Ask Catalina Margulis about her next novel, and the signature grin arrives first, followed by a cheerful confession: “I have to get better at the logline.”
It’s a charming admission from the former national magazine journalist and married mother of four, who now guides other writers through their own books. It’s typical: she is quick to laugh and to reveal curiosity (“Ooh, that’s such a good question!”), and is always ready to turn the spotlight on someone else’s story.
We reconnect a year after the release of her debut Again, Only More Like You (Rising Action, 2025). Margulis has just come off a summer sabbatical, in which she’s been writing, scaling back her business, and being present with her kids. Mission accomplished: she is “refreshed and ready for it.”
As we begin discussing her novel, she explains that it began in an absence. “I was looking on the bookshelves, and I was looking on Netflix for a story that felt like somebody was going through something similar to what I was going through — and could show me how to get through this moment,” she recalls. “And I couldn’t find anything.” So she took the advice she had previously come upon to “write the book you want to read”. That book was Again, Only More Like You.
The story follows Carmen and Ally, who have been best friends since childhood, as their fortieth birthdays loom. Carmen has built a glossy New York life with a high-profile career as a magazine editor and a loving family. Then an unexpected pregnancy, a sudden layoff, and the first crow’s feet arrive in quick succession. Meanwhile in Maine, marine biologist Ally is reeling from an affair with her boss that has gone up in flames. She heads for Portland, Oregon, hoping for a clean slate and another shot at love. As their paths diverge, tragedy dredges up buried resentments, and the pair must face their pasts — and each other — to confront the question: is the best behind them, or is forty merely the opening chapter?
Margulis’ playfulness shows up in the novel’s dual perspective. “Oh gosh, that was so fun,” she says of writing both women, who become “each other’s what ifs,” with each able to look across the country and wonder, “What if I never had kids?” The idea grew directly from her own friend circle, which was then divided between young mothers and single women building careers, whose families had not materialized. “I felt like we were always sort of judging each other and comparing ourselves against each other.” Add in social media, where “people make up stories around what we see on Instagram, and what our friends post on Facebook” — and the grass looks greener everywhere. For Margulis, the exercise of building a novel around these dynamics was “healing for myself” and “a great exercise in gratitude.”
Although some aspects of Carmen’s life seem markedly similar to Margulis’, she assures me that there is far less of her on the page than her family assumes. “It’s not a memoir — so that I can tell the best story,” she explains. “I can colour outside the lines.” Thus, when relatives spot certain aspects of her in Carmen, she often pushes back: “That wasn’t me at that age.” But Ally, she admits, was the harder puzzle for her to crack and required extensive research. “I didn’t understand her, and I really had to spend a lot of time with her to make her come up on the page,” she admits. The solution, paradoxically, lay inward: “I really had to write from me … even though, on the outside, this character looks nothing like me.”
One of the novel’s principal achievements is its nuanced depiction of female friendship, which Margulis most wanted to protect. She has been with her husband since age eighteen, “so really, my best friend is my best friend.” She’s very happy, but when she sees lively photos of female friend groups online, she also admits, “I want that.” So she wrote Carmen and Ally’s relationship without sugarcoating it. “I wanted to show a different kind of friendship,” she explains: one strained by distance and family, and sometimes reduced to a once-a-year text. She knows the feeling well. “I’ve had a lot of friends come and go,” she acknowledges. “I’m past the point of feeling bad about that.” She relished letting Carmen and Ally be “really horrible to each other,” then “receive that unconditional love back, after that.”
Reinvention runs through the book and through Margulis herself. “I think it’s really freeing to know we can reinvent from moment to moment. That’s available to all of us at any age, and let’s not forget that!” she smiles. Her career has taught her this lesson repeatedly: “I’ve always been outrunning some kind of technology that is putting the squeeze on my industry.” She once feared the resultant job-hopping made her look flaky, but now she sees it “more and more as a mark of resilience.” And as she approaches fifty, she has even returned to a dream shelved at age eighteen, when she skipped film school because she told herself “people like me don’t make it in Hollywood.” Tapping back into that interest, she has begun dabbling in screenwriting. “Talk about dormant,” she laughs. “I’m reaching 50, and yeah, I think it’s time for me to play with this ‘toy’. We can have more fun with it.”
Though she lives in Toronto, Margulis set Again, Only More Like You in the United States — a lesson learned during her magazine years: “Nobody in the US is buying our Canadian titles,” she states flatly, so she worried that a Canadian-set novel “would just be within our borders, and that was as far as that book was going to travel.” With its US setting and resonant premise, Margulis is gratified to report that the book has travelled. Upon reading it, her mother told her, “this isn’t just a book for 40-somethings” — and the signings have borne that out. She has met college students and others unsure what to do with their lives, and her answer is simple: “This is the book for you.” Most surprising to Margulis was learning of a woman in Florida who had written a book about hitchhiking in the 1970s, and who, like Margulis, fell in love young, while keeping an adventurous streak. Margulis has no idea how this reader got hold of the novel, but “she loved my book so much that she sent me her book and wrote me this beautiful card,” she says. “This was really cool.”
Her advice to debut writers is as warm as she is. She cites Stephen King’s rule of writing with the door closed and editing with it open, then adds her own: “Trust your obsession.” Her second novel about a mother at a crossroads, which she is currently working on, took five years to win her over. “I had so many conversations with God,” she says, and thought, “I don’t want to write this book. This is not my book to write.” And yet “it just would not let me go.”
Her parting words are for anyone hesitating over a story of their own. “Somebody may be out there waiting for your story,” she says. Then re-states her point more firmly: “Somebody IS waiting for it.”
And then, just as our conversation is winding down, the grin reappears, and she leans into the curiosity and friendship at the core of Again, Only More Like You”. “So tell me what you’ve been up to,” she says, the grin back in place.
Again, Only More Like You is available at bookstores, and more information is available at simonandschuster.ca.
© Arpita Ghosal, Sesaya Arts Magazine 2026
