In Bethany Joy Lenz’s debut fiction novel, a painter spends her days honoring ordinary women the world overlooked — ones whose deaths were caused or enabled by a system that ignores them.
The Betrayal of Cora Wexford, out Oct. 20 from Simon & Schuster, is set in the 1880s and follows Cora, a 38-year-old American who flees her life and relocates to London to make a living as a postmortem portraiture artist. She is later commissioned by a suffragist gallery owner to create a series of portraits of women who have been unseen and ignored in London. As she works to honor the victims of serial killer Jack the Ripper, she also becomes increasingly disoriented within her own relationship with the charming Miles Vale. The novel’s central question: Will anyone notice a woman being dismantled over time by someone sharing her bed?
For Lenz, the One Tree Hill alum who publicly told her story of being in a cult in her 2024 memoir Dinner for Vampires, the question is personal.
“I took some of my own experiences, some from women I know, and some I observed, and looked at the overarching themes. What does this manipulative, dark triad personality type feel like from the inside? I dealt with it in a cult, and I’ve been in several other relationships with it, not just romantic but friendships and family dynamics,” she tells The Hollywood Reporter.
Her memoir, she says, gave her “freedom in several ways.” Though it meant reliving a significant chunk of her life, revealing it publicly helped move her forward in “my own healing and growth.” Putting the memories on paper, then closing the book and putting it on a shelf, was “incredibly cathartic and healing,” she says.
Two years after its publication, Lenz has learned it helped others, too. Readers still write to her about their own experiences in high-demand groups, intimate partner relationships, workplaces and families. “It’s disheartening that this is still happening so frequently, but it’s heartening to know that not only am I not alone, but they’re not alone,” she says. “There’s no greater hope I could have had for that book.”
She has no interest in a memoir sequel (“I said what I needed to say”), but fiction, instead, has let her widen the lens on the story and continue to offer a voice for the voiceless.
“Let me take a look at all of these pieces and assemble something that is going to be very true to what me and so many others have experienced,” she says.
With her new Cora Wexford book, Lenz wanted to tell a story of manipulation, hidden agendas and charming men while also offering understanding to those who haven’t lived it.
“I wanted to explore my own personal feelings about how to heal [and] justice. What do you do with these kinds of experiences? What does it feel like when you feel like you’re going crazy? I wanted to explore all those things, but it needed to be dressed up. It had to be in a way that was yummy and exciting for a reader to read,“ she says.
Lenz’s solution was exploring it all in a psychological suspense novel, finding inspiration from storytellers she revered growing up like Agatha Christie and Alfred Hitchcock to those she devours now, including authors Gillian Flynn, Ruth Ware, Lucy Foley and Paula Hawkins. “I feel comfortable in that world. It’s fantastic in that world, and I just thought, let me just get into it here,” she says. The 1940s film Gaslight, with Ingrid Bergman and Charles Boyer, was her tonal jumping-off point, though she hopes her book is “a bit more ambiguous” than that movie. She has been calling Cora Wexford Neo-Victorian, with “a little bit of camp.”
Cora’s profession as someone who paints the dead was a deliberate choice. Lenz wanted her comfortable around grief, which “gives her an intelligence, a gravitas, an oddity” and lets readers get to know her quickly. Her arc runs from honoring the dead because she’s being paid to, to genuinely caring: “She wants to honor them and make sure that there’s something of their legacy that lives on.”
Then there’s Miles Vale, the charming stranger Cora falls deeper into trust with. “We all know a Miles Vale,” Lenz says. “They think they’re so special,” but “they’ve got no personality. They’ve got no internal life. They don’t exist.”
As she prepares for her story to publish, Lenz is open to revisiting Cora’s world but admits she has “a few other stories on my mind that may take precedence over that.”
“I’ve been a writer my whole life: songs, a book I started when I was young and didn’t finish, scripts, pilots, several musicals. I really enjoy researching any topic or timeline, and if there’s a human story to be told that pulls at my heartstrings, I’ll go there,” Lenz says. “I remember wanting to write an episode of One Tree Hill and never getting around to it. Writing is always pouring out of me, and this was a perfect example of preparation meeting opportunity.”
Writing, she says, is “all me. It’s all in my brain, which is perfect for an only child with some trauma responses, who would prefer to be in my house all the time and never speak to any human until I start feeling stir-crazy. Then I go out in the world and you can’t shut me up,” she laughs.
“I’m just so grateful that one of these dreams is coming true, and I’m living it right now with my novel,” she tells THR.
Whatever she writes next, her hope for Cora Wexford is simple: “I want this story to reach as many women as possible.”