Using
her trademark blend of psychological suspense, complex characters and razor-sharp
crime writing, Laura Lippman returns with I'd Know You Anywhere (Morrow,
$25.99, 9780061706554/ 0061706558, August 17, 2010), the story of Eliza
Benedict, whose peaceful life is upended when she receives a Death Row note
from Walter Bowman, the serial killer who kidnapped and held her hostage
decades earlier. Here, in an interview with Shelf Awareness reviewer and
author Debra Ginsberg, Lippman reflects on the nature of memory, the human
capacity for evil and the inspirations for her characters.
It's essential to our survival that our memories be flawed and predisposed to forming stories that are beneficial to us, or at least shaping them in ways that make them useful. I had a pretty happy childhood, but every family has its difficult moments. As an adult, I found my memory had chosen not to preserve everything in amber, as it were, which was a blessing. I also discovered that memories wear down like everything else. I've been interested in the fallibility of memory for a very long time.
Does Eliza's memory of her kidnapping help or hinder her?
It has helped her for much of her life, but now it's hindering her, in part because her own daughter is turning into the sort of golden girl that Holly (one of Walter's victims) appeared to be--pretty, popular, poised. She has to resolve her feelings about her role in what happened to Holly because they're beginning to mingle with the problem of being the mother to an adolescent girl.
By giving part of the narrative over to Walter's point of view, you've made it frighteningly easy to understand (if not sympathize with) him and his crimes. How did you get inside his head--and what was it like to live there for the duration of this novel?
I didn't like it. I got very depressed and sullen while writing the Walter chapters and I had a hard time knowing if they would be similarly off-putting to readers. But I committed myself to inhabiting him, seeing the world through those eyes. All adult women know men like this, not killers but guys who are slightly "off." They seek women who look like adults but still think like girls.
Part of what makes Walter so scary is the almost casual nature of his pathology. He is competent, "almost handsome" and a skilled manipulator, yet his frustration and lack of emotional problem-solving lead to horrifying consequences. Is Walter evil? How defined is the line between good and evil?
If Walter was more self-aware, he might be evil. But up until the end, he's still rationalizing. I think it's hard to be evil, but frighteningly evil to rationalize one's way into doing evil things. I perform this constant mental checklist, where I try to catch myself rationalizing an action I find indefensible in others. For example, it makes me crazy when someone enters, say, the local Motor Vehicle Administration, sees a long line and instantly goes to the front, apparently thinking: "This is line is not for the likes of me." (We call this Secretary of State syndrome in my household.) And yet... I have done the same thing on occasion. Or started to, then caught myself. It's funny, the things we will and won't do. I would never park in a handicapped/disabled spot. I just wouldn't. I would never steal. But I'll speed. I'm sometimes late, much as I dislike lateness. I've been known to gossip, although I quite despise gossip. Walter wants a girlfriend and he thinks he should have one. He never starts out thinking he's going to kill a girl, yet that's what he ends up doing.
Although Eliza still harbors fear and guilt, she's remarkably well-adjusted for a woman with such a traumatic event in her past. Where did you find the inspiration for Eliza?
Eliza was inspired by a friend. I'm not even sure she knows it. But when she was young, she experienced a traumatic illness, something with a 1% survival rate. And she lived. I knew her for a long time before she mentioned this and it was my sense she wanted to shut the conversation down very quickly. It didn't define her. She also happens to be this incredibly calm, down-to-earth, happy mom.
I had just come off writing Life Sentences, a book about the kind of writer whose book is read by book clubs. I wanted to write about the kind of woman who belongs to a book club, if that makes sense. When I was a journalist, I belonged to a school of reporters--admittedly, a small school--who believed that a good reporter should be able to open a phone book, blindly pick out a name, call the person and be able to develop that call into a full-blown feature story. Everybody has a story. I wanted people to look around them, at the grocery store or PTA and think: Do I really know you? What secrets might you harbor?
I think Eliza is the most likable character I have ever written and it was very hard to let go of her. To me, her defining moment comes when another character tells her that he/she always does what's right and Eliza replies: "That's a nice way to be." She's utterly sincere, but she also knows it's a luxury to live a life in which right or wrong is readily apparent. By the way, for all of Eliza's protestations about her averageness, her lack of special talent--I think her time with Walter shows she has a genius for empathy. Plus, her made-up version of Travels with Charley isn't bad at all.
The complicated relationship between mothers and daughters is a theme throughout I'd Know You Anywhere. How did that develop?
In 2008, I wrote a novella in which my series character, Tess Monaghan, had a baby. Because of that, mothers and daughters were very much on my mind already. I wanted to write about good mothers, and I think every mother in this book is a good one. Except, perhaps, Walter's, but whatever her failings, she can't be blamed for the man he became. At one point, I had hoped to tell all the mothers stories, to see how the mother of each victim was faring, but I think the book would have sagged under the weight of so many characters. But I had those stories in my head. Trudy, the mother of Walter's final victim, is not a character whose values I share. But you know what? I would not deign to tell a parent who has lost a child how to be. Over the past few years, I've become good friends with Ann Hood, a brilliant novelist who wrote a memoir about the death of her daughter. Knowing Ann, knowing the book, knowing the novel that also was drawn from her experience--it has opened my mind to the idea that grief comes in a thousand hues, that it's something that lives and breathes and mutates, but it never leaves. The same is true of my mother-in-law, to whom this book is dedicated, along with my late father-in-law. She lost her only daughter to cancer 20 years ago. She thinks about her every day.
You've written 10 novels in your series featuring Baltimore PI Tess Monaghan; I'd Know You Anywhere is your fifth stand-alone. What are the challenges and rewards of writing a series vs. those of writing the stand-alones?
By the luckiest of happenstances, I managed to create a character with whom I have now spent almost 20 years of my life. But her world is very defined so I've used stand-alones to try things that wouldn't work in Tess's world. And the stand-alones give me a chance to play with structure. The challenge and the reward of a stand-alone is that it takes me into uncharted waters. Although I've tried not to write the same Tess book twice, I do have the advantage of knowing the characters, the setting, the larger world. The stand-alones, in fact, tend to tell the same story, but in very different ways. A woman--or women--has/have a secret. The reader has all the factual information and can begin to piece the story together if intent on doing that. The basic facts of the story are not contradicted; I don't really do twists. But the "why" remains tantalizing--I hope.
Laura Lippman discusses I'd Know You Anywhere.