Bestselling author Carola Lovering—known for hit psychological thrillers like Tell Me Lies, Too Good to Be True, Can't Look Away, and Bye, Baby—will release her next novel, Whiteout, on March 9. The Aspen-set domestic thriller centers on June, whose world is shattered when she loses her second pregnancy in a ski accident. Unable to recall anything about the incident—including why she was skiing so late in her pregnancy to begin with—she searches for answers, unraveling years' worth of secrets within her marriage and family.
In anticipation of the release, Lovering has shared an exclusive essay with Marie Claire about how she wrote Whiteout after finding herself struck by Lindsay Clancy and other cases of postpartum psychosis.
Content warning: the below contains references to and descriptions of postpartum psychosis and the death of children.
In January 2023, my husband shared horrific news with me involving the brother of a man who’d been on his sailing team in college.
Actually, I’m not sure I should tell you. My husband had hesitated, backpedaling, the color draining from his face. It’s the kind of thing—He shook his head. It won’t be easy for you to hear.
I forced him to spit it out, and he proceeded to tell me about Patrick Clancy, whose wife Lindsay had killed their three young children in the basement of their suburban home just days earlier. She’d strangled them with exercise bands before attempting to take her own life; a jump from a second-story window left her partially paralyzed. As I listened to my husband recount what had happened, it sounded like an actual living nightmare. A scene ripped straight out of hell.
At the time, I was more sensitive than usual. Fragile. A month earlier, in December 2022, I’d woken to a world that felt heavy with darkness. What began with intense anxiety that prevented me from sleeping for 48 hours soon spiraled into a depressive episode. The feelings had me shaken and afraid, even though they weren’t unfamiliar—it was a kind of sinister fear I had known before. I was also four months postpartum with my second child, who had been born at the end of July.
I’d wasted little time before reaching out to the psychiatrist who’s treated me on and off since my junior year of college. He knows me well, he knows my history, and I am lucky for that. He was quick to up the dosage of my antidepressant, which had been lowered during my pregnancy, and prescribed Ativan to help me sleep. We need to tackle the insomnia first, he’d said. That’s the gateway to the anxiety and depression.
Several weeks later I was feeling better, the dark veil lifted enough for me to see—to trust in—the light. When my husband told me what Lindsay Clancy had done to her children, I felt solid enough to receive the information without letting it eviscerate me completely. But the truth is that the story opened a door inside of me; it kicked off an obsession that began to run wild in my mind. I felt rattled, distraught; I couldn’t stop thinking about Lindsay and googling her name. I couldn’t stop reading about postpartum psychosis and the circumstances that had led to this unfathomable reality. I studied Lindsay’s old Facebook posts that had resurfaced in the news, photographs that so clearly evoked a loving mother and her children. I read about her continued cries for help, her calls to suicide hotlines and visits to various psychiatrists and failed efforts to qualify for inpatient treatment. I read about the 13 psychiatric medications she’d been prescribed—a perilous cocktail—in the four months leading up to her children’s deaths.
An incomprehensible tragedy, and yet, it seemed obvious what had happened. Here was a mother who loved her kids unconditionally, who’d known something was off in her mind and sought help in all the right ways. This was a concept I could relate to on a cellular level. Lindsay Clancy had been dealt the cruelest, unluckiest hand.
At the end of 2022 and into the early months of 2023, I’d been brainstorming ideas for a new novel. My publisher had me contracted for another book, and I’d spent ages toying with a few different concepts, none of which inspired me enough to pursue in earnest. But I was working against a deadline. And, as the months went on, I failed to shake Lindsay Clancy from my thoughts. As I continued to research postpartum psychosis, I learned about other women who had suffered the same fate, but without the high-profile media attention. As Eren Orbey wrote in The New Yorker, “The Clancys were the kind of family whom true-crime enthusiasts often find irresistible: young, white, well-off, photogenic.” Many others fly under the radar.
In 2022, a Black woman named Erin Merdy drowned her three children in the ocean near Coney Island. Merdy’s youngest child was 3-months-old at the time, and there was speculation of postpartum depression and psychosis, but because she admitted guilt, there was never a trial. In May 2026, Merdy received a sentence of 20 years to life in prison.
There is also Latarsha Sanders, a Black Massachusetts woman who was found guilty of murdering her two children in 2018. Sanders pleaded not guilty to her original charges, citing that she had suffered from psychosis. And although a neuropsychological evaluation found that Sanders was indeed “grossly psychotic” at the time of the killings, her medical records weren’t permitted to be shown in court by the defense the way Lindsay Clancy’s were. The jury never saw these records, and Sanders received two life sentences without parole; as of August, the Massachusetts’ highest court granted her a new trial.
In the spring of 2023, with Lindsay Clancy and Erin Merdy on my mind—I did not yet know about Sanders—and my deadline inching closer, I began writing a novel that aims to shed light on the dire state of maternal healthcare. My books are not social commentaries so much as suspenseful beach reads, and I did worry—do worry—about this undertaking. But if there’s one topic that gets me truly piqued, it’s the persistent stigma around mental health and the inadequacies of a broken system.
The urge to acknowledge these similarities and examine them under harsh light feels almost unconscious—perhaps we do it to validate her, and also to try and grasp her outcome. Why Lindsay? Why not us?
It took me two years to write a first draft. All the while, I kept tabs on Lindsay Clancy in the news. I watched her trial date postpone, then postpone again. I read Patrick Clancy’s interview in The New Yorker (the Eren Orbey piece), and forwarded it to family and friends. It sort of has to do with the book I’m writing, I would explain, tentative. I felt somewhat insecure in admitting my interest in such chilling darkness. To live in this headspace for years was not exactly a healthy choice, especially for someone with a history of depression.
I finished the novel in the spring of 2025, then spent seven months in deep revisions, an intense period that coincided with an unexpected third pregnancy. I submitted the novel in the fall, six weeks before my son was born.
Like countless women in America, I spent the second half of this past summer captivated by the Lindsay Clancy trial as it unfolded in Plymouth, waiting with bated breath for a verdict that would acknowledge the incontestable ways Lindsay was failed. Her story is one that has taken certain corners of the internet by storm; it’s unleashed a wave of long-simmering feminine rage that’s hard not to feel. I can’t speak to the personal experience of postpartum psychosis—and neither can most women who rally behind Lindsay—but we recognize ourselves in her old Facebook pictures, in her blissful smile, cheek pressed against the child in her arms. We recognize ourselves in her effusive captions describing the love and gratitude she felt for her babies, in the gift of getting to be their mother. And we recognize ourselves in her diary entries during the months she was struggling, in the anxiety she harbored over sleep training and insomnia; the crushing guilt over an inability to parent her third child like her first.
The reality is that no matter how much we love our children, no matter how much a pregnancy is wanted, the process of giving birth is physically and psychologically transformative in ways that no woman can prepare for.
In a recent interview on 60 Minutes, Patrick shared that he first knew something was wrong with Lindsay when she didn’t sleep for two nights at five months postpartum, after which she went to the hospital. I didn’t sleep for two nights at four months postpartum, after which I reached out to my doctor. Many women share my inclination to hyperfocus on pieces of Lindsay’s trajectory that feel eerily similar to their own. The urge to acknowledge these similarities and examine them under harsh light feels almost unconscious—perhaps we do it to validate her, and also to try and grasp her outcome. Why Lindsay? Why not us?
The reality is that no matter how much we love our children, no matter how much a pregnancy is wanted, the process of giving birth is physically and psychologically transformative in ways that no woman can prepare for, even if they’ve gone through it before. In late August, more than 400 supporters gathered outside the Plymouth courthouse to stand in solidarity with Lindsay. They wore pink and carried signs that read “Listen to Mothers,” “She Needed Help,” “Compassion Before Judgment.” Women from all political backgrounds have been vocal in their support for Lindsay, and in this I sense a female camaraderie that I haven’t in recent years––a bone-deep understanding that sometimes, the early days of motherhood ask more of us than we can bear. Most women come out on the other side; Lindsay didn’t. For those of us who have been consumed by the case—and dejected by the declaration of a mistrial—bearing witness feels like the only grace we can offer.