The Story Behind One Debut Novelist’s Inspiration
As told by Penny Zang, through three Pinterest collages
Like many writers and artists, I have a mood board above my desk with an ever-changing group of photos, postcards, quotes, and ideas for my current work-in-progress. However, since I’m often not working at my desk, I find joy in creating Pinterest boards that I can access electronically no matter where I am. This also means that at the coffee shop, at my son’s swim practice, in the car when I have a sudden idea to add to the Pinterest mood board, I’m often looking at some really weird and random stuff.
My debut novel, Doll Parts (forthcoming from Sourcebooks, August 26, 2025), is a dual-timeline narrative about two best friends and the secrets they left behind at their all-women’s college.
The official description: The Virgin Suicides meets I Have Some Questions For You in a dual timeline suspense following one woman as she begins to uncover the truth of the death of her estranged best friend and the Sylvia Plath adoring sad girls they attended college with decades ago, all while holding a secret that will slowly unravel her new, suburban dream life.
My less official description includes the word “vibes” a lot. And the biggest vibes are 90s grunge, Sylvia Plath, and ghost girls/literal doll parts. With all of that inspiration, my Pinterest boards sometimes look a bit unhinged, but in the best way possible, too.
Pinterest Collage 1: 90s Grunge
For a book called Doll Parts, if you get the Courtney Love reference, the inspiration is, of course, grounded in a very particular time. The music, the fashion, the zines.Think flannel tied around your waist, think riot grrrls disguised as weird theater kids. My main characters, Nikki and Sadie, listen to a lot of Hole and wear their (knock-off) Doc Martens with pride. Subsequently, my Pinterest mood board captures all of these points of inspiration and even sparked some new ideas (Seventeen magazine is definitely mentioned in the book). For my Gen-X readers, in particular, get ready for the flashbacks.
Pinterest Collage 2: Sylvia Plath
I became obsessed with Sylvia Plath later in life as I tried to teach her poems to my college students and instead fell down a rabbit hole filled with tragic biographies and Plath’s seemingly cultish appeal. I have many, many thoughts regarding how Plath is written about and how she is taught. All of this lives under the surface of Doll Parts, in which the characters uncover their college’s haunted past, a group of girls called “The Sylvia Club.” And if there’s one thing Pinterest knows how to serve up, it’s a certain sad-girl Plath aesthetic.
Pinterest Collage 3: Ghost girls (and dolls)
Ghosts haunt Doll Parts because they also haunted me as I wrote it. I don’t mean that this is a scary story, though. Let’s call them literary ghosts. Less creepy horror movie dolls and more headless Barbies. I wrote this book in the aftermath of losing several loved ones, including one of my best friends, so the ghosts were going to be there whether I liked it or not. What draws me to ghosts in literature is that there is, of course, the potential for literal hauntings, but we also have to confront the more metaphorical ways we are haunted. We’re haunted by our past, our regrets, the people no longer with us. The people we used to be. This is where my Pinterest boards started to really take shape. Courtney Love and Sylvia Plath are one thing, but layering in ghosts and dolls meant I never knew what I’d end up seeing in my Pinterest feed.
It is also worth mentioning here that Doll Parts, or any book, has to be about more than the vibes. My biggest point of inspiration, the true heart of the novel, lies in the friendship between my characters. It’s the kind of friendship that people might be lucky to find once in their life. Ride-or-die friends, they are often called. And that is harder to capture in cute pictures on any mood board. Friendship bracelets and pinkie swears aren’t enough to give the full picture. I’m lucky that I had pages and pages to go deeper.
If this all feels silly or completely unnecessary, maybe that’s what makes it so joyful. I can write without Pinterest and I actually rarely use Pinterest for anything else, but in the end, this type of electronic collage felt very close to what I would have created on my own in the 90s, just with scissors and tape instead. When it comes to my second book, I know I won’t hesitate to start making mood boards all over again, just for the hell of it.
About the author: Penny Zang is an author and English professor in Greenville, South Carolina. She graduated from West Virginia University with an M.F.A. in Creative Writing (Fiction) and her work has appeared in the Potomac Review, Louisville Review, and South 85, among others. She is the 2024 Elizabeth Boatwright Coker fiction fellow via the South Carolina Academy of Authors. Her debut novel, Doll Parts, will be published by Sourcebooks in August 2025.
Pre-order Doll Parts at Bookshop.org (or other online retailers)
Subscribe to Penny’s Substack, Mourning Pages
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Oh I love this so much, Penny. The vibes on those mood boards are EVERYTHING!