(gentle music) (typewriter clicks and dings) (typewriter clicks) - [Ashley] Hi, I'm Ashley Winsted, author of "This Book Will Bury Me."

This is a book about a woman who, after the unexpected death of her father, completely loses interest in her normal life and becomes obsessed with the shadowy world of online sleuthing.

(gentle music) - You were asked to explain the book in five words, and you said, "The secret house of death."

- Yes.

- That's Shakespeare.

- That's Shakespeare.

- Can you explain?

- The setting is the digital world, the sort of world that we all now find ourselves increasingly living in, and what is so comforting to my main character, Jane, about this world is that all that these online sleuths talk about is death.

And so she enters this world, and it's almost like entering a fraternity.

And it is this sort of secret house of death.

That's "Antony and Cleopatra."

I just read that and thought, "Oh, how perfect."

And one of the characters says it or includes that line in the book, and it means different things to different characters, so.

- I'm curious about how anonymity has been driving the world that we find ourselves in right now.

- I was thinking a lot about absence and presence.

I wrote this book as a tribute to my late father, and the fact that when he passed, I was left with a digital archive.

I was left with his videos, his photos, and that was all I had, really, these, like, little pieces of him that were both him, but also I can't ever get through that screen.

And so I was thinking about how to create this for readers and for my main character, Jane.

And I wanted to just really play with the idea of having such intimacy at the same time as absence, so much absence, and I think it was partly me trying to comfort myself.

- Sure.

Ashley, thank you so much for being here today.

- Thank you so much, J.T.

What an honor.

- This was amazing.

- Thank you.

- And thank you for watching "A Word on Words."

I'm J.T.

Ellison.

Keep reading.

(bell dings) - [Ashley] I kind of went into a rabbit hole of true crime and had to pull myself back and kind of contending with the ethics of it.