Guthrie started her journalism career at the San Francisco Examiner, and after its merger, continued at the San Francisco Chronicle. She published her first book, The Grace of Everyday Saints, in 2011, about a church's closure order. It was based on work she had done as metro reporter covering the church's drama in 2005. In 2013, she published her second book, The Billionaire and the Mechanic, which was updated to include the Oracle Team second win at the America's Cup in its 2014 second edition. Its second edition landed on the New York Times bestsellers list.[4] In 2014, her third book was preemptively sold to Penguin Books. That book was originally entitled "Beyond: Peter Diamandis and the Adventure of Space", before becoming How to Make a Spaceship. In 2016, her third book, How to Make a Spaceship, was published. This book enticed several offers to acquire the film rights. It landed on the New York Times bestsellers list, and became a finalist in the 2017 PEN/Wilson Literary Science Writing Award, and won the 2016 Emme Astronautical Literature Award. Her fourth book, Alpha Girls, bought up by Currency Books in 2017 for 2019 publication, incited a bidding war in 2017 for its film and TV rights, ending up at Welle Entertainment.