Before MacKenzie Scott became Mackenzie Bezos in 1993, she was an English major at Princeton, where Toni Morrison found her to be among the “best” students the Nobel laureate had ever had in a creative-writing class. Twenty years ago, Scott published her first novel, The Testing of Luther Albright, followed by a second, Traps, in 2013.
Now, as the noted philanthropist releases her latest work of fiction, Last Days in Two Nations—a serialized dystopian novel available to read for free on Substack—revisit Vogue’s profile of Scott from 2013.
“A Novel Perspective” by Rebecca Johnson was originally published in the March 2013 issue of Vogue.
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Before I met her, my only image of MacKenzie Bezos came from the author photo on her first book, The Testing of Luther Albright. In it, she looks gamine and ethereal but slightly uncomfortable, as if she’s not entirely sure about herself or this whole novel-writing business. When she shows up at the Thai restaurant in Bellevue, Washington, a suburb of Seattle, where we are meeting for lunch to talk about Traps, her latest novel, I see right away how wrong that impression was. She does have an ethereal quality, with pale white skin and high cheekbones, but she’s not hesitant at all. At least, not anymore.
She admits that the first book took ten years and “a lot of tears” to finish. Granted, she was doing other things during that time—moving cross-country, giving birth to four children (three boys and a girl, ranging in age from seven to twelve), helping her husband start a fledgling business called Amazon.com. “Jeff is my best reader,” she says of her more well known spouse, who will cheerfully clear his schedule for the day, read her manuscript in one sitting, and give her meticulous notes on her work. In order to finish Traps more quickly, she forced herself to forgo those comforts. “Not talking about it to Jeff gave me an extremely rewarding carrot,” she says. “The sooner I finished, the sooner I could share it with him and talk about these characters who had been taking up so much space in my head. By the last three months, they were so real and important to me, I could start crying just thinking about them while driving to pick up the kids from school.”
A slim, fast-paced novel tracing the lives of four diverse women over the course of four days in and around the Los Angeles area, Traps is taut but nuanced, a character-driven thriller that is both suspenseful and intelligent. As she did in her first book, which was named a Los Angeles Times book of the year and which used the mysteries of plumbing as a metaphor for the intricate bonds of family intimacy, Bezos assigns her characters a wide variety of professions—from animal rescuer to teen prostitute—then uses those professions to elucidate the way their lives have sputtered or stalled. A high-level security consultant is great at sensing threats, not so good at being vulnerable in relationships. A movie star has a million fans but hasn’t spoken to her mother in years. Unlike Luther, which read like a tour de force of domestic realism but wasn’t necessarily a fun time—you try spending a year in the head of a self-absorbed civil engineer—Traps crackles with ready-made Hollywood drama.
