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Award-winning TV writer/producer turned novelist Georgia Jeffries spoke with me about why Cagney and Lacey was her film school, teaching screenwriting at USC, and the ghosts, grief, and grievance in her debut novel THE YOUNGER GIRL.

Georgia Jeffries is the Emmy-nominated TV writer/producer who became the first individual female screenwriter to earn a Writers Guild Award for Episodic Drama for her work on the ground-breaking series Cagney & Lacey.

Her debut is The Younger Girl: A Dark Labyrinth of Family Betrayal, based on a true crime. It was described by bestselling author Rachel Howzell Hall as “...historical fiction at its best. … [and] an eye-opening, immersive story about a family, then and now, nearly stripped bare from greed and the steadfast refusal to acknowledge a painful past.”

Jeffries has written docudramas and series pilots for CBS, ABC, NBC, HBO, and Showtime and is a professor at USC’s School of Cinematic Arts where she created the first undergraduate screenwriting thesis program at an American university.

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In this file Georgia Jeffries and I discussed:

Her early years as a journalist

How she received rave rejections on her first attempt at a novel

Why she based her debut on true events from her family’s past

The throughline of her quest for justice and love of noir fiction

Writing genre-bending historical suspense

And a lot more!

Show Notes:

⁠georgiajeffries.com⁠

⁠The Younger Girl: A Dark Labyrinth of Family Betrayal⁠ by Georgia Jeffries (Amazon)

⁠Georgia Jeffries on IMDb⁠

⁠Georgia Jeffries on Instagram⁠

⁠Kelton Reid Instagram

⁠Kelton Reid on Twitter

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