Sara Stamford on Writing Anna in The Lost Souls
By: Jessica Suarez
There is a particular challenge in writing a character who is manipulative, genuinely in pain, darkly funny, and occasionally frightening in the same chapter. The risk is that the reader will stop caring about her, that the manipulation will cancel the pain, that the destruction will overwhelm the humanity underneath it. In The Lost Souls, Sara Stamford writes Anna at her most complex without ever losing her compassion for the woman beneath the behavior.
That balance was intentional and required constant attention. Stamford always saw Anna as more than her worst moments. She can be manipulative and destructive, but underneath that is someone carrying a lot of pain and trying to survive it in ways that aren’t always healthy. Having compassion for a character doesn’t mean excusing their behavior. It means trying to understand what brought them to that moment.
The Marionette and the Music
Anna describes herself at one point as a marionette dancing to the rhythm of her own music. That image captures something essential about her. She performs a version of herself for the world around her, a life of confidence and dream-fulfillment that she eventually acknowledges is a sham and a staged performance. The performance is so practiced and so complete that it has become almost impossible to separate from the person underneath it.
Stamford’s title speaks directly to this. Anna is one of the lost souls of the novel’s central concern, someone who has lost herself while trying to be who the world around her expects her to be. Her version of Los Angeles is a city that demands you look a certain way, know the right people, and constantly prove that you belong. She has been proving it for so long that she has forgotten she was ever doing anything else.
The Kitchen and the Knife
One of the most difficult scenes in the novel involves Anna in Patrick’s kitchen with a knife. Stamford was clear about what she wanted readers to feel in that moment. She didn’t want them to simply see Anna as dangerous or unstable. She wanted them to feel how lost Anna had become, drowning in her own fears and anguish.
That is a harder thing to write than a simple villain scene. It requires holding the character’s interior pain as primary, even while the external behavior is alarming. The scene works because Stamford never steps back from Anna’s perspective long enough to judge her from the outside. The compassion doesn’t disappear at the moment the behavior is most difficult. It deepens.
Connection as a Lifeline
Anna’s darkest moments in the novel are written with a specific and important counterweight. When thoughts of ending her life surface, they are pulled back by Shane’s face or Elizabeth’s smile, which Anna clings to like lifelines. Stamford was deliberate about this dynamic.
She wanted to show that even in Anna’s darkest moments, she still had hope. Shane and Elizabeth couldn’t save her. But they reminded her she wasn’t completely alone. That felt very important to capture: sometimes connection, even when it’s messy, can be the thread someone holds onto when everything else feels lost.
Patrick and Jasmine’s Complicity
Anna’s supporting cast is equally carefully drawn. Patrick is described as a heart surgeon who doesn’t have a heart. Jasmine is the wife displaced by Anna’s presence who still shows up with her Yorkshire Terrier and genuine concern. Both of them care about Anna. And both of them, through good intentions, become part of her unraveling.
Stamford wanted them to feel human rather than simply good or bad. Good intentions don’t always lead to good choices. Sometimes trying to protect someone, making excuses for them, or constantly rescuing them can actually enable their behavior. Their dynamic shows how easy it is to become part of someone’s unraveling without realizing it, especially when love, guilt, and responsibility get mixed together in ways that are impossible to fully separate.
A novel about pain, performance, and the complicated compassion we owe even our most difficult characters. The Lost Souls by Sara Stamford can be found on the book’s Amazon page.
