Q. Gareth’s personality is an interesting mix of crushingly awkward insecurity and pompous arrogance. People usually think of those traits as mutually exclusive. What motivated you to write him like that?

A. Wait, do people really think of those traits as mutually exclusive? That surprises me. In my experience, most who come off as pompously arrogant are in fact deeply insecure. Arrogance is usually overcompensation, and it’s a mistake to read it as confidence.

This is reason #43,109 that I do not buy into the traditional construction of the alpha male. The man who tells a woman, “Yes, I know you want me. Your mouth is saying ‘no’ but your body is saying ‘yes,’ and I’m going to listen to your body” is operating from a place of insecurity.

If he really believed his own words, he wouldn’t need to push. He’d know deep in his soul that she would come to him, that he wouldn’t have to override her judgment and taste. He is so secure in his own worth that he doesn’t have to override hers to prove that he’s right. Secure people do not need to push other people off balance; they want to help them be secure, too.

The most gracious, giving people I have met are often extremely secure. The confident person has no need to make others feel badly about themselves. And conversely, one of the most proud, arrogant individuals I’ve ever worked with was painfully insecure.

I’ve had people tell me that Gareth is the most alpha of my heroes, and I find this appalling. Alphas are supposed to be leaders of men, and let’s face it—Gareth couldn’t lead mice into a cheese factory.

Most people who yell at others and run roughshod over their feelings are not leaders of men. Think about the people who have really motivated you to perform in your life. How many of them were massive jerks? And how many of them were people who respected you and your abilities, and treated you fairly?

Yep. That’s what I thought.

Q. One of the things that Jenny and Gareth have in common is they both are very lonely. Would you say that Gareth’s isolation as the Marquess of Blakely is by choice, whilst Jenny’s isolation as Madame Esmerelda is forced? Or do you think their motivations and options render it more complex than that?

A. I don’t think it’s that simple. Both Jenny and Gareth are isolated, and it’s a result of choices that they’ve made. In fact, I’d say that it’s very much the result of their vocations. Jenny’s isolated because she’s lying to everyone else, and because all her life, people have told her that she’s worse than she is. She avoids other people and society in general because she thinks that if they knew the truth about her, they would never believe her to be their peer.

Gareth is isolated for almost the exact opposite reason—that he’s been told that he’s better than everyone else, and so doesn’t have a solid set of peers that he can relate to. He’s a marquess and a Blakely, and he keeps himself apart because he doesn’t believe that he has peers.

Q. Jenny has an extremely sweet and genuine friendship with Ned, despite the falsehoods at the core of their relationship. Was it difficult to balance that authentic affection with the facts of Jenny’s profession?

A. In the precursor to this book there was a heroine, Claire, who had a hapless little brother. I loved the characters too much to let them go.

In that book, Ned was the brother of the heroine, and while Ned and Jenny aren’t related in reality in this book, their relationship dynamic is very much that of older sister and little brother. I absolutely loved writing Ned and Jenny’s relationship. It was so painfully bittersweet.

For whatever reason, it’s much, much harder for me to write relationships that are simple and uncomplicated. Difficult balances are my favorite thing to write.

I’ve always felt that the heart of this book is as much about the two brother-sister relationships (Gareth/Laura and Jenny/Ned) as it is about the romance between Gareth and Jenny. Because I had to reread these books to make the enhanced edition, I actually might make a stronger statement: I think the brother/sister relationships in this book are stronger than the romance.

Q. Jenny spends a lot of time trying to get Gareth to understand her boundaries as regards their relationship. Was her first abortive turn as a mistress the primary motivator there or was it a combination of her other life experiences as well?

A. Jenny has spent her entire life not receiving respect. I think that acting as a man’s mistress really brought to the forefront all her feelings on this matter, but she learned, very early on, that if she doesn’t insist on getting what she wanted, she was never going to get it.

Jenny’s insistence on independence also is driven by the fact that she has been abandoned so many times. She doesn’t trust other people to give her things, because other people go away. She is much more comfortable giving than being given.

Q. In direct contrast to Jenny and Ned’s relationship, Gareth not only resists connecting with Ned, but is terrible at connecting with his sister, Laura. He generally credits this to his grandfather’s influence, but do you feel there are other reasons?

A. Gareth is bad with people generally, and he’s never had anyone to teach him how to get it right. In fact, most of the people in the world—not just his grandfather—have been teaching him that he’s better than everyone else. And since he’s rather isolated, nobody is in a position to correct him.

His own natural inclination is quite introverted, and that’s probably not a complete description. After I’d written the first draft of Proof by Seduction, I read Look me in the Eye by John Elder Robison, about his experience with Asperger’s, and I realized that for whatever reason, Gareth felt a lot internally like Robison described. I wouldn’t want to venture a guess as to how far down the spectrum Gareth falls, but it made a lot of sense to me. The only change I made to the text after I read Robison’s memoir was that I made more mention of Gareth’s eye contact. Gareth doesn’t notice this is happening—he’s of a social status where people would naturally not make friendly eye contact. When this happens in the book, Jenny interprets it initially as arrogance. It’s only a little later that she starts to translate it as unease.

None of this is explicitly explored in the story. I really don’t think that anyone of the time would notice that someone fell on the mild end of the Asperger’s spectrum. They had no idea what Asperger’s was, and most of the symptoms can be interpreted in other ways. Wealthy, powerful men were allowed to be eccentric, and nobody expected an explanation. And at the time, the understanding of mental differences was so poor that the notion that someone could be a sane, functional human being, but not neurotypical, would have been beyond comprehension. So I’ve never really talked about this much. It’s really more of author headcanon than actual, textual truth.

Q. Where did you get the idea for Hat on Top?