TV Series "Girl Taken" Premieres on Thursday, January 8th, 2026
Book synopsis of "Baby Doll" (TV Series Title: Girl Taken) by Hollie Overton:
You've been held captive in one room.
You've been mentally and physically abused every day since you were sixteen years old.
Then one night you realize your captor has left the door to your cell unlocked.
For the first time in eight years you're free. This is what happens next. . .
Escape was just the beginning.
Hollie Overton is a television writer and producer who has written for Shadowhunters, Cold Case, and The Client List. Her debut thriller, Baby Doll, became an international bestseller and has been published in eleven countries. Her second novel, The Walls, was released in August 2017. An identical twin, Hollie grew up in Kingsville, Texas, and now lives in Los Angeles with her husband and their rescue dog, Stevie.
Here is the Novelpro Junkie interview with Hollie Overton, author of Baby Doll:
You've been held captive in one room.
You've been mentally and physically abused every day since you were sixteen years old.
Then one night you realize your captor has left the door to your cell unlocked.
For the first time in eight years you're free. This is what happens next. . .
Escape was just the beginning.
Hollie Overton is a television writer and producer who has written for Shadowhunters, Cold Case, and The Client List. Her debut thriller, Baby Doll, became an international bestseller and has been published in eleven countries. Her second novel, The Walls, was released in August 2017. An identical twin, Hollie grew up in Kingsville, Texas, and now lives in Los Angeles with her husband and their rescue dog, Stevie.
Here is the Novelpro Junkie interview with Hollie Overton, author of Baby Doll:
1. What inspired you to write “Baby Doll”?
I’m an identical twin, and in Baby Doll the story centers on twin sisters, Lily and Abby. Lily is the one who is taken. When I first had the idea for the book, there was a very well-known abduction case in the United States involving a man named Ariel Castro, who had kidnapped three young girls and held them captive for ten years. They eventually escaped, and one of them even had a child while in captivity.
There are many stories about abductions, but what struck me personally was imagining how devastating it would have been for me and my own twin sister to be separated like that, and how profoundly it would have changed both of our lives. Lily, the sister who is taken, faces unimaginable challenges, but I was equally interested in the experience of the sister left behind. Abby blames herself for Lily’s disappearance because they had argued on the day Lily was taken, and that guilt becomes its own kind of imprisonment.
That emotional dynamic became the jumping-off point for the story. I don’t think I ever consciously set out to write a thriller—that wasn’t my intention at the time, even though I was working as a dramatic television writer. What I did want was something gripping and entertaining. Clearly, that approach resonated.
2. Was “Baby Doll” the original title or were there other titles?
So, Baby Doll was always going to be like just the working title. I don't know if I love it, but I couldn't think of anything that I liked more. Then, when I sold the book, my publisher in the US was, “well, we may change the title. We're not sure, but we'll just go through the publishing process”. And then we got to the very end stages and apparently, they run their titles by their marketing department and the marketing department loved it. So, it just never ended up changing. So, right after it was published, my husband mentioned paper doll—we were talking about paper dolls and how they disappear—that would have been a good title. I told him, “Now, you think of it” [referring to an alternative book title]. But now you think of it, it kind of ground me after all this time. I feel like I wouldn't have thought of a different title.
3. What was your writing schedule when you wrote “Baby Doll”?
I'm a night owl. I have ADHD. Now, I have three kids. I didn't have kids then.
I wrote the first part of this book (Baby Doll), the first 90 pages in a week or two. It was so fast. I ended up taking a class and a teacher guided me through the process. I was given notes every 50 pages. So, at the time I was writing the book, I'm still a TV writer. I would mostly write at night, after my husband went to bed. So, I’d usually write from 9 p.m. to one or two, sometimes three a.m. Those were like the perfect writing hours for me. Sometimes I would write every single day, I’d write a lot like 10, 12, 15 pages and then not write on the book for a week because it wasn't my primary job.
Now, I write every day, whether I'm writing books or TV. I write Monday through Friday. But back then it was sort of just whenever I had time to work on that particular project.
4. When you wrote the novel, did you map out the plots ahead of time or did it come to you while you wrote the story?
When you're writing TV, it’s a very structured process, you're in a writer's room and you're writing with a group of people. So, you’re creating the story and the outline for the episodes. That's how I write TV. When I went into novels, there was something so freeing about not having to do that, like just being able to like being free. It was just me sitting down going, “okay. What's this next chapter? what will happen next?”
I probably got to about a hundred, like 140 pages or so and then I didn’t know what the end of this book would look like or the culmination. Then I created a loose outline for the last half, but it was very loose. It wasn't full on scenes. It was just enough for me to be like, “okay, I see what the last hundred pages could be”.
5. At what point did you realize this story needed to be told from multiple perspectives rather than just Lily’s?
From the start, I always knew I wanted to have the twins have their perspective and their mother. It's interesting because when I wrote Rick [captor], when I wrote his first chapter, I was in this class (the teacher— now a very good friend of mine and a creative mentor, a writer named Eduardo Santiago). I brought in pages to the workshop in his class. I'm a little hesitant because he’s [Rick] so awful. I'm not sure I'm comfortable writing him. We workshopped the pages and Eduardo was like, “you have to include him. He's like such a terrible character, but it's so compelling”.
I never really made a conscious choice not to do the multiple characters.
I had one more character in the book, the sheriff Tommy. My agent, she was like giving me notes, she said, “I don't think you need him. I think you can cut him”. He was slowing the book down, which was great advice.
I've written three novels since Baby Doll and only one of them has been a single character
novel. I've done multiple POVs in all of them, which to me, is a little bit cheating, because I like to be in other people's heads—maybe it's from the TV experience, I like to be in other people's heads. I find it a little more challenging to just have one character. My fifth book has multiple POVs too. So, I haven't changed that yet. I enjoy writing multiple POVs and I think it's fun for the reader too, to experience multiple POVs throughout the book, guessing what's going to happen and getting to know them.
6. What was the biggest craft lesson you learned writing your debut that you carried into later books?
I think part of it is to not be too precious with your work. There's this tendency for all authors to want it to be perfect. You're going to get so many notes along the way. You're going to get notes from an agent. You're going to get notes from your editor. It's ever evolving. I've had friends that said “I'm writing a book” and four years later, I've written two books and they're still writing that one book. I mean, it worked out for Donna Tartt, it works out for certain writers to spend 10 years on one novel. But I think you've got to be courageous and get your work out there.
The other lesson is don't let other people's ideas of what stories are important or what people want to read. For instance, when I first started telling people about the idea for Baby Doll, they were like, “well, have you heard of Room?” Obviously, I’d heard of Room at the time. It was a best-selling novel and it was about a girl held captive. But my book is so different. My book opens with the young woman with Lily escaping (the TV show is a little different). It wasn't a book about captivity. My book really is about the twins and the sisters’ relationship to me. So, I think if I had let what people were saying— “Oh, it might be too similar”—get into my head, I might've limited myself from getting it [the book] out there. I think there is value and there is room for so many stories to be told, even if they have similar themes. That's really what I learned.
7. Congrats on “Baby Doll” being adapted into a TV Series by Paramount+, what scene from the book are you excited to see on the screen?
I actually got to be on the set this summer of the filming. As a producer, they were very inclusive. I got to read all the scripts. I got to weigh in on some changes that happened from book to screen. The one thing I didn't get to see, but I'm excited about, and I've seen the show—I’ve watched the early cuts—is the sisters’ relationship. That’s what I’m really excited to see. They're going to advertise the hostage part and the thriller part probably more, but for me, as long as they maintain their [sisters] relationship, their bond, the core of what they have together, I'll be happy. They cast real life sisters who are both incredible actresses—Tallulah and Delphine Evans, they are so good. I wasn't a mother when I wrote this book, and now I am, and I feel so anxious and nervous even though I know everything that's going to happen.
When I was on set, I got to watch some of the captivity stuff and Alfie is very creepy and very sinister as Rick. He has this very quiet intensity that was so good for the character. That was something I was really excited to see and then getting to be on set and see it come to life was really amazing.
8. Could you tell me your memorable moment on set ?
Overall, it was just such an exciting experience. Obviously as a TV writer and producer, I've been on a lot of sets in my career. But there's something really special about just something that was in your brain that was on the page and it was 12 years ago that I wrote the book. Most authors, after 12 years, don't expect their book to come back around and become something new.
I think it was just like those little moments of getting to see—for instance, your name on everything, and seeing the title of your book on everything, getting to meet all the cast and crew. Being introduced with, “this is the author who wrote…”
There's a particularly dark scene where one of the characters, Rick the captor, is telling the girl he's holding, Lily, why she's going to stay and why she's not going to hurt herself or end her. I wrote stuff like that, but it made it so much more real to see it acted out and just the way the director shot it and everything was so special.
I mean there's so many moments, just being part of the cast and the crew and the production team. They were so kind and so welcoming. I know a lot of authors sometimes don't have the best experience when they have their work adapted, but mine was like a dream.
9. What are your thoughts on Jill Halfpenny and Alfie Allen playing Eve and Rick respectively? Did you ever meet them or any other cast member on set?
Alfie, I got to meet. He's just so nice, so friendly, so easy going. We were filming in the north of Spain, in the middle of the woods. It's hot; it's the middle of summer. I was only there for a couple of days, but he was very gracious, so kind, so sweet, he took pictures with my sister and I. When I heard he was cast—obviously everybody knows him from Game of Thrones, he's just such a recognizable name and a face—I was really excited because I knew people would get excited about the show because of his casting.
I didn't get to meet Jill Halfpenny, but she's actually from the same area my husband is—Newcastle. My husband's a Geordie. It was so nice to have a Geordie cast. It kind of gives it the American English connection. She's so good and I've obviously seen her in a lot of stuff. She's a big star in England and my sister-in-law was over, visiting from England a few weeks ago and she's like everybody's so excited because they all love Jill half-penny so I just thought it was like the perfect casting. I even messaged her after I watched the show and I [told Jill] was like “you are so good”. She just broke my heart and I said as a mom the show hits differently now than it did when I wrote the book. She was amazing so I couldn't have gotten luckier with the casting.
10. Could you talk about your experience being the writer and co-executive producer of “All-American: Homecoming”?
That was one of the best experiences that I ever had—I’ve been working in TV for a long time. It was three years of my life on the show. The creator, Nkechi Carroll, did All-American and then she did another show called Found. She just fostered such a great creative atmosphere, everybody had a voice.
All American Homecoming was about a girl at an historical black college, HBCU and a boy…she plays tennis, he plays baseball, it’s a love story and it's also about the friends of the people that she meets. It’s like a college 90210. But we got to touch on so many important issues and representations that we don't always see on TV. It was just the best group of writers. I was very fortunate.
I got the job right after I had identical triplets—my daughters. I'd really been struggling with this idea of “can I be a mom and a writer?” I knew I could, but will the industry allow it? Being on that show [All-American: Homecoming] proved to me that I could, and it helped me set this great example to my daughters that, “You can do this. You don't have to give up this career that you love. You can balance it all, work to balance it all”. It was really special. The show got canceled last year [2024], but it was still one of the best experiences that I've had. I got to be on set and I got to film baseball; I got to meet Coco Gauff. She was in my episode, before she won the US Open. I'm in this minor league baseball field, like watching them film a baseball game I wrote, just so many amazing moments. I just feel so lucky as a girl from a small town in Texas.
11. Could you talk about your experience when tennis star Coco Gauff came to film that episode:
We were doing this episode about our tennis team. It was based on a true story that happened in Atlanta where an all-black field hockey player was stopped by the police and racially profiled. It was very upsetting. They were taken off the bus; they had their belongings searched. We really wanted to highlight that. So, we told the story about our all-girls tennis team. It was really about the star of our show pushing back against that, creating this movement. Coco Goff came and played herself in the episode. It was just so cool to get to have her there. This was her first acting experience—which I read later she said she didn't think she was very good—but we loved her. I thought she was great. It was the first time she'd ever been on TV. It's so intimidating, but she was a pro. She showed up, she knew her lines. Everybody was so excited to have her. I got to talk to her mom—my husband is a tennis coach. I asked her, “How did you make her [Coco Gauff] into a superstar? Her mom gave me some background. It was really fun.
I remember feeling so proud of her when she won the U.S. Open a few months later. I was cheering in my living room. She's just such a great representative of the sport.
12. You also worked as a writer and producer in the book-based TV series “Shadowhunters”, could you talk about your experience with author Cassandra Clare and the series in general?
She [Cassandra Clare] was initially in the early part of the season, she was involved. She was in the writers' room, but as the show went on, I think she was just busy with books. Her involvement was less. We knew what a fan base Shadowhunters has, so our goal was to always stay true to the books while also understanding that you have to adapt things. We were very careful to try to make the mythology work. That was like a really cool experience because prior to that, I'd been on set of, and like the shows that I'd done had been based in reality.
Obviously, Shadowhunters is about half angels, half humans who fight demons. It’s not based in reality. I mean, the reality that we know anyway, who knows. I'm not a sci-fi person, I'm not well versed. There's certain sci-fi I'll watch, but I've never seen the whole Lord of the Rings movies. I've seen the first Star Wars and that's it. So, we'd be in the writer’s room and someone would make a reference and I'd be like, “what's that from?” And they'd say, “Star Wars, Holly. It's from Star Wars”. At the end of the day, we watched Star Wars because it's like good versus evil. I felt like I was the voice of the character moments, the emotional level, is the audience going to care?
At this point, I’d love to be on another vampire [ fantasy TV series]. I enjoyed writing that and it was escapism as a writer too. So, it was really great. We filmed in Toronto, which was really fun. The crews were so great. It was definitely different from filming in LA because it was much colder. It's so cold on set, but it was nice to have those different experiences.
13. What do novelists misunderstand about screenwriting—and vice versa?
That’s a really great question. I don’t know if it’s a misunderstanding, but I think a lot of novelists, when they hear that someone wants to adapt their work, become very protective of it. I’ve tried to acquire or option novels before, and often the author will say they want full creative control and that nothing can be changed. At that point, you kind of have to walk away, because some things that work on the page just don’t work onscreen. Film and television require changes to make the story more cinematic, and that can be hard to accept.
I understand why authors hold on so tightly—it’s incredibly personal work. I actually hoped to write some episodes of Baby Doll, and the producers were open to it, but because of guild rules and legal timing issues, it didn’t work out. In retrospect, I’m almost glad I didn’t write the series, because I think I would have struggled to let go of certain things I loved about the novel, instead of allowing someone else to make the necessary changes.
I also think screenwriters tend to romanticize what writing a book is like—sitting in a café, typing away—but it’s actually a very lonely process, and it takes a huge amount of time. You have to be willing to sit with it for eight, ten, even twelve months, and that’s still considered fast. Often it takes closer to two years, and you just have to be okay with that.
A lot of my screenwriter friends say they could never do it, and I always tell them that most people probably could write a book—but it’s an endurance test. The real question is whether you can stick with it. I’ve noticed that many screenwriters fall into the habit of writing ten pages, then endlessly revising those same ten pages instead of moving forward. They spend all their time editing, and as a result, the work never progresses.
14. If you have your own talk show, who would your first three guests be (dead or alive)?
Dolly Parton, Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, and Virginia Woolf.
15. What was the first book that made you think for days after reading it?
There are so many books I could name, but there’s one in particular that really stayed with me. I think I read it when I was around twelve or thirteen. It’s called Beach Music by Pat Conroy. He also wrote The Prince of Tides, which most people know because it was adapted into a very famous movie.
After I read Beach Music, I went back later and was surprised to see how negative many of the reviews were. A lot of them called the book a mess, and some even claimed that Conroy didn’t really write it himself—that it was heavily shaped by editors. I don’t know whether that’s true or not, but none of that mattered to me as a reader.
What stayed with me was how beautifully tragic the story is. It almost feels like six books in one. At its center is a man dealing with the loss of his wife and a deeply painful love story, but the novel expands outward into her family history—her parents’ experiences during the Holocaust—and his own background growing up in a Southern family marked by alcoholism. It weaves all of this together into a powerful exploration of love and generational trauma.
It’s not necessarily a book that will go down in literary history, but it’s one I’ve read three times, and it still stays with me. As a kid—a preteen—it made me feel things very deeply and showed me what books are capable of doing. It was one of those early reading experiences that made me think, this is the power of storytelling.
16. Last question, in one word how would you sum up your experience writing, releasing, and now the TV adaptation of “Baby Doll”?
Good one—well done. I think I’d describe it as a “full-circle” moment.
It really does feel full circle for me, because this is one of those things that reminds you how unpredictable a creative journey can be. That’s something I always tell writers, especially when I’m coaching them: you never know where your work is going to lead, so you have to get out of your head and write the thing that scares you.
When I got the email from Clapperboard last year—almost exactly a year ago now—asking if I wanted to option the book, it felt like one of those messages you get all the time. You have lots of conversations where someone says, “Hey, we’d love to talk about a project,” and most of them don’t go anywhere. But to actually see this one move all the way through to a finished trailer—to have it reach that point has been incredibly satisfying. It really does feel like a true full-circle moment.
I’m an identical twin, and in Baby Doll the story centers on twin sisters, Lily and Abby. Lily is the one who is taken. When I first had the idea for the book, there was a very well-known abduction case in the United States involving a man named Ariel Castro, who had kidnapped three young girls and held them captive for ten years. They eventually escaped, and one of them even had a child while in captivity.
There are many stories about abductions, but what struck me personally was imagining how devastating it would have been for me and my own twin sister to be separated like that, and how profoundly it would have changed both of our lives. Lily, the sister who is taken, faces unimaginable challenges, but I was equally interested in the experience of the sister left behind. Abby blames herself for Lily’s disappearance because they had argued on the day Lily was taken, and that guilt becomes its own kind of imprisonment.
That emotional dynamic became the jumping-off point for the story. I don’t think I ever consciously set out to write a thriller—that wasn’t my intention at the time, even though I was working as a dramatic television writer. What I did want was something gripping and entertaining. Clearly, that approach resonated.
2. Was “Baby Doll” the original title or were there other titles?
So, Baby Doll was always going to be like just the working title. I don't know if I love it, but I couldn't think of anything that I liked more. Then, when I sold the book, my publisher in the US was, “well, we may change the title. We're not sure, but we'll just go through the publishing process”. And then we got to the very end stages and apparently, they run their titles by their marketing department and the marketing department loved it. So, it just never ended up changing. So, right after it was published, my husband mentioned paper doll—we were talking about paper dolls and how they disappear—that would have been a good title. I told him, “Now, you think of it” [referring to an alternative book title]. But now you think of it, it kind of ground me after all this time. I feel like I wouldn't have thought of a different title.
3. What was your writing schedule when you wrote “Baby Doll”?
I'm a night owl. I have ADHD. Now, I have three kids. I didn't have kids then.
I wrote the first part of this book (Baby Doll), the first 90 pages in a week or two. It was so fast. I ended up taking a class and a teacher guided me through the process. I was given notes every 50 pages. So, at the time I was writing the book, I'm still a TV writer. I would mostly write at night, after my husband went to bed. So, I’d usually write from 9 p.m. to one or two, sometimes three a.m. Those were like the perfect writing hours for me. Sometimes I would write every single day, I’d write a lot like 10, 12, 15 pages and then not write on the book for a week because it wasn't my primary job.
Now, I write every day, whether I'm writing books or TV. I write Monday through Friday. But back then it was sort of just whenever I had time to work on that particular project.
4. When you wrote the novel, did you map out the plots ahead of time or did it come to you while you wrote the story?
When you're writing TV, it’s a very structured process, you're in a writer's room and you're writing with a group of people. So, you’re creating the story and the outline for the episodes. That's how I write TV. When I went into novels, there was something so freeing about not having to do that, like just being able to like being free. It was just me sitting down going, “okay. What's this next chapter? what will happen next?”
I probably got to about a hundred, like 140 pages or so and then I didn’t know what the end of this book would look like or the culmination. Then I created a loose outline for the last half, but it was very loose. It wasn't full on scenes. It was just enough for me to be like, “okay, I see what the last hundred pages could be”.
5. At what point did you realize this story needed to be told from multiple perspectives rather than just Lily’s?
From the start, I always knew I wanted to have the twins have their perspective and their mother. It's interesting because when I wrote Rick [captor], when I wrote his first chapter, I was in this class (the teacher— now a very good friend of mine and a creative mentor, a writer named Eduardo Santiago). I brought in pages to the workshop in his class. I'm a little hesitant because he’s [Rick] so awful. I'm not sure I'm comfortable writing him. We workshopped the pages and Eduardo was like, “you have to include him. He's like such a terrible character, but it's so compelling”.
I never really made a conscious choice not to do the multiple characters.
I had one more character in the book, the sheriff Tommy. My agent, she was like giving me notes, she said, “I don't think you need him. I think you can cut him”. He was slowing the book down, which was great advice.
I've written three novels since Baby Doll and only one of them has been a single character
novel. I've done multiple POVs in all of them, which to me, is a little bit cheating, because I like to be in other people's heads—maybe it's from the TV experience, I like to be in other people's heads. I find it a little more challenging to just have one character. My fifth book has multiple POVs too. So, I haven't changed that yet. I enjoy writing multiple POVs and I think it's fun for the reader too, to experience multiple POVs throughout the book, guessing what's going to happen and getting to know them.
6. What was the biggest craft lesson you learned writing your debut that you carried into later books?
I think part of it is to not be too precious with your work. There's this tendency for all authors to want it to be perfect. You're going to get so many notes along the way. You're going to get notes from an agent. You're going to get notes from your editor. It's ever evolving. I've had friends that said “I'm writing a book” and four years later, I've written two books and they're still writing that one book. I mean, it worked out for Donna Tartt, it works out for certain writers to spend 10 years on one novel. But I think you've got to be courageous and get your work out there.
The other lesson is don't let other people's ideas of what stories are important or what people want to read. For instance, when I first started telling people about the idea for Baby Doll, they were like, “well, have you heard of Room?” Obviously, I’d heard of Room at the time. It was a best-selling novel and it was about a girl held captive. But my book is so different. My book opens with the young woman with Lily escaping (the TV show is a little different). It wasn't a book about captivity. My book really is about the twins and the sisters’ relationship to me. So, I think if I had let what people were saying— “Oh, it might be too similar”—get into my head, I might've limited myself from getting it [the book] out there. I think there is value and there is room for so many stories to be told, even if they have similar themes. That's really what I learned.
7. Congrats on “Baby Doll” being adapted into a TV Series by Paramount+, what scene from the book are you excited to see on the screen?
I actually got to be on the set this summer of the filming. As a producer, they were very inclusive. I got to read all the scripts. I got to weigh in on some changes that happened from book to screen. The one thing I didn't get to see, but I'm excited about, and I've seen the show—I’ve watched the early cuts—is the sisters’ relationship. That’s what I’m really excited to see. They're going to advertise the hostage part and the thriller part probably more, but for me, as long as they maintain their [sisters] relationship, their bond, the core of what they have together, I'll be happy. They cast real life sisters who are both incredible actresses—Tallulah and Delphine Evans, they are so good. I wasn't a mother when I wrote this book, and now I am, and I feel so anxious and nervous even though I know everything that's going to happen.
When I was on set, I got to watch some of the captivity stuff and Alfie is very creepy and very sinister as Rick. He has this very quiet intensity that was so good for the character. That was something I was really excited to see and then getting to be on set and see it come to life was really amazing.
8. Could you tell me your memorable moment on set ?
Overall, it was just such an exciting experience. Obviously as a TV writer and producer, I've been on a lot of sets in my career. But there's something really special about just something that was in your brain that was on the page and it was 12 years ago that I wrote the book. Most authors, after 12 years, don't expect their book to come back around and become something new.
I think it was just like those little moments of getting to see—for instance, your name on everything, and seeing the title of your book on everything, getting to meet all the cast and crew. Being introduced with, “this is the author who wrote…”
There's a particularly dark scene where one of the characters, Rick the captor, is telling the girl he's holding, Lily, why she's going to stay and why she's not going to hurt herself or end her. I wrote stuff like that, but it made it so much more real to see it acted out and just the way the director shot it and everything was so special.
I mean there's so many moments, just being part of the cast and the crew and the production team. They were so kind and so welcoming. I know a lot of authors sometimes don't have the best experience when they have their work adapted, but mine was like a dream.
9. What are your thoughts on Jill Halfpenny and Alfie Allen playing Eve and Rick respectively? Did you ever meet them or any other cast member on set?
Alfie, I got to meet. He's just so nice, so friendly, so easy going. We were filming in the north of Spain, in the middle of the woods. It's hot; it's the middle of summer. I was only there for a couple of days, but he was very gracious, so kind, so sweet, he took pictures with my sister and I. When I heard he was cast—obviously everybody knows him from Game of Thrones, he's just such a recognizable name and a face—I was really excited because I knew people would get excited about the show because of his casting.
I didn't get to meet Jill Halfpenny, but she's actually from the same area my husband is—Newcastle. My husband's a Geordie. It was so nice to have a Geordie cast. It kind of gives it the American English connection. She's so good and I've obviously seen her in a lot of stuff. She's a big star in England and my sister-in-law was over, visiting from England a few weeks ago and she's like everybody's so excited because they all love Jill half-penny so I just thought it was like the perfect casting. I even messaged her after I watched the show and I [told Jill] was like “you are so good”. She just broke my heart and I said as a mom the show hits differently now than it did when I wrote the book. She was amazing so I couldn't have gotten luckier with the casting.
10. Could you talk about your experience being the writer and co-executive producer of “All-American: Homecoming”?
That was one of the best experiences that I ever had—I’ve been working in TV for a long time. It was three years of my life on the show. The creator, Nkechi Carroll, did All-American and then she did another show called Found. She just fostered such a great creative atmosphere, everybody had a voice.
All American Homecoming was about a girl at an historical black college, HBCU and a boy…she plays tennis, he plays baseball, it’s a love story and it's also about the friends of the people that she meets. It’s like a college 90210. But we got to touch on so many important issues and representations that we don't always see on TV. It was just the best group of writers. I was very fortunate.
I got the job right after I had identical triplets—my daughters. I'd really been struggling with this idea of “can I be a mom and a writer?” I knew I could, but will the industry allow it? Being on that show [All-American: Homecoming] proved to me that I could, and it helped me set this great example to my daughters that, “You can do this. You don't have to give up this career that you love. You can balance it all, work to balance it all”. It was really special. The show got canceled last year [2024], but it was still one of the best experiences that I've had. I got to be on set and I got to film baseball; I got to meet Coco Gauff. She was in my episode, before she won the US Open. I'm in this minor league baseball field, like watching them film a baseball game I wrote, just so many amazing moments. I just feel so lucky as a girl from a small town in Texas.
11. Could you talk about your experience when tennis star Coco Gauff came to film that episode:
We were doing this episode about our tennis team. It was based on a true story that happened in Atlanta where an all-black field hockey player was stopped by the police and racially profiled. It was very upsetting. They were taken off the bus; they had their belongings searched. We really wanted to highlight that. So, we told the story about our all-girls tennis team. It was really about the star of our show pushing back against that, creating this movement. Coco Goff came and played herself in the episode. It was just so cool to get to have her there. This was her first acting experience—which I read later she said she didn't think she was very good—but we loved her. I thought she was great. It was the first time she'd ever been on TV. It's so intimidating, but she was a pro. She showed up, she knew her lines. Everybody was so excited to have her. I got to talk to her mom—my husband is a tennis coach. I asked her, “How did you make her [Coco Gauff] into a superstar? Her mom gave me some background. It was really fun.
I remember feeling so proud of her when she won the U.S. Open a few months later. I was cheering in my living room. She's just such a great representative of the sport.
12. You also worked as a writer and producer in the book-based TV series “Shadowhunters”, could you talk about your experience with author Cassandra Clare and the series in general?
She [Cassandra Clare] was initially in the early part of the season, she was involved. She was in the writers' room, but as the show went on, I think she was just busy with books. Her involvement was less. We knew what a fan base Shadowhunters has, so our goal was to always stay true to the books while also understanding that you have to adapt things. We were very careful to try to make the mythology work. That was like a really cool experience because prior to that, I'd been on set of, and like the shows that I'd done had been based in reality.
Obviously, Shadowhunters is about half angels, half humans who fight demons. It’s not based in reality. I mean, the reality that we know anyway, who knows. I'm not a sci-fi person, I'm not well versed. There's certain sci-fi I'll watch, but I've never seen the whole Lord of the Rings movies. I've seen the first Star Wars and that's it. So, we'd be in the writer’s room and someone would make a reference and I'd be like, “what's that from?” And they'd say, “Star Wars, Holly. It's from Star Wars”. At the end of the day, we watched Star Wars because it's like good versus evil. I felt like I was the voice of the character moments, the emotional level, is the audience going to care?
At this point, I’d love to be on another vampire [ fantasy TV series]. I enjoyed writing that and it was escapism as a writer too. So, it was really great. We filmed in Toronto, which was really fun. The crews were so great. It was definitely different from filming in LA because it was much colder. It's so cold on set, but it was nice to have those different experiences.
13. What do novelists misunderstand about screenwriting—and vice versa?
That’s a really great question. I don’t know if it’s a misunderstanding, but I think a lot of novelists, when they hear that someone wants to adapt their work, become very protective of it. I’ve tried to acquire or option novels before, and often the author will say they want full creative control and that nothing can be changed. At that point, you kind of have to walk away, because some things that work on the page just don’t work onscreen. Film and television require changes to make the story more cinematic, and that can be hard to accept.
I understand why authors hold on so tightly—it’s incredibly personal work. I actually hoped to write some episodes of Baby Doll, and the producers were open to it, but because of guild rules and legal timing issues, it didn’t work out. In retrospect, I’m almost glad I didn’t write the series, because I think I would have struggled to let go of certain things I loved about the novel, instead of allowing someone else to make the necessary changes.
I also think screenwriters tend to romanticize what writing a book is like—sitting in a café, typing away—but it’s actually a very lonely process, and it takes a huge amount of time. You have to be willing to sit with it for eight, ten, even twelve months, and that’s still considered fast. Often it takes closer to two years, and you just have to be okay with that.
A lot of my screenwriter friends say they could never do it, and I always tell them that most people probably could write a book—but it’s an endurance test. The real question is whether you can stick with it. I’ve noticed that many screenwriters fall into the habit of writing ten pages, then endlessly revising those same ten pages instead of moving forward. They spend all their time editing, and as a result, the work never progresses.
14. If you have your own talk show, who would your first three guests be (dead or alive)?
Dolly Parton, Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, and Virginia Woolf.
15. What was the first book that made you think for days after reading it?
There are so many books I could name, but there’s one in particular that really stayed with me. I think I read it when I was around twelve or thirteen. It’s called Beach Music by Pat Conroy. He also wrote The Prince of Tides, which most people know because it was adapted into a very famous movie.
After I read Beach Music, I went back later and was surprised to see how negative many of the reviews were. A lot of them called the book a mess, and some even claimed that Conroy didn’t really write it himself—that it was heavily shaped by editors. I don’t know whether that’s true or not, but none of that mattered to me as a reader.
What stayed with me was how beautifully tragic the story is. It almost feels like six books in one. At its center is a man dealing with the loss of his wife and a deeply painful love story, but the novel expands outward into her family history—her parents’ experiences during the Holocaust—and his own background growing up in a Southern family marked by alcoholism. It weaves all of this together into a powerful exploration of love and generational trauma.
It’s not necessarily a book that will go down in literary history, but it’s one I’ve read three times, and it still stays with me. As a kid—a preteen—it made me feel things very deeply and showed me what books are capable of doing. It was one of those early reading experiences that made me think, this is the power of storytelling.
16. Last question, in one word how would you sum up your experience writing, releasing, and now the TV adaptation of “Baby Doll”?
Good one—well done. I think I’d describe it as a “full-circle” moment.
It really does feel full circle for me, because this is one of those things that reminds you how unpredictable a creative journey can be. That’s something I always tell writers, especially when I’m coaching them: you never know where your work is going to lead, so you have to get out of your head and write the thing that scares you.
When I got the email from Clapperboard last year—almost exactly a year ago now—asking if I wanted to option the book, it felt like one of those messages you get all the time. You have lots of conversations where someone says, “Hey, we’d love to talk about a project,” and most of them don’t go anywhere. But to actually see this one move all the way through to a finished trailer—to have it reach that point has been incredibly satisfying. It really does feel like a true full-circle moment.
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