Goodreads asked Kate Braithwaite:

Where did you get the idea for your most recent book?

Kate Braithwaite I came across Nellie Bly in Brain Pickings - a blog I subscribe to, run by Maria Popova. Although I live in PA, where Bly is from, I didn't grow up here and had not heard of her before. I was fascinated at the idea that this young woman had pretended to be mad in order to be committed to an asylum and report on conditions for a New York newspaper. I bought her story Ten Days in A Madhouse that same day. My book about Nellie, The Girl Puzzle, tries to explore what her time in the madhouse must have been really like for her as she lived it - as opposed to her published newspaper reports on what happened. Competing newspapers disputed some of her commentary and there was a hint that she might have had a relationship with one of the doctors. And as I read more about Nellie's whole life, I knew I wanted a story line that reflected on her later years and the way that her asylum expose wasn't the end of her story, it was just the beginning.

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