Long before she became one of the most fiscally generous people in history, Scott wanted to write fiction. She attended Princeton, drawn in by the prospect of studying with Toni Morrison; the vaunted author would advise Scott on her thesis project, a novel-length manuscript titled The Fathering Water. Morrison later told Vogue that Scott was “one of the best students I’ve ever had in my creative-writing classes…really one of the best.”
Morrison continued to champion Scott following graduation, introducing Scott to her own agent, Amanda “Binky” Urban. Urban signed Scott as a client. (It’s not clear whether Urban’s agency, CAA, still represents Scott; a representative for the company didn’t respond to a request for comment.) In 2005, Fourth Estate published Scott’s debut novel, The Testing of Luther Albright, a quiet, emotionally exacting character excavation that unspools the life of the titular Luther—an engineer whose copper piping system begins to fail in the wake of an earthquake. (His inability to plumb his own emotions also causes a rift between him and his family.) The novel won the American Book Award, one of the prizes Morrison had won for her 1987 novel Beloved.
Scott took a break from writing during what she has called the “too busy” years she spent raising her three children with Bezos—until 2013, when Knopf published her second book, Traps. She described the book to Charlie Rose as a creative departure: it takes place over just four days and is narrated in close third-person from the perspective of four different women, including an Oscar-winning actress plagued by paparazzi and a teen mom with newborn twins.
While researching the novel, Scott said she worked for a few days at a dog shelter and also spent time on a movie set. In writing it, she set out to explore “the things that we worry over the most in life, the things we feel trapped by, the mistakes we’ve made, the bad luck we come across, the accidents we come across. The paradox is, in the end, oftentimes those are the things that we’ll look back and be most grateful for; those are the things that take us where we need to go.” The novel was edited by Jordan Pavlin, now Knopf’s executive vice president and publisher, whose authors include Kazuo Ishiguro, Bret Easton Ellis, and Jhumpa Lahiri.
Scott at the Met Gala in 2012.Larry Busacca/Getty Images
