[Interview] with Jaime Parker Stickle

by Leanne Phillips

Jaime Parker Stickle’s debut novel Vicious Cycle is a thriller set in the Highland Park neighborhood of Los Angeles, California. After two teenage girls are found hanged in a nearby park, former investigative reporter and new mother Corey Tracey-Lieberman is outraged. The girls’ murders are immediately blamed on street crime and quickly disregarded as unsolvable…or unworthy of the time, money, and effort necessary to solve them. Unfulfilled by her job as a spin instructor and battling postpartum anxiety, Corey sets out to solve the murders with her infant son in tow. Stickle’s Vicious Cycle is an engaging and entertaining roller-coaster ride with generous doses of humor. It is sure to please readers of the thriller genre. At the same time, it is character driven and layered with nuanced observations about racism, workplace harassment, sexual assault, mental health, and the gentrification of small family neighborhoods. I see Vicious Cycle sitting alongside novels by Gillian Flynn (Sharp Objects), Paula Hawkins (The Girl on the Train), and Liane Moriarty (Big Little Lies).

Jaime Parker Stickle is a busy woman. She is a writer, an actor, a podcaster, and a full-time university professor teaching film, television, and podcasting. She is a wife and mother, and she and her husband own and operate a vacation rental business. She describes Vicious Cycle as her love letter to Los Angeles.

I recently had a chance to sit down with Jaime Parker Stickle to talk about Vicious Cycle as well as sisterhood, motherhood, and what it means to belong to a neighborhood.

[Kelp Journal] The first thing I’d like to ask you about is your dedication. You dedicate your debut novel Vicious Cycle to all women. Why did you choose that dedication?

[Jaime Parker Stickle] It was important to me. It was a hard decision because my husband has been such a great support. But I talked to him about it, and he was completely supportive. I grew up in a house where I was taught you can’t trust women. I was taught that women aren’t your allies. They’re your enemy. They always want something from you, and they’ll steal from you, and don’t trust women. The only women you can trust are your sisters. And I rebelled against that because all I ever wanted was to be friends with women and have a large posse. I joined the cheerleading squad in sixth or seventh grade and maintained that through the end of high school. I joined a sorority in college. I was dedicated to women in a way that made me the odd one in my family, and it caused a lot of problems. But I’m still that way. I believe women. I surround myself with strong women, and I always cherish my friendships in a way I wasn’t taught to. I want women to know I was writing for them. I want women to know specifically that there’s a little bit of Corey in all of us.

[KJ] Do readers ever express to you that they think your book is autobiographical? Do they think Corey is you?

[JPS] Yes. I even had a reader reach out and say, “I hope you’re not still married to that man.” And I was like, “I’m sorry. What? No, no, this isn’t me.” I’ve put my experiences into the character, but the character isn’t me. I’m very much in love with my husband. He is amazing.

I think part of that is because women tend to write with such deep emotion. It’s about the character as much as it’s about the story. We put in the good, the bad, and the ugly. We go deep; we tap into our humanity. There was a lot of crying when I wrote the book because I had to go so deep into my emotions and feelings as a woman to create a woman who was fully realized. And so I think because that’s so real and tangible, readers automatically assume it must be memoir. It must be autobiographical.

So yes, I have seen that, and I have received some apologies. Things like “I’m sorry you went through that.” And I say, “Thank you. I am not Corey.” But, yes, I did have postpartum panic disorder. My husband is not Evan, and I am still with him and very much in love because he is very supportive. But that being said, even my male characters are a little bit me in certain relationships. I relate to every single character. Like, Diane is me, and Kat is me, and Monique is me. Every single one of them has a part of me in them or something I’ve experienced. Something I haven’t experienced—I find that so perplexing and interesting. And also, I think we have to question male authors who ask that and say, “Are you going deep enough with your emotions? Because nobody’s asking if you are your characters.”

[KJ] I really love that you said that, because I think that is it. In A Room of One’s Own, Virginia Woolf talks about how women need to stop trying to emulate men in their writing and to write like women. And I think you’ve done that. You’ve written as a woman. And I think that makes so much sense, that because you’ve got so much great interiority and emotion and all that, maybe it feels more like a real person to them.

[JPS] I love my agent and my publisher and my editor for that. I had others read the manuscript and want things taken out because they thought it would be too sensitive for the readers, and women wouldn’t like it. “If you say this, women won’t understand. Women will judge you.” And I thought to myself, I’m not writing for those readers, then. I’d love everyone to appreciate this book, but that’s not possible. At the same time, I think my book resonates with more men than I anticipated. I’ve had male readers reach out to me saying their wife has gone through this. They stood by her while she went through this. There has been such an outpouring of male support for the book and for Corey that I don’t think it alienates. I think it’s given men security to read this book and to enjoy it and to have a response to it.

[KJ] I wanted to ask you about the point of view you chose. You wrote this book in first person. Can you tell us why you chose that point of view?

[JPS] Yes. Because mental health is very much inside one’s own mind. I didn’t want the judgments of other characters, of other people, to interfere with Corey’s sort of descent into postpartum. I think that needed to be explored in the first-person point of view so that readers, in particular male readers who haven’t had this experience, could understand how it works. Postpartum is a mental health issue and not a disease. It’s a mental health issue caused by hormones that often happens to women after they’ve given birth. It’s hormone related. And we need to examine that. It’s a thing. And I wanted men to hear it through the lens of the woman going through it because when we go through it, we talk to ourselves, and we don’t let other people know, because we’re afraid they’re going to take our baby away. We are afraid there’s something wrong with us. We think we’re dying or something bad is going to happen, and we spiral, and it’s all internalized. If I hadn’t written it in the first person, we wouldn’t have been able to hear it or have it articulated in the same way.

[KJ] How did it feel for you to have to reinhabit that, because in order to write the book, you had to revisit a time of when you went through something similar.

[JPS] I had such a great support system. My husband was great. My husband brought me to work with him. My therapist found me a psychiatrist who sat with me for three hours. I had people who, when I asked for help, jumped hurdles to get me the help I needed, including my neighbors in Highland Park. I had a lot of help. I wanted to go back to those moments, and I knew that I had safety rails up. If something happened by going back and having all those feelings and revisiting them, I could get pulled out of it very quickly. My husband would talk me through it, and I could go to the doctor. I also take medicine for anxiety to this day. I did come off it after a couple of years, and within a year I was having panic attacks again. Because that is a normal thing to have happen once you begin to have them. Once you have OCD, it doesn’t just miraculously go away in your life. I mean, for some people, that may be the case, but that’s not the norm I would say, from all the learning I’ve done and the teaching I’ve received, and from having gone through it myself with my therapist and psychiatrist. But it scared me at first to revisit that. Not for myself, but for the judgment of others.

[KJ] That’s my next question. How afraid were you of that potential judgment?

[JPS] I wasn’t as afraid, I think, because I’m talking about myself. You know, I think it’s scarier to talk about my mother or to talk about my family or to talk about my relationship with my sisters in a book, even if it’s fiction. I always fear they’re going to see themselves in it. But what was scarier was people not being receptive to this kind of story. I did have some pushback when drafts were read, and not in the way that I thought I would get it, but more like “Maybe you’re telling too much.” And my response to that is, then let it be too much. Let readers decide it’s too much. If I can affect one person through being too much, I decided that was enough, and so my early beta readers, the women I gave it to, it affected them in a good way. I definitely wasn’t afraid so much internally, but it was the external factors that I feared the most. I was afraid of what people would think of me or think of Corey or think of me for having written a character like this.

The biggest thing writers are told is to read, read, and read more in the genre they’re writing in. And I did that extensively, and I still do that extensively. And I’ll always come back to Stewart O’Nan’s The Speed Queen, which was written in the 1990s and was a huge hit. The protagonist is a horrible, unlikable mom who’s in prison for Bonnie-and-Clyde-type adventures. Terrible things—bringing her baby into situations with drugs and robbing and guns and shoot-outs. And I thought, you’re telling me that the realistic version of a woman who cares too much for her child is worse than Stewart O’Nan’’s The Speed Queen, which I love. I wondered, is it because it’s written by a man, so we know it’s facetious and not true? What is the difference between that and my book? So, yes, I was fearful of the opinions of the community. I feared that more than I feared going back and visiting those very trying times. If I could affect one person, that was my goal. And I had to stick with it and not care about the way it made me feel or the way other people perceived it. It was just that one person I was writing for the whole time.

[KJ] I think that shows. And I think that’s one of the things that makes your book so good—you knew who your intended reader was. And if other people love it, too, great. And I think another thing that makes your book so good is that you were brave enough to go there. You may have been afraid to write about these things, but you did it anyway. You were brave writing about postpartum. But you were brave about other topics, too, like workplace harassment, sexual assault, and gentrification in Los Angeles. I wonder if you might have a little to say about your feelings and your experience with gentrification. How did that topic make its way into your book? That’s not a very well-phrased question.

[JPS] No, it’s great. It’s open-ended and broad. And I think that is sort of how I see gentrification because it happens differently, city to city, state to state. My husband and I were so excited to buy our first home, and it happened to be in the Highland Park neighborhood, where my book is set. I’m deeply in love with the people of Highland Park. I’m deeply in love with Highland Park, and I loved our home there. We did have to sell it just before COVID, but we purchased our first home in a part of Highland Park that had not been gentrified yet. And we didn’t even really understand what was happening in the community. Like, we were obtuse. We were obtuse white people who thought, oh my gosh, we can finally afford to buy a house. And this is the area we can afford to buy our first home in. And we loved it. I never saw myself as the white interloper or the white trespasser. And I was never made to feel that way.

So, we get into our house. I love it. I love my neighbors, who are all Spanish speaking, some bilingual, some not bilingual. But what happened was the things that we loved started getting taken over by the HGTV sort of economy of people and corporations flipping homes and selling them. I remember a multigenerational home on our block; it went into foreclosure. Some people from out of state bought it up in foreclosure and flipped it into an Airbnb. This teeny, little bungalow starter home was boarded up like a castle. They might as well have built a moat and drawbridge. They put these high walls around it and these security systems. It was so eye-opening to me, these white people coming in, clutching their purses week in and week out, thinking that the neighborhood was unsavory. And I realized, oh my God, these people literally think that this town and the brown people that live on this street are the trouble. I was gobsmacked, and I felt really shitty because I had contributed to it by being so ignorant and by coming in and purchasing a home without having done my homework or learning about what’s happening.

I’m not saying that I shouldn’t have bought the home. I’m not saying that I shouldn’t have lived there. What I am saying is I should have done my job and researched what was going on and been an advocate for change far sooner than I learned to. And that’s the truth of it. Gentrification caused so much homelessness in that area. It’s so hard to talk about because sometimes I just don’t even feel adequate or eloquent enough to talk about it. And all I can do is write about the wrong that I see but not necessarily have the answers. I’m part of the working middle class, to be frank, and so sometimes I don’t even know how to address a situation. All I can do is cite what I’m visibly seeing and write about it.

[KJ] I think that’s a big thing. Bringing awareness, and that is one of many layers in your book. It seems like there’s this trend toward more literary genre fiction, but it’s still genre fiction. But beginning to incorporate some of the elements of literary fiction, like being more character driven and the layers of meaning.

 [JPS] I listened to a lecture that Steph Cha gave, and she’s a crime writer and an attorney, and she said—and it’s stuck with me for, God, what is it, eight years now?—she said all literary fiction starts with crime. You can’t read a novel that’s literary that doesn’t have an element of crime to it. And I thought back to every novel I had ever read, and I can list, oh, this crime happened in that book. Oh, this crime happened. And then she went a step further and said that it’s usually over land. Land has been the thing that has instigated crimes and wars and unjust killings and murders, and that’s what gentrification is. It’s a crime over land, housing. I’ll always remember that. And that’s why I think you’re definitely beginning to see that now because I think genre fiction is pushing that element further in its storytelling for sure. Everything starts with crime. It all starts with land. Steph Cha is brilliant, and I highly recommend her books.

[KJ] You’ve written a sequel to Vicious Cycle. Is there anything you can share with us about book two or what is in store for Corey?

[JPS] I can say that we pick up just shortly after where Vicious Cycle ends. There’s not a huge time gap. Which is something I promised my son I would do. Even though he hasn’t read the book, he loves the character of Jacob, the baby. But yeah, I think Corey’s growth continues, and I think that’s the most important thing, that even though she’s still combating some mental health issues, she continues to grow as a person and as a mother.

[KJ] Do you have a publication date you can share yet?

[JPS] Not yet. Possibly summer of 2026, but I can’t say that definitively yet. But the title should be announced soon, and the cover reveal should be announced soon.

[KJ] I wanted to end by asking you about endings. Liska Jacobs once told me she has a martini to celebrate when she finishes a book.

[JPS] That’s adorable.

[KJ] And I once heard Melissa Febos say she buys a cake and eats the whole thing when she finishes a book. Do you have a celebration ritual? What did you do when you finished your book?

[JPS] I started putting my son to bed again. Dad had to take over for a while. So, for me, it was getting back into the bed with my little guy and putting him to sleep, scratching his back. It’s like, “Oh, the book’s done. Mom doesn’t have to stay up late tonight. I get to put you to bed.”

​Jaime Parker Stickle is a writer, actor, podcaster, and professor of film and television at Montclair State University. She is the author of the gripping thriller Vicious Cycle: A Corey in Los Angeles Mystery and is the creator and host of the true crime investigative podcast The Girl with the Same Name as well as the hilarious podcast about side hustles Make That Paper. Jaime lives in Los Angeles with her husband, son, and fur babies.

Leanne Phillips lives, reads, and writes on California’s Central Coast. Her debut novel-in-linked-stories, California Is an Earthquake, is coming in fall 2027 from Sibylline Press. Leanne’s work has appeared in the Los Angeles Times, The Rumpus, the Los Angeles Review of Books, Kelp Journal, and The Coachella Review.