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When Girls Talk Books
Are you ready for story time? When Girls Talks Books is a podcast with two best friends bonding between the pages. They give comprehensive reviews of books where even if you haven't read the book, you can still enjoy the story. Brace yourselves for a tornado of laughter and literary love! When Girls Talk Books is here.
When Girls Talk Books
Author Interview with Heather Colley Book Bites
We talk with author Heather Coley about The Gilded Butterfly Effect, tracing how glamour, power, and campus mental health collide through the entwined voices of Stella and Penny. The conversation moves from craft to consequence, ending on the sharp note of a fate that feels earned and haunting.
• debut novel context and linked short stories
• crafting Stella’s voice and rapid interiority
• dual protagonists merging by design
• psychiatry, self-medication, and system failures
• writing drug scenes without glamorizing harm
• cyclical relapse risk and ambiguous endings
• blackout structure and tonal balance with humor
• moral ambiguity in romance and the Jack reveal
• classic literature influences and unhinged heroines
• dedication to dad, rejection, and persistence
• lessons for students about status and myth
• upcoming collection Public Property and where to follow Heather
Make sure to like, subscribe, share, follow
Go and get The Gilded Butterfly. It is out on October 21st
Watch our full length episode if you haven’t yet
Editing done by Connor Luther @clfilms.co
Music by @thundercatlouis
Merch Here
Hi everybody, welcome back to another Book Bites episode. I'm Susie. I'm Kylie. And today we have a very special guest with us. We have Heather Coley, who is we are doing our first author interview. So thank you so much for being here with us today.
SPEAKER_01:Thank you so much for having me.
SPEAKER_00:Heather is the author of The Gilded Butterfly Effect. And this book. Oh my gosh. There's much sun pack.
SPEAKER_02:Um, and this is your first novel, correct?
SPEAKER_01:Yep, this is my debut novel, first one.
SPEAKER_02:Nice. And it showed um when I looked online you had done short stories prior, correct?
SPEAKER_01:Yeah, I do all short stories, and I have a short story collection coming out next year.
SPEAKER_02:Oh, okay, like a all-in-one.
SPEAKER_01:Yeah, yeah. So it's a collection of, I think, 10 stories that are all kind of interlinked. Oh, that's fun. That sounds really interesting. Yeah.
SPEAKER_00:Do you have a favorite or a character that you're particularly fond of? Because there was, I mean, there was a lot of characters in here, but there's a lot of main characters with so many different personalities.
SPEAKER_01:Yeah, I definitely I'm favorable towards Stella. I really like her. Um, I I enjoy writing in her voice, uh, partially because she's so unhinged. Um you can be as extreme as you want when you're writing from her perspective. Um yeah, I have an affinity for her for sure.
SPEAKER_02:I did notice, like when you're reading it, that it very much like you could feel the almost like, especially I think as a woman, like your brain goes a thousand miles an hour, and like, and this and that, and da-da-da-da-da. And I really felt like you could feel that as you're reading it, like her just kind of obsessively thinking, which I thought was really interesting, instead of being like her mind was moving a thousand miles an hour, like you got the inside actual thoughts of that, which I thought was cool.
SPEAKER_01:Thank you.
SPEAKER_02:So you have described Stella and Penny as like two sides of the same coin. Um, is there a moment while you were writing it that it felt like they kind of started to bleed in together?
SPEAKER_01:Yeah, I wrote the book so that it's kind of up to the reader how they want to understand these two characters, especially their relationship with one another. Uh, in my mind, I have them molding into one another increasingly as the book goes on, so that kind of by the end they seem somewhat like the same person and they're experiencing the same things. And then, of course, one of them, no spoilers, but one of them kind of crashes and burns. Um, but yeah, there it's meant to be kind of fluid between them.
SPEAKER_02:So, from my perspective, as I'm reading it, it felt like they do kind of mesh together, but it also felt like Penny had much more like there's a real, real problem here with her mental health, where it felt like Stella was a little bit more of that like party girl that kind of then created issues for her. Did was that kind of your thought process, or was that just my interpretation?
SPEAKER_01:Yeah, I I definitely think that that that that that's yeah, that's that's totally true of the two characters. They uh they represent kind of two different approaches to this sort of mental health care system that they're both embroiled in. Uh, Penny already has a lot of mental health issues that are untreated when she gets to the university, and she ends up in this really perfect storm with Stella, who uh loves manipulating her psychiatrist, which I don't know that Penny would do because her issues are very, very serious.
SPEAKER_00:When that f when I first saw that happening in the book, I went, oh, oh, oh.
SPEAKER_02:The self-medication was crazy from Penny.
SPEAKER_00:Yeah. So I don't know why I'm like scared to ask this question because I don't want it to come across like this wasn't enough. But the way that the book ends, I was curious if you were thinking about writing a little bit more about Stella's story.
SPEAKER_01:Yeah, it's it's a good question, and I agree that the ending is very ambiguous. It's not there's no definitive ending really. Um, so one of the short stories in my new collection coming out next year is from Stella's perspective. Um I've kind of written it so that you don't have to read the book before, but if you have read the book, you would recognize her voice and some of the things that she talks about. She, in that one, has gotten an internship in Washington, D.C. for the summer.
SPEAKER_02:Oh, fun. Okay, so one of the main topics in the book is obviously the drug use, the prescription drug abuse, and things like that. Um, how did you balance writing those scenes vividly about like the highs and the lows of it without kind of like glamorizing it? Like, is that something that you thought about when you were writing it? Because I do think it was done well, in my opinion.
unknown:Thank you.
SPEAKER_01:Yeah, I it's a good question. I partially wanted Penny to think that it is glamorous. And so I wanted there to be kind of a veil of glamour around it, which the girls think um is everything, and the readers obviously think is like crazy and nonsensical. I hope that from kind of the downfalls of these girls, like people won't think, oh wow, these this seems like a great idea. Um, rather the opposite. But I think if Penny kind of sees that this world is glamorous, then I I think that that would make sense for her too.
SPEAKER_02:Do you think, um, in your opinion, obviously it's not written. Um, but at the end, we do see Stella kind of continuing to go to the psychiatrist, and it says that she is clean from it. Do you think that there is a possibility that she may relapse? Because she's still in that kind of environment.
SPEAKER_01:She may well. And I we set up the ending so that you might kind of start the book over and think it's a never-ending cycle. Uh so, and especially because her psychiatrist kind of prescribes her more drugs, even as she's trying to escape it. So I I definitely see it as a as a secular thing for her, um, which might she might struggle with throughout all of her university life.
SPEAKER_02:Did you wrestle with like not showing certain scenes? Like if you felt like they were too triggering? Like, is there anything that you felt like might be too much? Because I do think the book is very candid about the reality of a lot of these things. Um, so is that something that you wrestled with? Is there anything that you decided not to put in that you thought might be too triggering?
SPEAKER_01:I I didn't kind of sanitize it on purpose because I think that can do a disservice to how traumatic and how very real these events can be for young women. It is very dark, so I would definitely like it's not the sort of book you want to bring to the beach that you want to read like to cheer yourself up, like be you know, be expecting a bit of bleakness. I I think it's important to show certain traumatic events in life as they are, and I appreciate literature that does that. So that's sort of the the technique that I follow as well.
SPEAKER_02:Sorry, I just have one more thing. I did think it was really, really amazing how in those scenes, whether it's like kind of the drug abuse or there's obviously assault involved in it, of like again, you're in the brains of the girls and like the blackoutness of it, of like this happened and then they're here and then they're there, and then this, and so I felt like that was very, very well done. And I really appreciated that because when you're in a moment that is so intense or traumatic, or you're under the influence, that is so real to like how you're actually feeling and thinking.
SPEAKER_01:Yeah, and I I try to structure it exactly that. Like sometimes it's just a blackout, which would be on the page, just everything ends, and you move on to the next chapter, and that's very much how it seems in their minds.
SPEAKER_00:Mine is actually not necessarily about the book, but to get to know you better a little bit when you're not writing this kind of intense book or going back and forth between these universities. What do you enjoy doing?
SPEAKER_01:I obviously like to read. I like to walk and run. Um, um, yeah, it's pretty, pretty standard hobbies. I I think people like often wonder if I'm like these girls, and I'm pretty like straight edge. I don't relate to them like a whole lot. Yeah, exactly. That's probably why I enjoy like being in their minds a bit. But yeah, I really like to be outside and I love reading. I'm getting my PhD, so I do a lot of uh like English literature stuff in general.
SPEAKER_02:And I have seen um on Heather's Instagram, in case anybody wants to follow her, she does post like recommendations based on certain certain things, and they're all a lot of classic literature and things like that. And I do I do enjoy that. I always look at them. So if anybody's looking for some book recommendations, you can go ahead and follow her. So, did you ever think about writing the book in the perspective of like a UK university, or was it always gonna be kind of that standard uh US kind of party atmosphere?
SPEAKER_01:I think you could do something similar with UK universities, which I think it is a little bit difficult to think about because Greek life feels so American culturally. But I do think that anywhere you have usually an elite university where students tend to be competitive and uh intense, you can get these kinds of behaviors. Obviously, it wouldn't be in a sorority house, but I think that you could transpose it really interestingly to somewhere like Oxford or Cambridge, for example. Um, I love I go to Oxford, so I love that campus and I love the university. Um, and I think there's a lot of fodder for kind of fictional exploration there, but I did think it had to be in a sorority house, so it kind of had to be in America, and I love the Midwest as a setting.
SPEAKER_02:Did you ever watch my Oxford year on Netflix? This is just kind of a side note.
SPEAKER_01:I didn't to be honest, oh god, I don't know. I didn't love the book. Um so I yeah, so I I read the book, like it came out years and years ago, and then it kind of like sprung back up. Um, but I actually did an Oxford year in undergrad. I spent my junior year in Oxford, so I think I was probably just too close to it. I was like, I'm I'm not having like beautiful affairs with my tutors, you know. What is this? This is not realist. I would promise something else here.
SPEAKER_02:So um at the ending, uh Stella's final narration of Penny is that um she flew and she crashed. Um how did you kind of prepare for that moment? And is that kind of always how you were gonna say it? Is to be very bleak and blunt, or how how was that kind of process to kind of conclude Penny and all that she'd been through?
SPEAKER_01:Yeah, I tend to gravitate toward writers who are blunt, who can also elicit emotion through being blunt. Like if you think of someone like Kurt Vonnegut, he writes some of the most tragic events with like a couple words. And sometimes I think that that can be the most effective way to communicate something really hard. Uh, so she was always gonna meet that end. I knew that kind of from the beginning. I always I wrote the ending like first after I had like one chapter, and I usually do that. Um, so that was always gonna be her demise. Yeah.
SPEAKER_00:Fair. I was so flabbergasted and like shocked to be totally transparent of reading along in the best way possible. Like that, yeah, it's been a little bit since a book has thrown me for a loop like that.
SPEAKER_02:Um I will say my scene, this is total spoiler, City. So if anybody hasn't watched our full episode or read the book, you need to go do that. Um, good old Midwestern. Oh my goodness. That had me in shambles. I oh my gosh. I did not see it coming, for one. Yeah. I want to think the best in everybody. So that's partly my fault. But we have golden retriever husbands. So I was over here believing him.
SPEAKER_01:Yeah. Yeah, I I'm glad that you had that reaction. That's like exactly what I was going for. I uh contemplated letting Jack be a good guy and letting Stella end up with a good guy who might help her heal. And then I was like, no. Really like that. Yeah, not weird. Um, so I did um turn him into a bad guy as well, unfortunately. Uh, but yeah, he was supposed to be one of these kind of nice all-American boys, which he is not.
SPEAKER_02:That threw me for a loop. I was so like, like literally. Do you think he ever tells Stella? Because in my brain, he doesn't. I think he's taking that to the grave. Yeah.
SPEAKER_01:Okay. I I actually would have thought that he would. I think he has much more of a conscience than some of the other fat boys in the book. And I think he might be overcome with guilt a little while later.
SPEAKER_00:And uh what it'll take a long time, and maybe it'll be like until they're married, they got three kids.
SPEAKER_02:Oh, that was crazy. Sorry, that was a bit of a tangent, but I was like, that I texted her about it. That had me messed up. So the book obviously talks a lot about therapy and seeking help for uh mental health issues. Do you see writing as a kind of therapy? Do you find it therapeutic at all?
SPEAKER_01:That's a great question. Yeah, I think writing can be very cathartic. Even if you are in if you're writing fiction, for example, I think it can be very cathartic. Uh the book is very hyperbolized. It it's not really, it's not supposed to be really realistic, it's supposed to be hyperbolic, but even then, just the act of writing it down, I think writing anything down can be yeah, really therapeutic. You can kind of explore the way that you feel, the way that you think, uh, much more clearly on the page, I think, than in in a lot of other circumstances.
SPEAKER_02:Did you find it fun being like so different from yourself? Because I think I would have really loved that. I'm very much on the same page. I'm not like personal note here. Reading about these girls just taking drugs was crazy to me.
SPEAKER_00:Um reading about what I chose to do in my early 20s, I was just like, wow, what the fuck is wrong with you?
SPEAKER_02:I it was so crazy. So did you like have fun kind of exploring that unhingedness of it because you are so different from your characters?
SPEAKER_01:Yeah, I have always been really fascinated by unhinged literary women. I remember like being in high school and reading The Awakening and being like, I didn't know that women in literature could be crazy. And I've always really liked that idea. And I think it's fun to inhabit that kind of um that mindset. Of course, the things that they feel and the things that they they think are rooted in reality and kind of some things that I think a lot of women share and think about a lot, but they're very grotesque and they're very extreme, and it's fun to explore that, and there's no limits because it's not you, they're totally fictional.
SPEAKER_02:Yeah, they can do whatever, they are doing whatever. Yeah, yeah. Um, so the book is dedicated to your dad. Uh, what role did he kind of play in your journey towards publishing the book and like how has he reacted after it's a finished product?
SPEAKER_01:Yeah, I uh really meant what I wrote in the dedication. He has read everything first, probably every bit of fiction that I've written, and that's saying something because I've written a lot of bad fiction um over the years. So that he was the first reader of much of that is really, really um extraordinary. He writing can be a really kind of tiring process, especially if you want to be traditionally published. It's a lot of rejection. He has always believed that I could do it. He has always liked this book, even when I had doubts about it. Um, so I owe so much of it to him, really.
SPEAKER_02:When you published it, since you went to also an American university, was he like, you okay?
SPEAKER_01:You alright? Well, I think that my parents and those close to me know that I like extreme characters. I like in my short fiction, my character is even more extreme. I like to embody these very strange, unhinged figures. And I think that they knew that. I also wrote a lot of the book while I was in college. So I think their line of thinking was if I were acting like these girls, I probably couldn't have read a novel. That's fair. Absolutely.
SPEAKER_02:That's fair. Many readers will probably either be reading this in school or kind of have that intrigue of this Greek life. Um, what do you hope that students kind of carry away from the story? And also what is something that like maybe they might change with their habits when it comes to it?
SPEAKER_01:Well, I think part of the point of Stella and Penny's relationship is that Penny thinks this is also amazing, and she thinks this is where she'll be happy. And obviously the reader knows, and even Stella and Penny know that that's not really true. Um, but if you're an outsider like Penny, you know, Stella might seem like the sort of person that you want to be. Um, she's beautiful, she's well liked, she seems to have a ton of fun. Uh so obviously I hope that people kind of understand that a lot of that is just fake and a lot of it is not rooted in reality.
SPEAKER_02:Stella and Penny obviously have a very interesting relationship in the obsession, sort of. Do you think it's obsession for Stella like wanting to protect her, or do you think it's more about like control for her? Because I kind of struggled with A the obsession alone, because they very clearly have this hypercharged relationship. But I couldn't figure out if it was more about control or not.
SPEAKER_01:I definitely think she sees Penny as her like last connection to the normal world outside of her sorority, and so she really values that even if she can't articulate that to herself. She depends on Penny for a bit of normalcy. And when Penny starts to interact with the fraternities and starts to interact with the sorority girls without Stella, I think Stella kind of freaks out because that doesn't really make any sense to her. So I definitely think um she sees Penny as really separate from that life, and the problems arise when Penny intermingles with all the other people.
SPEAKER_02:So do you think at that point, because she still is hyper-fixated on her in a way, do you think it's kind of more of a jealousy or almost like a resentment because she's changing?
SPEAKER_01:Well, I think it can be both. I think uh she has really complicated feelings when it comes to people like Tripp, when it comes to her her sorority sisters. So I think it's it's reasonable that she might feel a kind of really crazy jealousy when she sees Penny with Trip, which then kind of pisses her off because that doesn't really make sense according to their history. Um but I think uh what I wanted to do was show that kind of all of these emotions can be true at once, and these are the kinds of relationships that people have at that age, especially in these kinds of systems.
SPEAKER_02:Yeah. I I um very relaxed person, so I had a hard time being like, you girls need to chill, like oh my goodness. Our relationship would not have lasted. There's yeah.
SPEAKER_00:I just have a random comment about the part of the book when it was Parents' Weekend. I just want to say I loved the way you wrote it. Yeah. I just loved it. I I like I laughed a lot and it was so accurate. I really felt like I was watching a movie watching the mom get more and more wasted, and it was just so funny. And then how being a young woman that gets really irritated by her mom, it was so perfectly written the way that you're feeling in that moment. You're just like, oh my god, why are you here? And it's so funny.
SPEAKER_01:Yeah. Um, yeah, I I do think that the book needs some chapters that are a bit lighter, even though that chapter is like also dark as well. It it requires a bit of a breakup. And I changed the perspective there too, so you get a little break from the heads of Stella and Penny. Um, so it's more omniscient. Uh, but yeah, I really that was one of my favorite chapters to write as well.
SPEAKER_02:Okay. Um, I do think the book is very heavy. I felt it was very heavy, especially in the brain of two girls that you know have bad luck at the brain, as you say. Um so I did appreciate some of the lighter points of it. So you obviously read a lot of classic literature. Uh, which classic heroine would absolutely hate Stella, and which do you think she would get along with?
SPEAKER_01:Oh, that's a great one. Um Stella would love Lady Macbeth. Um, because Lady Macbeth is also manipulative, and she kind of like hates around her in a lot of ways. She has a lot of resentment. Um which classic uh literary woman would would hate Stella and Penny? It would have to be like um one of the Bennett sisters from Pride and Prejudice. They're so they're they're all about propriety, right? That's like one thing. And I just think I can't even imagine what like Jane Bennett would say if she like read from Stella's perspective. I I can't even imagine. She would have a heart attack. It's like unimaginable.
SPEAKER_02:So if you have anything that you would um like to say about the book, yeah, I um am very active on Instagram and TikTok, which yeah, you mentioned.
SPEAKER_01:So I'm doing my best to promote it as much as possible there, and then I have my kind of normal like literature content too. Um, I'm doing a kind of podcast tour, and then in the future, in February, I have my short story collection coming out, um, which I'll hopefully uh promote as well in the same way.
SPEAKER_02:Nice. Do you have that named yet, or are you still working on that?
SPEAKER_01:It's just named after the first story, which is called Public Property. It's they're all set in a school, a high school, and they're all inter interlinked with one another.
SPEAKER_02:Wow.
SPEAKER_00:I'm excited for that.
SPEAKER_02:Yeah, I'm like, put that down, put that down. Well, thank you so much for coming. Thank you for being flexible. Again, I apologize about that. Um and we appreciated you being our first author ever on the podcast.
SPEAKER_01:Yes. Thank you so much. I really appreciate it. It was so fun. Thank you.
SPEAKER_02:Okay, everyone, that'll be it from us. Thank you so much for joining.
SPEAKER_00:Make sure to uh oh go ahead. Make sure to like, subscribe, share, follow.
SPEAKER_02:Ah, we got it, we did the things. I was like, now you go do the things, that oh, and go get her.
SPEAKER_00:Most importantly, we saved it for last because it's the most important. Go and get the gilded butterfly. It is out on October 21st. October 21st.
SPEAKER_02:Um watch our full length episode if you haven't yet.
SPEAKER_00:Yes.
SPEAKER_02:Okay. Thank you so much. Thanks, everybody. Bye. Bye.
