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）。