Meet Mia Siegert, Author of “The Names We Buried”

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A legal name change is supposed to be the start of a new chapter. For Jaden, it blows his entire life apart.

In Mia Siegert’s The Names We Buried, a routine trip to the courthouse ends with Jaden’s father under arrest, a suspicious birth certificate, and a DNA test that reveals something far more unsettling: Jaden is a perfect genetic match for a couple who have spent the last seventeen years searching for their kidnapped child.

Their kidnapped daughter.

What follows is a twist-heavy thriller about family, identity, and what it means to belong when every answer creates a new question.

Siegert talks about the documentaries that sparked the story, the challenge of balancing high-stakes suspense with the very real emotions of a trans teen navigating a legal name change, and why a trans protagonist should be able to lead a page-turning thriller without the story revolving around trans suffering. Jaden gets to be complicated, loved, scared, determined, and fully at the center of the mystery. That should not feel unusual. It should feel normal. And for fans of genre thrillers, The Names We Buried does not disappoint.

Every queer person has a story that helped them feel seen. What book, movie, TV show, or piece of art made you feel that way growing up, and how did it influence the stories you tell today?

I’m absolutely dating myself here. Although it didn’t age well, Showtime’s Queer as Folk (2000) probably will always stand out to me. A lot of the queer rep at the time was through one very, very narrow lens, the campy gay bestie sort of thing—so with QAF, it was the first time I saw a fleshed-out cast, unique stories, and it touched on some taboo topics I didn’t know we were allowed to have. The edginess-over-wholesomeness spoke to me as well because just like how queerness falls on a spectrum, I believe literature and media as a whole needs to encompass a spectrum to represent and cater to different people. Many people want escapism to get away from certain daily struggles and stressors, but you get other people who have trouble with that escapism because they want something that’s more tangible and directly correlates with what they experience.

What was the moment, person, or question that inspired you to write this story?

I watch a ton of documentaries and, by fluke, a ton came up in a row about people who discovered they had been abducted as children through DNA testing. My brain works a little differently than some other writers, and I tend to do some weird connections and links, often doing a “what if” or “is it possible” line of thought. So my mind immediately went to The Face on the Milk Carton, where a cishet girl recognizes herself on a milk carton as a kidnapped child. And, of course with my brain being different, I wondered, “would it actually be possible for a story like this to exist today with DNA testing?” Then immediately, “what would happen if the kidnapped child were trans? What would happen if they were loved and accepted with their sense of identity? How would faith come into play if Jaden was agnostic?” And around then, a documentary came up exploring JonBenet Ramsey where it said one of the most unusual things was how the parents stayed together despite not being particularly religious as usually couples, when experiencing a tragedy involving any sort of loss of a child, break up unless they’re very religious or there’s a cover up. Then I typed a few lines and realized I had a book!

The situations Jaden endures throughout The Names We Buried exist in sort of this soapy, thriller, heightened sense of reality, but he’s also dealing with the very real world experiences so many trans teens are navigating of getting a legal name change to match his gender. How did you go about balancing the emotions of those two extremes?

A big part was due to the team. I was extremely lucky to work with my editors Mallory Kass (who wrote The 100) and Maya Marlette—both have huge backgrounds with character-driven commercial fiction where I come from a more literary/experimental world. The characters personal stories and their emotions largely didn’t change—I had TON of help reorganizing with some major edits, including chopping 90 pages in my first editorial pass—for pacing and to have those twisty turns and heart-pounding “what’s next?!” moments. It’s not easy! I was definitely more character-heavy before them! Fun fact: generally I never change my first and last sentences from my very first rough draft—the way they get typed is the way they end up in the printed version. It was really eleventh hour when Maya had a suggestion for my last sentence to consider slightly changing the metaphor. I made a very, very tiny tweak, and it worked really well—the original would have been fine, but I think that was one example of a balance where it just helped overall (and very much was not the norm for me!)

If you could leave one note inside every copy of your book for the next LGBTQ+ young person who reads it, what would it say?

That’s honestly a tough one, but probably “Art is Resistance.” With things like the “Don’t Say Trans” bill, the state of publishing is in the air for many queer writers; trans and nonbinary writers are especially targeted at the moment. As well, a lot of publishing imprints are shutting down. A lot of people are afraid to pick up those stories or openly talk about them because they believe they’re not safe. The best thing readers can do to help out is to not just purchase those books (if possible) but check them out from the library and to leave reviews on all sites (even if it’s just one sentence because it’s algorithm-based) so publishers are willing to keep fighting alongside us.

Why do you think “The Names We Buried” is such an important book for right now?

Tying in with the “Don’t Say Trans” bill, transphobia is at an all-time high due to the current administration, social media oligarchs, and rampant misinformation. The trans community deserves representation that isn’t just locked into one or two tropes, such as a coming out narrative filled with rampant transphobia. Having a trans protagonist in a twisty thriller should be as normal as a cis protagonist. The Names We Buried deals with identity more than anything. With changes, this book could have been written with a cis protagonist easily, and probably there would be more casual readers—and there lies a problem already with normalization. Many cisfolk don’t think they can identify with a trans protagonist—I hope with Names, they can see that yes, they absolutely can identify with Jaden, empathize with him, and also enjoy a twisty thriller. And for the trans and nonbinary communities, we absolutely deserve to have a page-turning thriller that doesn’t revolve around trans-suffering. We deserve to be the protagonist and to have a story centered around us.

What are three books other than your own centering LGBTQ+ characters that you think every person should read?

Only three? That’s mean! LOL! Oh, this is difficult because I think reading is so subjective; you could ask a hundred people and get a hundred different answers, and what works for some people doesn’t work for others. Without question, the closest to a universal top pick would be Once You Go Back by Douglas A. Martin, which is just astonishingly beautiful and an accessible read for almost everyone. For queer thrillers, my go-to writers would be Tess Sharpe and Caleb Roehrig as literally anything they write will be heart-pounding, clever, and amazing; I’d literally read a grocery list if they published them! Kacen Callender’s Lark & Kasim Start a Revolution was also really, really fantastic and a great think-piece.