When Marisa Kashino started writing her debut novel, “Best Offer Wins,” her mindset was uncommon for an author: She wasn’t sure if she wanted anybody to read her book. Yet, she completed her first draft in nearly three months.

Kashino’s weekdays were spent working as an editor; on the weekends, she devoted herself to writing her novel. Writing fiction was how Kashino filled the creative void she felt from her day job. She didn’t expect how much she would love the process of writing her debut, and she certainly didn’t expect to become a full-time author.

“I really thought I would be a journalist for my whole life,” Kashino said.

Set in the suburbs of Washington, D.C., the novel follows the unhinged 37-year-old Margo Miyake on a hunt to secure her dream home in an increasingly ruthless, competitive housing market.

“Best Offer Wins” is a thriller, but also a satire and social commentary on the modern housing crisis. After the book’s publication last year, its response was quick and completely unexpected to Kashino. “Best Offer Wins” is a USA Today Bestseller, a Good Morning America Book Club Pick and is in early development to become a Hulu series.

Before writing fiction, Kashino wrote nonfiction for 17 years. She spent most of her journalistic career at Washingtonian magazine, writing investigative, long-form pieces as well as overseeing real estate and design coverage. In 2022, she began working at The Washington Post as an editor for the home care and improvement section, where she did little to no writing.

“I did not predict how much I was going to miss writing myself in my day-to-day life,” Kashino said. “That was what spurred me to try creative writing, which I had never done before.”

To scratch her creative itch, Kashino enrolled in a class at The Writer’s Center, a Washington, D.C.-based nonprofit organization that offers hundreds of creative writing workshops each year.

What resulted for Kashino was a project fueled by the freedom to invent, imagine and write, a project just for her and no one else: It became her earliest version of “Best Offer Wins.”

“Having been a journalist for that long, and beholden to the facts and the reporting, to have those guardrails taken off and have the freedom to just make it up — that was so fun,” Kashino said.

By writing purely to create, Kashino said she could explore her novel’s story without limits. It was a mindset that developed Margo into the equally messy and captivating character she is now.

Writing Margo was voicing a character who could “say the quiet parts out loud and misbehave in all the ways that women are not really allowed to misbehave in real life,” Kashino said.

Kashino’s literary agents say Margo’s strength as a woman protagonist and her anti-hero qualities are exactly what drew them in. For Ethan Schlatter, a United Talent Agency coordinator and one of Kashino’s literary agents, the smart, satirical, propulsive thriller was a “lightning in a bottle” situation.

“She’s just such an incredible writer,” said Meredith Miller, a United Talent Agency literary agent and Kashino’s other literary agent. “You could tell from the tone of how she spoke about her characters, as well as the story, that this is someone who has fully inhabited this world and has had a lot of fun with it.”

Miller and Schlatter were immediately hooked by Margo’s ability to venture where others wouldn’t, literally and metaphorically.

“It’s not an uncommon characteristic in books, but it is an uncommon one to nail the way that Marisa did,” Miller said.

Throughout the book, Margo goes through a “psychological unraveling”, propelled by a certain “internal rage” that emboldens her to extreme actions. It’s a type of rage Kashino intentionally explored through fiction.

“Most women can find any number of reasons to feel pretty angry about things these days,” Kashino said. “Having a main character who leans so fully into that rage and really lives in it was a lot of fun to write, because you and I can’t express our rage the way that Margot ends up expressing it in the book.”

Miller and Schlatter were both in the process of moving when they first read Kashino’s novel, which Schlatter said enabled them to sympathize with Margot’s anger and frustration toward the housing market.

“There was this similar simmering sense of rage at being blocked out of a system that we’ve been told our entire lives we need to participate in,” Miller said. “It’s the American dream to own your home.”

It’s a dream that drives Margo, and one that many people can sympathize with.

“When you put something creative into the world, all you want is for people to have a response, a reaction to it or for it to make people feel something,” Kashino explained.

Kashino will be discussing ”Best Offer Wins” at the Los Angeles Times Festival of Books on Saturday at 10:30 a.m. in Taper Hall, room 201, speaking in a panel dedicated to crime fiction novels with strong female leads.

“There’s nothing more valuable than somebody’s time. So, for people to choose to spend their time with my book … There is no higher reward,” Kashino said.