Their joint novel We Are Not Like Them follows two lifelong friends navigating a ripped-from-the-headlines tragedy.
Jen, who is white, married a police officer and is entrenched in the PPD inner circle.
Riley, who is Black, is a newscaster returning to her hometown for a big new gig.
Christine Pride and Jo Piazza.Julia Discenza
How has your professional relationship evolved to this point?
It was a very unique writer-editor relationship; we really helped develop that book’s story line together.
Then we went on book tour together, which is unique, but it helped our friendship blossom.
‘We Are Not Like Them,’ by Christine Pride and Jo Piazza.Atria Books
We started talking about how we had never seen a true-to-life, authentic interracial friendship on the page.
Police shootings had been in the headlines more and more, and it was very much on my mind.
We knew that writing this book individually wouldn’t be nearly as strong as if we wrote it together.
But once we started the process, the momentum built.
A thousand things had to fall into place for this book to exist.
We were texting each other dirty, sexy things at, like, Christmas dinner with my mother-in-law.
And what was important to you in their development?
PIAZZA:We also decided pretty quickly to place the story in Philadelphia.
But also Philadelphia is a city that has a lot of reckoning to do when it comes to race.
We tried to bring those things into the book.
But she had to be naive for some friction to grow in their friendship.
We interviewed cops, mothers of shooting victims, newscasters since Riley is a newscaster.
We just listened to these other voices, and also to each other, as much as we could.
Did anything about those interviews surprise you?
PRIDE:A blind spot for us, frankly, was the world of policing.
How insular the policing community is.
The police officer is the villain, he is the worst."
But we wanted to show the nuance in everything, including the policing.
The ending was the biggest struggle we had.
In our original ending we didn’t have many consequences for the officers involved, because that mirrored reality.
But we worried we were going to disappoint people who were looking for consequences.
We’ve been friends since I was a crime reporter in Yukon.
Again, it’s so many shades of gray.
We knew that the book would not work if we came across like we had an agenda.
Everything needed to be grounded in how these women relate to one another.
You know, the broken homes, growing up without certain things.
As a Black woman, I felt strongly that this character of Riley would not fall into those tropes.
She can be from a happy, stable, middle-class home and have a nice life.
What did you want to show in their each coming to that realization?
It’s just impossible.
What will you do, together, to celebrate publication day?
PIAZZA:We haven’t talked about this yet, but we need to figure it out.
