If you did not know who killed Elena Alves in The Undoing, you should have. At least that’s what the title of the book that it is based on tells you –You Should Have Known. Jean Hanff Korelitz wrote the novel that the HBO TV series is based on and even though she did not know how David E. Kelley would adapt it into a six-part mini-series, she assumed it would be a whodunit. And if you still don’t know and still don’t want to know who did it, you should probably stop reading now, as this interview with the author Jean Hanff Korelitz contains spoilers.

What was your initial reaction when you heard that there was going to be an adaptation of your book “I Should Have Known”?

A different producer had bought it around the publication in 2014. I never met or spoke to that producer, but I think she could not find the writer that she was interested in and I thought: ‘That’s that’. It was nice that someone was interested, but I did not think that it would happen again. Then one day my phone rang, and it was my agent, who said that David E. Kelley had bought the book and I was absolutely stunned and pretty thrilled.

And what does it feel like to hand over a world that you created in your mind to other people?

Well, there is handing it over to a stranger and then there is handing it over to David E. Kelley. He is really a legend. I remember when I got the call. I was walking my dog in the park and I kind of had to sit down. It was really life-changing information. Bizarrely, my husband also had a very small acquaintance with David E. Kelley, because my husband teaches at Princeton University where David went to college and he was on an advisory board that my husband was running. That was just pure coincidence.

David E. Kelley wrote the script and Susanne Bier directed it. What was your collaboration like with them like?

I did get to meet David at Princeton and we had a nice talk and I met him once or twice at other times. But it was clear that it was not a collaboration of any kind. He was doing this, and I said I am completely available for anything or nothing and he was very generous about sharing scripts with me, but I was not involved at all.

Had you seen any of Suzanne Bier’s work before?

I had seen the Danish version of After the Wedding. I had seen parts of Bird Box, but I am very scaredy-cat when it comes to films, so I was not able to watch the whole film. My son allowed me to watch certain parts of it and told me when to leave the room. And of course, The Night Manager, which I loved. It was an amazing show. She is obviously very good.

What do you think of the result of The Undoing overall? And what do you think the title says about the new version of your story?

People are now using the original title to remind us that we should have known that it was Jonathan all along. I don’t know if that was the rationale for changing the title and I read about the change of title in a press release and my concerns were a little more practical: ‘What do I do about my book that has been published under a different name for several years?’ A friend of mine said: ‘Just change the title of your book’ and so we published it again with the name The Undoing.

What do you think the title says about the new approach to the story?

I did not realize that it is a psychoanalytical term. It has meaning to people who know about psychoanalysis, but to me, it was a poetic way to talk about the unmaking of a life – somebody like Grace, who thinks they have it all together and they know who they are and who everybody in their life is and then to have that life deconstructed or unmade or undone – that must be an extremely painful and violent process. I just thought it was poetic. And to tell you the truth, I never loved the title You Should Have Known.

Jonathan is not really present in the book apart from Grace’s mind and a letter he has written to her. That seems to be one of the biggest differences to me. What do you think?

It is one of the things that David E. Kelley said to me: ‘You know, Jonathan is going to be in the story.’ And I said: ‘Great.’ In writing the novel, I took out more and more of Jonathan and I think I got him down to one text message and that letter at the end and that is because as I rewrote the book, I realized that my interest was Grace. I really wanted her to walk through this landscape with this terrible realization that she was lost inside of her own life. That meant not having him there and having the echo chamber that he left behind when he left. But obviously, you don’t hire Hugh Grant to do a character that is barely there, and David said that we were going to be looking at Jonathan’s life. I thought it was terrific and I had no problem with it at all. I was interested in seeing what they came up with. There were changes like he is British, but the essence of him – the psychopathology of him was exactly like I had imagined.

What did Hugh Grant bring to the story?

I think he is absolutely brilliant. I think that what it added was the fact that we could test ourselves against this person: Do we believe him? He seems to be telling the truth. Does it make sense? How do these tears stack up against the fact that I know that he lost his job and did not tell me? We all got conned by him and some people got more conned than others. But I got a little conned.

So, you did not know if they were going to make him the killer or not?

No, I did not know. In fact, my son and I sat down during the day before the last episode aired and told each other whom we thought had done it. And neither of us got it right. I will not say I was shocked because it always made the most sense to me but at one point or the other, I considered everyone else. At one point, I considered Sylvia. Good acting. It was really good acting.

What do you think about the cast in general? Did the actors correspond to how you saw the characters when you wrote them?

An adaptation is a creative act, and I am in the business of making things up and telling stories and I feel that when you submit your work for adaptation, you are really handing it over. You are saying that “my vision ends here, and this is where your vision starts”. If you are going to be really controlling about it, you really should not allow your work to be adapted, but I loved many films made from other stories. Watching stories move around from literature to theater to film. That is what my life is about – watching these ideas and characters and stories change through different art forms and I am not going to deny that to other people. I was never going to be the writer saying: ‘That is not what I wrote.’ I wrote the book, and I was in control of everything in that book and if you don’t like something in that book, you cannot blame the set designer or the costume designer or the actors. It is all on me. But the book ended, and this show is something else.

The TV-series is much more of a whodunit. Did you like how the producers did that?

I loved it. There were times when I forgot that I had written the book. I absolutely loved it. I thought it was gorgeous to look at. I loved the clothes. I loved the interiors. I loved Donald Sutherland saying he was ‘an old-fashioned cocksucker’, which I can promise you that the character never said in my book but I loved it! I have been a very interested observer, but I have been an observer like anyone else.

So many American dramas take place in courtrooms, including this one. Why is that?

Well, a much cleverer writer than me, Scott Turow, who is an attorney and a novelist said to me many years ago when he was asked why we were all so obsessed with courtroom dramas and stories about lawyers and he said that in our society the lawyers are the ones who are dealing with moral issues. I think that is true. To watch the character, Haley Fitzgerald, in the show struggle where she is like: ‘What am I going to do here? I cannot compromise myself. I have to walk this razor-thin edge of giving advice to my client and not compromise my principles – that was fascinating. Drama happens in courtrooms and moral conundrums happen in courtrooms and I guess Scott Turow was right. 

The book is called “You Should Have Known” – and this refers to Grace who had no clue what was right there in front of her, even if she is a therapist. What inspired you to write the book?

My mother was a therapist, and she was not a feel-good therapist. She would not say to her patients that they were victimized and that they had a right to feel terrible. She was a compassionate person, but she was always encouraging her patients to recognize what they themselves might have contributed to the situation that they found themselves in. And I had this lifelong fascination with liars. I am obsessed with liars. This has been a fascinating four years, watching our current leader lie to us constantly and then just walk away and then come back and lie some more.

It has been just a jaw-dropping experience. Devastating, but fascinating. I have always been drawn to these stories of people who lie with impunity. All of my novels so far – I have written eight – seem very different from one another. But when I look back at them, I realize that this has been the through-line that, in each of these stories, there is somebody lying their heads off and victimizing everybody around them. I just think it is this fascination with liars and this idea that as a therapist you are supposed to know these things.

When I read reviews of my book, which you are not supposed to do, the thing that I see over and over again is that readers cannot believe that Grace is this therapist, and she does not know – she is supposed to know better. But this happens to her anyway and I want to scream at these people: ‘But that is the point.’ It’s called irony.