Rover, fingers snapping out “call your manager” at the drive-through attendant in Morse code.)
Thompson is something else entirely, a self-styled iconoclast who sees the suburbs not just as a verdant background for sexy drama between affluent people, but as a canvas for drawing out hidden darkness and hypocrisy. The parent of two kids and author of four published crime novels turned down an offer to be interviewed on her home turf in Bethesda, opting instead to meet over tea in Dupont Circle.
“I spent my childhood trying to escape the suburbs,” Thompson tells City Paper. “Then I ended up in the suburbs … People do end up in the suburbs for reasonable, right reasons.”
“But there’s this teenager in me that just wants to poke holes in it,” she adds.
Thompson’s latest novel, You Deserve To Know, is a moody thriller in soccer mom drag. It’s about the impact of a shocking act of violence on three close-knit families who live in a community outside D.C. As the crime’s aftermath unfolds, secrets are revealed and the friendships that hold the families together fray at the seams. It’s told from the various perspectives of the women characters—Gwen, an allegedly perfect wife; Aimee, a workaholic misfit; and Lisa, whose pathological craving for connection makes her as dutiful as she is dangerous.
You Deserve To Know was inspired in part by Thompson’s fascination with “couples that spend too much time together,” she says. According to the author, this is a common phenomenon in the ’burbs. “Just through convenience, you end up socializing with people who have kids the same age as [yours],” said Thompson. “So I thought, okay, [these characters] are really tight. They’re intimate with each other, they’ve been to each other’s houses. But do they like each other? How strong are those friendships, really?”
The novel subjects Gwen, Aimee, and Lisa’s friendship to a grisly stress test, flipping between the three women’s POVs but denying us direct insight into what’s happening in the minds of the husbands. It’s an effective format for combining dramatic irony (the reader has more information than any one character at a given moment) and suspense. “My goal of the book is that you want to keep reading,” she says. “It gnaws at you like a mental puzzle, keeps you occupied, thinking, What is going on?”
Thompson accomplishes that goal. You Deserve To Know is an engaging, twisty read that plays out like a soapy streaming series with literary flair. It also includes a couple of real-life Maryland landmarks that those familiar with the area are likely to recognize.
Her training for writing about crime came in the form of a career as a reporter. Thompson worked the cops and courts beat and contributed to outlets including the Boston Globe and the Washington Post. During that time, Thompson kept two notebooks: one for jotting down information that was relevant to her day job and another for dialogue snippets and plot ideas. Some of those notes helped inspire her early attempts at fiction writing.
I Don’t Forgive You, Thompson’s first novel, published in 2021, is a paranoid psychological thriller about a woman who moves to the D.C. suburbs and finds herself fighting for her life after she’s accused of murder. Common denominators shared by I Don’t Forgive You and You Deserve To Know also crop up in Thompson’s other books, All the Dirty Secrets (2022) and Such a Lovely Family (2024). The D.C. metro area, suburban strife, and shocking murders are her signatures.
“I like to think that I kind of elbow the boundaries of my genre,” Thompson says. “My third book and my first book are radically different in terms of tone, but they all take place in that kind of world.”
Thompson’s preoccupation with the dual nature of suburban life is somewhat comparable to filmmaker David Lynch, especially in the wake of the auteur’s death. Lynch, like Thompson, wrote about families that might seem perfect, but are hiding something behind the Rockwellian facade of their perfectly staged Christmas cards photos.
When asked if she’s a fan of Lynch, Thompson blurts a confession that almost sounds like something Gordon Cole would have hollered across the Double R Diner in Twin Peaks.
“That’s why I’m tired! I was just watching Blue Velvet last night,” Thompson admits. “Isabella Rossellini is phenomenal … and Dennis Hopper, you know? ‘Heineken? Fuck that shit!’”
In addition to Lynch, Thompon’s work has also been influenced by authors Peter Swanson, Louise Candlish, and Lisa Jewell.
Thompson has sold options for film or TV adaptations of her first three novels. And with You Deserve To Know dropping on March 11, she’s already thinking about her next book. (Versed as she is in journalistic jargon, Thompson asked that any discussion of that next book’s story be kept off the record.) But writing is a compulsion for Thompson—something she says she’d do even if it never made her a dime. That said, she recommends that writers starting out in fiction decide early on what they want to accomplish given that the publishing business has a tendency to lock people into lanes.
“If you just want to write for yourself, you can do that. But [sometimes] people want to write for themselves and be commercially successful and be critically acclaimed … It doesn’t really work like that,” Thompson says. “I wanted to be published so badly that I learned a genre and wrote in the genre.”
To be clear, that’s “career advice” for the aspiring published author, not “writing advice,” which Thompson hates. She disagrees with books on writing that say authors need to sit alone in a room, door closed, wrestling with a blank page for at least an hour a day.
“I write my books sitting in bed, at the kitchen counter, in the parking lot while my kids are doing sports,” Thompson says. “If a book comes out of it, you’re a writer.”
Then Thompson corrects herself. She does have one piece of writing advice: Authors should read, especially outside their genres. For fiction writers? She recommends a deep dive into narrative nonfiction, with special mention given to The Worst Hard Time by Timothy Egan and Lost Girls by Robert Kolker.
“The only rule is do it well … You can do anything if you do it well, ” Thompson concludes. “You can get away with murder.”
by Will Lennon
3/6/2025