What is the title of your latest release?
BIG & LILY
What’s the “elevator pitch” for your new book?
A sharply funny, deeply heartfelt novel about two very different sisters who discover the best way to find themselves (and each other) is by getting lost in the wilderness.
How did you decide where your book was going to take place?
The setting for this book, the Alaskan wilderness, is modeled on a very similar trip I took a few years ago, where like BIG & LILY, I was out of my depths and in over my head.
Would you hang out with your heroine in real life?
Bridget (Big) and I would be besties. We get each other, both being eldest daughters who are always trying to organize and contain the world around us and never quite succeed to our own standards.
What are three words that describe your hero?
Classic First Born
What’s something you learned while writing this book?
You don’t have to wear the labels you were given (or you assigned to yourself) forever. You can rip them off the back of your collar if they scratch at you. The narratives we live with can be rewritten.
Do you edit as you draft or wait until you are totally done?
I write straight through to the end after creating a loose outline, usually based on Three-Act Story Structure (although I used the Hero’s Journey for BIG & LILY.) This way I know where I’m going, and I can keep moving forward. Then go I back to the beginning again and again.
What’s your favorite foodie indulgence?
I was addicted to Allsorts - the English licorice. They were my go-to snack and comfort food to get me through revisions. But considering how many revisions my books need, I had to cut back after my waistband started complaining!
Describe your writing space/office!
We recently renovated an old house on a lake and now my new office overlooks the water through a large picture window. The view is both inspiring and terribly distracting - especially when I see the swans or the heron go by and I stop whatever I’m doing to snap yet another photo!
Who is an author you admire?
I admire so many authors for a variety of reasons. Each one teaches me something different. It could be their voice (Nora Ephron, Maria Semple, Elinor Lipman,) their humor (Abi Waxman, Steven Rowley, Fredrick Bachman,) or their pacing and tension (Steven King, Gillian Flynn.) All just to name a few.
Is there a book that changed your life?
There were so many books that found me just when I needed them. But the first I remember was a book called NOTHING IS IMPOSSIBLE: THE BEATRIX POTTER STORY by Dorothy Aldis. It was the first time I really saw myself in a character - a shy young girl who turned to animals, nature, and art for company and self-expression.
Tell us about when you got “the call.” (when you found out your book was going to be published). Or, for indie authors, when you decided to self-publish.
One of the things I love about my agent, Jessica Berg of Rosecliff Literary is that she gatekeeps nothing and had been sharing submission info since my now editor asked for the manuscript. We’d been going back and forth through email, and texts about the possibility of getting an offer from Harper Perennial for a few days, but when my phone rang with a FaceTime call, I knew something was different. When she told me, we both screamed, then we sent our respective husbands out to get champagne, then we collected ourselves and talked specifics. The “collecting ourselves” may have taken a minute.
What’s your favorite genre to read?
While not technically a genre, I love smart, funny books about people who are quirky or a bit awkward or who don’t fit a mold.
What’s your favorite movie?
We are a Lord of the Rings family. Every Christmas for at least the last twenty years we watch all three movies (Peter Jackson’s extended director’s cut, of course.)
What is your favorite season?
Fall - the colors, sweata weatha, my grandmother’s apple/cranberry pie recipe, and excellent hair days for us curly girls.
How do you like to celebrate your birthday?
It doesn’t always happen, because my kids are grown and my birthday is on a holiday, but my most special birthdays are the ones spent with my family doing almost anything - a hang, a hike, a homemade dinner, a much-loved movie, and my husband’s special chocolate cake with sour cream chocolate frosting!
What’s a recent tv show/movie/book/podcast you highly recommend?
I just binged Dan Levy’s new show, Big Mistakes on Netflix. It was brilliant, chaotic and wonderful.
What’s your favorite type of cuisine?
Is cheesecake a cuisine!?!
What do you do when you have free time?
As I mentioned, we just moved to a lake, so I walk around the lake (great way to work out plot holes,) hike with my husband and three dogs in the nearby woods, tool around on my new kayak, or just stare into the water obsessively looking for birds and fish.
What can readers expect from you next?
I just sent my agent what we hope will be my next book! It’s a humorous yet emotionally charged story about a woman and her grown son who find themselves living together again. Think Amy Poeppel’s MUSICAL CHAIRS meets Sara Confino’s GOOD GRIEF. Keep your fingers crossed that my publisher (and soon my readers) will love it!
Narrator: Jesse Vilinsky
A Novel
A sharply funny, deeply heartfelt novel about two sisters who discover the best way to find yourself is by getting lost.
For her entire life, Bridget “Big” Ackerman Petty has struggled to hold everything together—her kids, her husband, her demanding mother, all in dizzying orbit around her. While the kids are grown and her husband is retired, every day still feels like a to-do list she can never quite finish. Why is everything so effortless and easy for her sister Lily—a woman blessed with a magnetic personality, a thriving business, and a husband who adores her.
But when Lily discovers her husband’s been cheating, her “perfect” life implodes. Devastated and overwhelmed, she decides to run as far away as possible: to Alaska to lose herself on a hardcore survival trek—and she’s dragged her reluctant sister Big along.
No cell service, no easy exits—just grizzlies, outdoor plumbing, and a group of strangers who know how to read a compass. As the sisters navigate freezing rivers, unmarked trails, and more than one near-death experience, the defenses they’ve used to protect themselves begin to crumble, and they’re forced to face everything they’ve spent decades avoiding: resentment, regret, envy, and the terrifying possibility that the other one’s life might not be as easy as it looks.
Big & Lily is a laugh-out-loud, emotionally rich novel about second acts, sisterhood, and the unexpected ways we find ourselves when we’re truly lost.
Women's Fiction Family Life [ Harper Perennial, On Sale: August 11, 2026, Trade Paperback / e-Book / audiobook, ISBN: 9780063474918 / eISBN: 9780063474925 ]
After graduating from the S. I. Newhouse School of Public Communications at Syracuse University and spending many years as an advertising creative director and copywriter in New York City, Lisa Roe accepted the tougher job of stay-at-home mom and turned to writing fiction — mostly to entertain her kids, but then to tell her own stories. A classic first born, a reluctant empty nester, and a Dr. Doolittle wannabe, Lisa lives in New Jersey with her husband and three incorrigible dogs. WELCOME TO THE NEIGHBORHOOD is her debut novel.
No comments posted.
© 2003-2026