Katie Bernet once joked with her two sisters that, when identifying with the March sisters in Little Women, they were fortunate not to have a Beth.
Beth was the sister who died. For Bernet, that overshadowed everything else about her.
But researching Beth Is Dead, her contemporary murder mystery inspired by Louisa May Alcott’s novel, changed the author’s understanding of the character she had been least drawn to.
Speaking to about 20 people at the Mattapoisett Free Public Library on October 24, Bernet described how her affection for her own sisters and her growing appreciation of Beth shaped her debut novel.
Beth Is Dead became a New York Times bestseller and the inaugural selection for Reese Witherspoon’s Sunnie Reads book club. Nearly everyone attending the talk indicated they had read Little Women or watched a film adaptation.
After five unpublished manuscripts and a three-month break from writing, Bernet found her way to the idea through a “love–hate list,” an exercise suggested by Mattapoisett Library Director Jenny Martin. Martin, who moved to Mattapoisett from Dallas more than a year ago, knew Bernet through the DFW Writers’ Workshop. The exercise helped Bernet combine her interests in sisterhood, ensemble casts and mysteries.
Looking back, Bernet said the unpublished books had helped her develop her craft.
“I was just a much better writer by the time I wrote Beth Is Dead than I was with those other books,” she said.
The novel begins with Beth March’s death and follows her sisters as they try to uncover what happened. Beth’s own perspective appears in an earlier timeline, giving her a voice alongside Meg, Jo and Amy.
Initially, Bernet thought she would need to make Beth bolder and more ambitious. Then she encountered readers online who valued precisely the qualities she had overlooked: Beth’s preference for home, her appreciation of small pleasures and her willingness to care for others.
Bernet began to see strength in the way Beth faced circumstances she had not chosen while continuing to make room for the people she loved.
That discovery helped shape an unusual element of her novel. The March sisters’ father is an author who publishes a book called Little Women about his daughters. His fictional portrayals force the sisters to consider the difference between how others see them and how they understand themselves.
For Beth, that means pushing against an image of herself as passive and angelic. For Jo, whom Bernet reimagined as an aspiring writer and social media influencer, it means wrestling with the desire to be seen and heard.
During questions from the audience, Bernet explained that the father’s role also allowed her to explore children’s privacy and the public identities adults create for them.
Bringing the sisters into the present required careful planning. Bernet used a large spreadsheet to organize four narrators and two timelines, sometimes changing a scene’s narrator after discovering whose perspective supplied the strongest tension.
She also described abandoning about 30,000 words of an early version in which she had changed the sisters’ names. Keeping a safer distance from Alcott’s characters, she found, prevented her from fully pursuing the idea.
Asked about the audiobook, Bernet said she had been offered three narrator options for each sister and was pleased to get her first choice for all four voices.
Bernet’s storytelling career began in dance before a back injury helped lead her toward advertising. As a copywriter, she learned to tell stories within the limits of short commercials, then rose at 5:30 am to work on novels before heading to her job.
“I always really just wanted to tell my own stories and do something longer than 60 seconds,” she said.
Writing Beth Is Dead ultimately brought her back to a familiar story with a different understanding of its quietest sister. It has also brought her readers who say the mystery encouraged them to pick up Little Women for the first time.
Bernet’s appearance was sponsored by the Friends of the Mattapoisett Library and the Mattapoisett Cultural Council.
By Jeanne Hopkins