All Her Little Secrets: A Novel

"Yes. I get asked to do a lot of blurbs. Very rarely, I’ll hear about a book, and I’ll want to read it. I wasn’t on their list for blurbs, but I said, ‘Can I get this book?’ Part of it is she’s writing in Atlanta and I’m thinking, ‘Who the hell’s writing in my city? I want to make sure she’s doing it right.’ Wanda is amazing. She is a lawyer, and she has never stopped working as a lawyer. She always wanted to be a writer, but she went the corporate route. She really knows that world. All Her Little Secrets is about a Black female lawyer working at a powerhouse corporate litigators’ office. She’s having an affair with her white boss. Early on, her boss gets murdered and she has to make a choice. ‘Do I want to pretend I don’t know anything?’ I love stories about the past coming back to haunt you. It’s also really a fascinating glimpse into corporate law, which, thankfully, I know very little about. It’s very cutthroat. It’s like the worst high school ever. It’s very tense. There’s also a racial component. Wanda Morris’s perspective is amazing. She really makes you think about those small things that we all take for granted. It’s like, ‘Come on, man, this is 2023 and we’re still doing this shit?’ As a reader living in Atlanta, it’s also fascinating to see the city I know so well through somebody else’s eyes. I’m a minority in Atlanta. It’s called a majority-minority city, because there are more Black people than white. It’s been that way since 1972. The Black power structures in the police department, the fire department, and the government are all there. It’s a side of the city that I don’t see, but Atlanta is a very integrated city. This is where Martin Luther King Jr was born. We have five historically Black colleges and universities, and they give us doctors and lawyers and other professionals who stay here in Atlanta instead of moving to New York or wherever. None of these books is saying, ‘I’m a social justice warrior.’ They’re not hitting you over the head with anything other than, ‘This is what life is for this character.’ To me, those are the best lessons. It is an amazing gift to see, as a reader. Everybody talks about memoir and literary fiction, saying, ‘It so moved me.’ That’s great but to be able to write about it and wrap it around this really fast-paced, gripping thriller is fucking incredible. It is a next-level skill to be able to do that. I’m in awe of Wanda. She’s great. This book has already been optioned by one of the cable channels. I rarely read a book and then want to see it played out, but I think this will be fantastic on the screen. It does. Perhaps because of her legal training, she can see around corners. At every step, she’s like, ‘I know what you’re expecting, and I’m going to do something different.’ Not all authors know how to do that. It’s easy to do the expected thing, but she doesn’t do that. It takes twice as much work but she wants it done right. I’m in awe of her."