The Netflix series You said a firm goodbye to Joe Goldberg (Penn Badgley) last year. But author Caroline Kepnes, whose 2014 book inspired the hit show, is still spending time in the serial killer’s mind. 

In her latest book You First, Kepnes returns to Joe, this time chronicling his younger days. Set in post-9/11 New York, the book explores Joe’s burgeoning toxic masculinity as he comes of age with the internet. 

“I wanted to go back and see what it was like to be a lonely man at that time,” Kepnes says. “It’s always been interesting to me from the get go: why is his loneliness dangerous for so many women.”

We meet the seventeen-year-old high school dropout as he’s figuring out what he wants to do with his life while working at the bookstore Moody’s, where he later stalks his prey. This time around the object of Joe’s affection is Vail, an older writer on Sex and the City who uses her experience to groom and manipulate Joe, behaviors he then perpetuates in his subsequent abusive relationships. This is Joe Goldberg we’re talking about, though, so of course he gets the upper hand in the end.

Kepnes was also interested in exploring how romantic comedies (like Sex and the City) shaped Joe’s actions as he tries to make sense of his first relationship alongside the advent of Craiglist’s Missed Connections and AOL instant messenger.

“The way my mind works is, well what if John Cusack was a bad guy?” she says. “He’s unconsciously learning this lesson that when a girl says no, you just keep going after her and you don’t give up.”

You has always mirrored the culture. The first book was published the same year as Serial debuted, kicking off our burgeoning obsession with true crime and our tendency to romanticize the male perpetrators while often homogenizing their overwhelmingly female victims into cautionary tales. The adaptation landed in 2018 right in the thick of #MeToo (though it was conceptualized prior to the movement, Kepnes says) and while boy next door Badgley’s casting as Joe did nothing to assuage us of said romanticization of a killer, the show and the actor tried to shed light on the prevalence of male violence against women.

“There’s been this sixth sense with all things involved in You—we don’t do it intentionally but oh, there it is,” Kepnes says. “As a writer, I go online, I procrastinate, I talk to people. It’s the journalist in me—I’ve always kept up with what people are talking about.”

It’s that sense of community that Kepnes both mourns and celebrates with You First. 

“There was this feeling of interconnectedness. We were all [going through it] together,” Kepnes says of New York City after 9/11. “And here’s this person who doesn’t know how to connect with people, when we really did have more in-person interactions.”

Kepnes concedes that the retrograde ideas at the heart of the manosphere, which encompasses looksmaxxers like Clavicular, toxic masculinity influencers like Andrew Tate, and incels, the most prominent example of whom was the 2014 Santa Barbara mass shooter Elliot Roger, are nothing new. Rather, along with politicians espousing pro-natalist stances our fascination with tradwives, they’re throwbacks. It’s just that the internet has amplified what feel like responses to the feminist gains of the past decade or two, such as body positivity and autonomy and a widespread acceptance and adoption of lifestyles that don’t include marriage and motherhood. “When a woman is lonely, it’s like, girl, go to the gym or get a hobby,” Kepnes jests. When a man is lonely, he might take it out on a woman, like Joe does.

It’s for that reason that, on the surface, it may appear that Joe would acclimate to the manosphere but Kepnes begs to differ.

“He would be horrified. He would enjoy looking down on these men. It’s disturbing that those guys are out there and that they have followings, but they announce themselves. They’re not pretending to be something that they’re not and we know who they are. Joe is scarier. He’s capable of other things because he’s convinced that he’s above that,” she says. “Because of Joe’s anonymity and his moral code, part of the magic that he works on himself is that he [believes he] would never hurt a girl. He wouldn’t talk that way to a woman, about a woman. He wouldn’t rape someone. That’s always been interesting territory for me because it’s a license to do so many terrible things.”

In a way, the You series has been about the male loneliness epidemic before it had a name. “These books are always about loneliness at their heart,” Kepnes says. “How does Joe deal with loneliness and why does he justify this approach to it? What’s scary about that personality type is that they always find a way. Now it’s so much easier for them to find a way.”