In this episode of Leaf by Leaf, Sophie takes us inside one of the most unsettling narrators in contemporary fiction — Eva Khatchadourian, the mother at the center of Lionel Shriver's We Need to Talk About Kevin. Writing letters to her estranged husband in the aftermath of her son's school shooting, Eva controls everything we know — and that control is exactly the problem. Sophie explores four craft techniques Shriver uses to make Eva's unreliability so devastating: the strategic gaps in her account, the rationalizations that confess more than they conceal, the way the novel positions the reader as juror, and how the letter form itself gives Eva cover to withhold the truth she can't face. For any writer working in first person, this is essential listening.

Today on Leaf by Leaf, we're studying Gabriel García Márquez and One Hundred Years of Solitude. Our craft topic is opening lines and the first chapter — specifically, how an opening earns a reader's trust, makes a contract with them, and pulls them forward into a story they didn't know they needed. But before we get into the craft, let me give you a quick overview of the novel itself — just enough to orient us for the conversation ahead.

In this episode of Leaf by Leaf, Sophie takes us inside one of the most structurally daring novels ever written, Kurt Vonnegut's Slaughterhouse-Five, to explore how a writer can dismantle chronology entirely and make it feel not just intentional, but inevitable. We dig into four powerful craft techniques: using form as argument, so that the shape of your story makes a claim about the world before a single character speaks; building an anchor moment that gives even the most fractured narrative a gravitational center; harnessing repetition and refrain to accumulate meaning in ways that linear momentum never could; and understanding what it means to let your narrator step briefly but unmistakably into the frame. Whether you write fiction or memoir, linear or non-linear, this episode will change the way you think about the relationship between structure and meaning, and send you back to your own work with fresh eyes.