The Twist: A Guest Post by Marisa Kashino

This gripping and darkly humorous debut novel examines the cutthroat housing market and just how far people will go in order to secure their dream home. Read on for an exclusive essay from author Marisa Kashino on writing Best Offer Wins.

It was the twist that came to me first.

Having recently signed up for a novel-writing workshop, I’d been trying to shake loose a worthy idea. As I walked into the kitchen one morning, the coffeepot brewing, it appeared in my head.

I looked at my husband: “What if someone was so desperate to buy a house, she…”

I can’t tell you the rest, obviously. That would spoil the book. But in that moment, I felt pretty sure I might be on to something — and after 15 years in journalism, I was hardwired to fear getting scooped. If I didn’t sit down and try to write this, I was certain someone else would do it first.

So began three fevered months of shutting myself away in the home office on weekends, hammering out the first draft of Best Offer Wins. (Shout-out to my husband for walking the dogs and reminding me to eat!)

Sure, the fear of being beaten kept me going, but I was delighted to discover an even bigger source of motivation: Writing this novel was incredibly fun. I had never written fiction before — when I signed up for that class, I wasn’t sure what to expect, but all week long, while working as an editor at The Washington Post, I couldn’t wait for Saturday so I could dive back into the manuscript.

Crucially, real estate was a topic I already knew a lot about. As a reporter, I’d covered it for many years, including during the particularly deranged market that resulted from the COVID-19 pandemic. And as a millennial, the housing crisis has always felt like a defining problem of my generation (practically everyone I know either can’t afford homeownership at all or has had to compete with other offers to win a house). As I crafted the character of Margo Miyake — the obsessive, past-her-breaking-point thirtysomething at the heart of Best Offer Wins — I drew on this plentiful supply of real-life source material.

Of course, after 11 lost bidding wars and nearly two years of house-hunting, Margo’s tactics reach extremes that (hopefully) could only appear in a work of fiction. Nonetheless, I do think her general frustration that achieving the American dream is this insanely, soul-crushingly hard will ring true for a whole lot of readers. As will the constantly simmering rage she feels, largely as a result of being a woman trying her damnedest to have the Instagram-perfect life — complete with the dream house, yes, but also the baby that she and her husband have been having so much difficulty conceiving.

As a writer, allowing Margo to lean hard into that rage and behave very, very badly was extremely cathartic. I hope it’s fun for readers to tag along for this wild ride, too!