BIG Book News Inside! 📖

Happy New Year Love and Laundry Readers!

I have big news to share today! About an hour ago, People previewed the cover for my next book!

Yes, that’s right. People. It’s almost like I’m hanging out in a very hip and intimidating nightclub with Nicole Kidman, Jennifer Aniston, and Kate Middleton. As one does. Because we have so much in common, obviously.

Maybe they’ll ask about my super cool winter boots and I’ll tell them I’m wearing a designer named Kirkland from my favorite clothier, the House of Costco.

Of course, it’s actually just my book cover hanging out at People, and not me at all, but still. I’m VERY excited about this. And best of all, I can finally share all the details!!!

Please cue the orchestra inside your head and play the theme music to 2001: A Space Odyssey.

Raise the velvet curtain!!! Here it comes!!! Da Da Da——-DA DUM!!!!

It’s called Behind White Picket Fences.

It comes out on June 9th.

The pre-order link is now live on Amazon, and you can actually pre-order it right now.

Isn’t it glorious? I love this cover SO MUCH and I’m so honored by this shout out today.

But what, you may ask, is this book actually about?

Well.

Kiersten Cleaver feels like she’s flunking Motherhood 101. Exhausted by travel sports, homework, and her son’s dyslexia, she joins forces with her neighbors, Rosamond and Piper, to drop out of the scholastic rat race and all activities for one year.

Together, they start the Beaverbrook Academy for Inquiring Minds in Kiersten’s kitchen, embarking on a journey back to the idyllic life they experienced as children, when phones were attached to the wall and kids played outside until the streetlights came on at dusk.

But the women quickly realize fractions aren’t their only problem. A sixty-year-old diary discovered in Kiersten’s basement raises unsettling questions about their neighborhood, their safety and the seemingly simpler past.

Their picture-perfect suburb disguises deadly secrets—and someone wants to keep them hidden. As unsettling events rattle their fragile utopia, Kiersten, Rosamund, and Piper face an impossible choice. And if they expose the truth, they put everything at risk: their children, their friendship, and their newfound community.

You’ll spot some of your friends from Friends with Secrets inside these pages. Once again, the story is set on the shores of the Potomac River in the Washinton DC suburbs, and once again, moms are the heroes of the story. Because as we all know, moms are the heroes of every story.

I think you’ll love it.

And that part—the wanting you to love it part—that was actually the hardest thing about writing this book.

When I wrote Friends with Secrets I’d been rejected so many times that I wasn’t really worried about what people might think of my book if it ever got published. Real readers seemed more like an impossible dream than an imminent reality. So I just wrote the book I wanted to read and hoped for the best.

And then Friends with Secrets became an Amazon bestseller and I signed a contract for two more books, and suddenly I felt the weight of expectations.

I thought about the incredibly kind emails I received from readers, from many of you in fact, strangers I now consider friends, and I thought about how I wanted you to enjoy this next book as much as you enjoyed Friends with Secrets. I thought about how I wanted this new book to sell as many copies as my last book so my publisher will keep giving me contracts to write more books.

And I thought about how awful it would be if I disappointed you or my publisher or myself. And when I thought about that, about expectations and the potential for disappointing people, it became really hard to write.

Writers call it the Curse of the Sophomore Novel. The second book under contract is often the hardest book any author will write, no matter how many unpublished novels we’ve written before. Because with the second book, we must learn how to be creative on a schedule with a looming deadline while carrying a fifty-pound pack of expectations.

For about two months, I was kind of paralyzed. I couldn’t write anything that seemed good enough.

And then a friend reminded me that expectations are resentments waiting to happen.

Expectations almost always set us up for failure. We can expect a nice Christmas, and then the whole family gets the stomach flu. We can expect a relaxing vacation at a beautiful resort and then our flights are cancelled and we end up sleeping on the floor at the airport instead.

We saddle the people we love with expectations when we want them to love the things that we love, instead of just allowing them to be who they are.

I’ve done this to my husband and children so many times. If only they’d just try Jane Austen or the Great British Baking Show or my Nespresso coffee machine, I know they’d love these things, because I love them.

My husband does this when he tries to convince me to stop using my paper planner and add all my activities to the electronic family calendar instead. That’s right. Electronic calendars for a luddite who is utterly mystified by both Instagram and the airplane mode function on my phone. (By the way, what exactly is airplane mode? Why do we have it? Will I crash the plane if I leave it off? And if regular cell phone mode is so dangerous, why are we all carrying it around in our pocket?)

My teenage sons do it when they tell me to take the short cut, even though it forces me to risk my life making a complicated left hand turn across two lanes of traffic in order to save a whole three minutes on the drive home.

And I do it to myself every January when I make the same insane resolutions, when I expect this year to be different.

Or worse yet, when I expect that this year I’ll somehow be different, that I will magically transform into the kind of person who exercises, loses weight, likes vegetables, gets organized, stops swearing, and remembers to bring those environmentally-friendly, re-useable shopping bags into the grocery store instead of just leaving them in the trunk, even though I have never, ever in all my years been this type of person.

I once worked in a newsroom with a man who sincerely believed that if you expect nothing, you’ll never be disappointed. He smoked a lot, and wore a trenchcoat, and thought that every elected official he interviewed was embezzling money and doing nefarious things. He was wrong about (most) of that, but I think he was right about expectations.

Freedom lies in letting go of other people’s expectations for us, and of our expectations for other people. And maybe most importantly, freedom lies in letting go of the completely unrealistic expectations we so often have for ourselves as women, as mothers, as workers, as children, as siblings, as friends, and as humans.

And that’s what I had to do in order to write this second book. I had to chuck all my expectations and shift my thinking.

I started thinking about my novel the way I think about this newsletter. Rather than worrying about disappointing people, I tried to think about giving people something instead.

Behind White Picket Fences began to feel like a present I was making for a friend, a homemade gift filled with all the things people said they liked about the first book. Humor. Suspense. Friendship. Relatable characters who feel like real people.

And as I wrote, I started to love my new book as much as I loved my old one. When I finished writing it, I printed the whole thing out. I sat down in a chair and started reading and realized that even though I knew exactly what was going to happen next (because I wrote it) I still wanted to keep turning the pages to find out what happened next. And that’s when I knew everything would be okay.

Thinking about the book as a present helped so much. Because as any mom will tell you, it’s hard to do something nice for yourself, but it’s easy to do something nice for the people you care about.

Thank you for being the people I care about. I hope you love the book I made for you with the construction paper and glitter glue of my imagination.

I also hope your most important resolutions are still alive and well as we push onward into 2026. This year I’ve decided to handle mid-January by just pretending I never made resolutions in the first place.

The notable exception is my resolution to eat more dark chocolate. I’m nailing this one.

And because dark chocolate is good for us, perhaps 2026 will deliver a rock-solid scientific study on the heretofore undiscovered positive health outcomes of buttercream frosting, lemon meringue pie, and Nutella.

We can always hope. It’s 2026 after all. We have AI chat bots, self-driving cars and robot- taxis. Anything is possible—and for this reason, the future is perhaps best regarded from a comfortable chair with a good book, a cup of tea, and very low expectations.

All my love,

Christine