She wrote far more of the book than she let on to Thiru. The memory of Columbus, the night in Gerry’s hotel room—that wasn’t in the original, an omission she found hurtful. How could the worst thing that ever happened to her not be one of his pivotal memories? She added other scenes as well, invented memories that she felt softened him. When she was finished, she realized she finally had some empathy for Gerry Andersen. She had expended so much energy, for so long, on hating him, but he might have saved her life and sacrificed his own in doing so. Not intentionally, perhaps, but he had believed himself brave, he had seen himself as a hero, and that had to count for something.
A two-book deal. It’s not enough. It’s too much. Kim doesn’t lack confidence. She can write another novel. She wrote one in her MFA program. She wrote and revised much of The Floating Staircase, a title about which Thiru is dubious, but Kim has been gently insistent that the book be submitted with that name, claiming it was Gerry’s choice. She simply doesn’t know what she wants. She remembers Gerry’s image of a wallet on a sidewalk, tied to a string, assuming that was Gerry’s image and not Aileen’s. She is not quite thirty. She doesn’t want to spend her life chasing wallets on strings. During the weeks she lived in Gerry’s apartment, readying it for sale, she found that the shelves full of his titles in various editions and languages exerted less power and charm with each passing day. It was, she supposed, like living near a beautiful vista, a mountain range, or an ocean. At some point, you stop noticing.
She has reached the northern edge of Central Park and the sun has disappeared, the wind is kicking up. The sky to the west looks dark, as if a storm might be coming in. She descends into the subway, a tune bouncing in her head: You must take the A train. That doesn’t sound like something she would be thinking, she’s not even sure how she knows that song, although she thinks she has heard Lin-Manuel Miranda sing it, but why would Hamilton mention the A train? Maybe it’s Gerry’s voice she’s hearing. Maybe Gerry will be with her forever, whispering in her ear, filling her mind with his old-man concerns and crotchets.
Good lord, how does she even know the word crotchet, so weird and old-fashioned, not something a thirty-year-old would say? Has she become Gerry Andersen by writing about him? She certainly didn’t bargain for that.
AUTHOR’S NOTE
And now perhaps we begin to see?
This is the way I always remember the last line of Portnoy’s Complaint. I always get it wrong. The psychiatrist asks Portnoy, clearly rhetorically, if he is ready to begin, not see. At any rate, Gerry Andersen is beyond therapy at this point.
If you want to play the game of figuring out who Gerry Andersen is, check out the author photo on this book. We are about the same age, creatures of Baltimore, formed by many of the same small experiences, none of the large ones. This is a book about what goes on inside a writer’s mind and it is, by my lights, my first work of horror.
Over the past few years, I have begun repurposing books that are beloved to me, trying to figure out how to further the conversations they began in my head. Stephen King’s Misery was clearly an influence here, but so were Roth’s Zuckerman Unbound and Margaret Mitchell Dukore’s A Novel Called Heritage.
But I think this novel was largely birthed in the living room of a now razed St. Petersburg, Florida, bed-and-breakfast, where the faculty at Writers in Paradise met for one week in January for fifteen years to drink and talk, talk and drink.
I had the usual support of “my” publishing team, people I have named often and will not try to list here as I will almost certainly forget someone. I had the support of my family as well and many friends, both in real life and on social media platforms. In fact, it was via Facebook that Martha Frankel put me in touch with Joe Donahue, who was extremely helpful in his description of healing from a bilateral quad tear. My neighbors who happen to be doctors, Joyce Jones and Andrew Stolbach, also offered assistance. And, sometimes, food and alcohol.
Two Baltimoreans bid on the right to have their names used in this book, with their contributions going directly to my daughter’s school. Thank you, Thiru Vignarajah and Sarah Kotula.
When I began this book in 2019, my desire was to set it in a time I call nowish, but the pandemic forced my hand. It’s odd to feel nostalgia for the life one was living when a book project began. By the time I finished this novel, my daughter was “distance learning” at home, which meant that I had to get up at sunrise to do my allotment of pages. This was exactly how I wrote twenty-plus years ago, when I still had a full-time job.
You know what? I liked it.
Laura Lippman
Baltimore, 2020
About the Author
Laura Lippman’s novels have won many crime fiction prizes, including the Edgar, Anthony and Agatha awards. Sunburn (2018), her second consecutive novel to win the eDunnit award at Crimefest, was also nominated for the CWA Gold Dagger award and was a Waterstones Book of the Month. Her most recent novel, Lady in the Lake (2019), featured in numerous best of year lists and was followed by the publication of her first collection of essays, My Life as a Villainess (2021).