For as long as she can remember, Kathleen Barber wanted to be a writer. The challenge wasn't discovering the dream. The challenge was believing it could become a life.

Growing up in Galesburg, she wrote constantly — characters she loved, stories she couldn't finish, worlds that existed only in notebooks. She remembers being in third grade, writing a little play, and her teacher letting her post a handmade announcement for it on the classroom wall. "I just felt very supported the whole time there," she said. When her first novel was published years later, many of those same teachers showed up at her event at the Galesburg Public Library. They had invested in her all along.

A 2000 graduate of Galesburg High School, Kathleen enrolled at the University of Illinois, uncertain what she wanted to do but certain she didn't want to stop reading. She majored in Classical Civilizations — a field she loved, one that offered no obvious career path. She briefly considered becoming a professor until she realized that would require learning Ancient Latin and Ancient Greek. Her father, a bankruptcy attorney who also served as Galesburg's city attorney, offered a different model: a creative man who had a stable, meaningful job and came home in the evenings to make stories and artwork. That seemed right. She went to Northwestern University School of Law.

Between college and law school, she spent a year as a traveling leadership consultant for her sorority, visiting campuses around the country. She graduated from Northwestern in 2008 and started at a large Chicago law firm that September — just weeks before the financial crisis arrived. The firm offered her a deal: take a year and a half of paid leave while things settled. She moved to New York with her now-husband Mark, whom she'd met in law school, and tried to write the book she'd been carrying for years. She couldn't find it yet.

She went back to law. By 2014, she and Mark were both at large New York firms, eating all three meals at their desks, sleeping with BlackBerrys under their pillows. They decided they'd had enough. They sold most of what they owned — the things too sentimental to sell went to her mom's house in Galesburg — and backpacked for eight months: Mozambique, through southern and eastern Africa, up through Egypt, into Jordan and Israel, ending in Europe. When they returned, Mark did advance work for President Obama through a connection with Kathleen's close Galesburg friend Johanna Maska, who was Director of Advance for the administration. And Kathleen finally sat down to write.

She had been writing about two characters — Josie and Lainey — since her teenage years. She knew who they were. What she lacked was the plot. It arrived through Serial. She listened to every episode back to back, went deep into the subreddits and Twitter threads, and one day caught herself doing a Google image search for the people involved. "I kind of realized," she said, "these are real people that something really awful has happened to, and I'm treating it as entertainment." That discomfort became the novel: a woman whose father's murder case is reopened thirteen years later by a true-crime podcast, unraveling everything she thought she knew about her family and herself. Once she had the story, it poured out.

She started writing in October 2014. By April 2015, she was querying agents. The manuscript needed work — an agent who declined to represent her nonetheless gave her detailed revision notes and introduced her to the agent who eventually sold the book — but the Serial wave was real, and publishers were looking. Are You Sleeping was sold to Gallery Books, a Simon & Schuster imprint, and was published in August 2017. It was later retitled Truth Be Told when Apple TV+ adapted it as a series starring Octavia Spencer.

She has published three more novels since. A fourth comes out in July.

Today, Kathleen and Mark live in Washington, D.C. with their children — a son, seven, and a daughter, five. City kids, she says: they ride the bus, they know the Metro. But when she brings them to Galesburg in the summer to visit her mom, her son always wants to know why they can't just stay. Recently, he made his own graphic novel and included an about-the-author page on the last page. Teddy lives in Washington, D.C. with his family. He has always wanted to be an author, just like his mom. Kathleen read it and was undone.

"It made me grateful," she said, "for the fact that they can see that I'm doing something that I love."

If she could sit down with her younger self — the girl filling notebooks but never showing anyone — the advice would be simple. Worry less about what other people might think. Share the work. "Chase the stuff that really lights you up and makes you feel passionate. Because I kind of think that's what life is really, actually about."

She spent a long time learning that. Now she lives it.