What doesn’t kill you makes you…a survivor.

Joy Moore and Benny Abbott have been best friends for a very long time, although the relationship has had its ups and downs. Right now, it’s definitely up, though there are other worries.

In Tiffany Crum’s This Story Might Save Your Life, the two have a hugely successful podcast of the same name. It’s a comedy survival podcast, one of them proposing a seemingly impossible dire situation and challenging the other to figure a way out of it, but mainly it’s a platform for the kind of riffing and chemistry that has earned them 35 million downloads per month and a potentially life-changing distribution deal.

The negotiations have been dragging on, though, and they have other problems. Joy has been coping with narcolepsy; her producer-husband Xander has gotten increasingly controlling, and he’s always been a little weird about Benny, anyway; there’s been blowback about an ad partner who’s apparently been shipping out toxic food; and someone seems to be stalking Joy and posting candids of her all over social media.

And then comes the morning when Benny arrives at her house to tape a recording, and finds the place empty – no Joy, no Xander, a window shattered, leaves blowing around the living room. And a text on Benny’s phone from Xander: WHAT HAVE YOU DONE? 

The police want to know the same thing. The night before, someone using Benny’s login had tried to withdraw a very large sum of money from their corporate investment account and put it in Benny’s own account. Benny knows it wasn’t him, but what the hell is going on? And where is Joy? Frantically, he scrambles for answers, but everywhere he turns, the mysteries only deepen.

Joy – his partner, his best friend, the woman for whom he’s never allowed himself to express his true feelings – has been keeping secrets piled upon secrets. Not that he can blame her. He’s been keeping plenty of secrets himself. And so, he discovers, as everyone else around him.

Where it will all lead is a place that neither he – nor you – will guess.

This Story Will Save Your Life is told through different perspectives and timelines, and even chapters of an incomplete memoir. Filled with twists, surprises, and characters that leap off the page, it has plenty of tricks up its sleeve, but, more than that, it has a story that will strike straight into your heart.

Maybe that’s the biggest surprise of all.

“I’d written a few practice novels before this one—quiet, literary stories that didn’t sell,” says Tiffany Crum, “and I was starting to feel like maybe I’d wasted a big part of my life on this writing thing. I decided to give it one last try and write the kind of book that would make me happy, packed with everything I love.  

“At the time, I was bouncing back and forth between thrillers and rom-coms. I’d listen to audiobooks with adorable banter during the day, and at night I’d curl up with twisty thrillers full of tension and reveals. But what I really wanted was a book that could do both—heart and humor and that propulsive, can’t-look-away pace, all in one story. So that was the challenge I set for myself. 

“I wanted to write two people you couldn’t help but love, and then do something absolutely awful to them. (Oof, that would sound terrible out of context.) I was deep into several true-crime and survival podcasts at the time (shout-out to My Favorite Murder), so that world naturally found its way in, too. I drafted the book in six feverish weeks—it just poured out of me, all hope and excitement and love for these characters. I adored every minute.”

It helped that she had a lot to draw upon – her bio, for instance, says that she’s had “various jobs in the film industry”: 

“My experience working in Hollywood helped me build Xander’s character—he’s a failing producer, and anyone who’s lived in LA knows at least one of those. I mostly worked as an executive assistant for difficult people, and later as a bookkeeper for my husband’s small production company. He did a lot of behind-the-scenes shoots with A-list celebrities, and that definitely gave me some fuel for Joy and Benny’s sudden rise to fame. There are a lot of perks that come with celebrity, but it can be a very difficult life too. I wanted to capture that mix of glamour and vulnerability that comes with being watched.”

To read more of Neil’s review and discussion with Tiffany Crum, go here.