The series offered a template – go to if you go on the pirate ship, go to if you open the door – that lent itself to telling 156 stories at once.
“I didn’t really have time to make it pretty,” McElhatton says of “Pretty Little Mistakes.” The book was “like ‘Alien’ coming out of my chest, and I just had to get it down.”Īn obvious influence on McElhatton was the “Choose Your Own Adventure” children’s books, a series she knew and loved.
McElhatton, 37, who has worked as a producer for Minnesota Public Radio and Public Radio International, says her book is “all the roads I didn’t take.”īut unlike her experience with the rejected manuscript, an admittedly purple novel set on the island of Sapelo off the coast of Georgia, McElhatton says she had four major offers for “Pretty Little Mistakes” in four days. From there, you (the novel is written in second person) keep choosing the next step – open a hummingbird sanctuary or open an orchid farm – until you wind up in a happy or a bad ending. McElhatton (it rhymes with “tackle Latin,” she says) starts “Pretty Little Mistakes” on the last day of high school – “the last time I remember being where I was supposed to be.”įrom there, the reader can decide to go traveling (as McElhatton did in real life) or go to college. Already in its seventh printing since being published in May, “Pretty Little Mistakes” has 50,000 copies in print. Billed as a “do-over novel,” it allows readers to choose which plot lines to follow to one of more than 150 endings. I was literally drinking a giant bottle of wine and trying to figure out where I’d gone wrong and what I should have done,” McElhatton recalls.īut the result was “Pretty Little Mistakes,” her hit debut book. “I wasn’t laying out the skeleton of a book or the structure of a book. When her first novel was rejected by publishers after six long years of writing, Heather McElhatton sat down and tried to figure out where “the train jumped the tracks.” She began diagramming her life’s choices on a discarded 6-by-10 hunk of linoleum.
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