PHOTO: SELA SHILONI

Growing up in Highland Park, Illinois, Schwartz had always surrounded herself with the literary world of books, writing, and reading—“My favorite childhood summer was the two weeks I spent at writing camp,” she says—but started her time at Brown quite sure that she’d become a doctor, not a writer. And yet, within five years of graduating, Schwartz had already published her first novel, And We’re Off, as well as a genre-busting, long-form personality quiz–cum-memoir, Choose Your Own Disaster. This switch wasn’t without some trepidation: “I was nervous to try to make this a career,” says Schwartz, who ended up concentrating in public policy, thanks to her love of history and writing. “I’m someone who thrives on external validation and on gold stars—and I didn’t see the concrete steps toward getting to that with writing. It seemed like a nebulous and difficult job.”

But the gold stars certainly have come—in the form of having her 2022 young-adult gothic  romance novel Anatomy hit #1 on the New York Times bestseller list, which she followed up, in early 2023, with the second in the duology, Immortality. Both novels are set in the macabre world of Regency-era surgery in early-1800s Edinburgh, which helped Schwartz use her passion for science and medicine in ways she never imagined.

Since 2019, she’s also written and hosted the popular podcast Noble Blood, which dives deep into the histories of the world’s most fascinating royals—from the criminal to the comical and beyond. “The thing about doing a show about royalty is that there seems to be infinite stories,” says Schwartz. “Every time I do an episode on one topic, it seems to lead me down a path to three more stories I could do. I could do months of the show just on Marie Antoinette alone!”

PHOTO: Philip Romano

Through it all, Los Angeles–based Schwartz is doing what she didn’t entirely think was possible: braiding together what may have seemed like disparate interests—medicine, history, fiction—but ones that all continue to provide her thrills. “I love being able to jump between media, and the person that I’ve always wanted my career to emulate is someone like Neil Gaiman, who has gone between novels and comic books and films and TV—but with a voice and a tone that remains so consistent. For me, my north star is always that it be something that genuinely interests me and excites me. Is it something that if I didn’t write it, would I want to read it? If I am excited by it, then the work doesn’t feel quite as much like work.”