Tova Mirvis: Emotional Friction

Tova Mirvis (photo: Aynsley Floyd)

Tova Mirvis is the author of a memoir, The Book of Separation, as well as three novels: Visible City, The Outside World, and national bestseller The Ladies Auxiliary. Her essays have appeared in the New York Times Book Review and Poets and Writers, and her fiction has been broadcast on NPR. She lives in Newton, Mass. Her fourth novel, We Would Never, a thriller featuring a tight-knit family, will be published by Avid Reader Press on February 11, 2025.

Your previous book, The Book of Separation, was a memoir of leaving your faith and marriage; an acrimonious divorce case is the background for We Would Never. How did you approach the topic differently in autobiography and fiction, while allowing your experience to add authenticity?

My inspiration for We Would Never was a true-crime case that hit me in a raw, vulnerable spot. The story was of a spousal murder that took place during a contentious divorce, and when I first read about it, I was in the midst of my own divorce. How, I tried to understand, can a separation spiral so out of control that it ends in murder?

To spend years writing a book, I have to feel a kind of emotional friction--like the sandpapery surface needed to strike a match. A story about a divorce gone awry--that lit my writing on fire. I decided to take the bones of that true-crime story and transform it into a novel. And while We Would Never is not based on my own life, I did make use of what I know about divorce--how it can feel obliterating and unmoor you from who you imagined yourself to be. When I was writing memoir, I sometimes felt like I had to tread carefully. In fiction, I can let my imagination run free.

Several of your books are set in Orthodox Jewish communities. Although the Marcus family is Jewish, faith is a fairly low-key element here. Were aspects of the family dynamic inspired by your background--the protectiveness, the sense of a conspiracy of silence?

What interested me in this novel were the family dynamics, the enmeshments and the longings and the estrangements--not how this family exists within a particular faith community, as I've explored in the past, but how they function as an almost sealed family unit. So, in this way, it does feel like a departure and a chance to explore new themes.

But at the same time, I think that, no matter how far we travel, we always carry parts of our backgrounds with us. In this novel, I was interested in the universal theme of forgiveness. This led me to include a little bit about the Jewish holiday of Yom Kippur, the Day of Atonement, and gave me a way to ask questions about what it means to forgive and what happens when we are unable to do so.

This idea of people who "would do anything" for their family or "would never" do certain other things when in extreme situations--how did you hope to push back at that? Can we ever really know what people will do?

That question really fascinated me. We might claim we would never do something, but I'm not sure we always know what we might be capable of in situations we can't yet imagine. Under what set of circumstances might someone commit an act they once believed was impossible? What combination of anger and loyalty and fear might enable someone to lose their moral compass? I was especially interested in the idea of escalation, how with a series of small actions, events can spiral out of control; sometimes we might not realize how far we've gone until we're already there.

What role does Adam play in this family? Why was it essential to have one estranged member who is mostly an outsider yet still has crucial inside knowledge?

The outsider is always one of my favorite characters--the person close enough to have access but far enough to see things in a new and often contrary way. And the outsider offers the reader another perspective on what they are seeing. In creating Adam, I thought about the painful loneliness of feeling separate in a setting where you expect to belong. He doesn't adhere to the family mythology and stands in contrast to his mother's fervent desire for them to be close. And his distance has a ricocheting effect on the decisions his family members eventually make.

With news of his diagnosis, readers perhaps start to sideline Sol in the same way that his family does. Was this a deliberate way of exposing how the ill are discounted?

Sol's illness is important in exactly this way. I wanted to explore what happens when an established family dynamic is forced to undergo a change--and illness is one of the most profound ways this can happen. Sol's diagnosis upends expectations about the future. He is sidelined, both in the family and professionally, which creates a vacuum in which the plot begins to unfold.

I'm curious about the choice of locales: rural Maine, Binghamton, N.Y., and West Palm Beach, Fla. Do these places have personal significance, and/or what metaphorical parts do they play?

A sense of place is very important to me, which I attribute to my Memphis upbringing and my love of the great Southern writers, for whom place was essential.

The true-crime story that inspired me took place in Florida. While I changed many details, Florida remained. I live in the Boston area but spend time in Florida because my husband works there several days a week. I have come to love the natural beauty of Florida, the tropical flowers always in bloom and the lush greenery that is simultaneously manicured and wild. That became important in creating the visual setting for the book.

I chose rural Maine because it felt like an opposite to West Palm Beach. I wanted to alternate between the stifling humidity of South Florida, with its swampy sense of entanglement, and the cold pristineness, the quiet loneliness, of Maine.

As for Binghamton (where the murder takes place), there was an element of randomness. A few years back, I was supposed to give a book talk at SUNY Binghamton. I was at the airport when I got a call saying there had been a murder on campus and the event was canceled. Sometimes details lodge in your mind, and then, one day, they make their way onto the page.

This is the first time you've written something approaching a thriller. How did you figure out when and how much to reveal?

It is the first time I've written a book with this degree of suspense, and it was very tricky to figure out how to both reveal and conceal, sometimes at the same time. It felt like a sleight-of-hand, trying to hide clues in plain sight. I made charts and wrote many drafts. To give you a sense of just how many, every time I did a major revision, I updated the name of the file. The final version was called New Novel 58. --Rebecca Foster