“You know, I was just reading that John Grisham gets his inspiration from the obituaries. And I was like, 'Oh! Stealing my thing!' I read the obituaries every day. I was really intrigued by the number of younger people that started showing up in the obituaries about five, six years ago. I feel like the world is okay, or at least, things are as they should be, if you read the obituaries and it's all elderly people who lived wonderful lives. But when you see a really young person on the obituary page, it's so jarring. When I was writing Lock and Key, I wasn't dealing with the death. I was just dealing with the abandonment. So The Rest of the Story was just the next step of that story and [its] also where our society has gone. We're in this epidemic right now. And a lot of kids are dealing with it. I think we're going to see more books covering this now, not less.”