Like all writers, I’m great at procrastinating. One of my favorite guilty pleasures is Reddit’s AmItheA**hole thread. If you haven’t yet succumbed to this black hole, random people submit real life hostile encounters to a jury of strangers, who pronounce someone the villain. What’s truly fascinating is how many different interpretations people come up with for the same events.
I’m intrigued by what happens when you combine emotional intensity with miscommunication and differing world views. Particularly when everyone involved is fundamentally a decent human being. Black-and-white, hero-and-villain-type battles between good and evil are only so interesting. In fiction, I prefer to dwell in the emotionally heightened grey area – where terrible mistakes are made for morally complex reasons. Throw in a dead body, and I’m hooked.
One of my all-time favorite book series is Elena Ferrante’s Neapolitan novels. She chronicles the life-long relationship – alternating between friendship to estrangement – between two brilliant women, Elena and Lila. As kids, they’re inseparable. But their bond is complicated when Lila is forced to drop out of school. Meanwhile Elena continues her education, setting her on a completely different life trajectory. Elena ultimately becomes a writer while Lila becomes a child bride, works in a meat packing factory, and survives a slew of abuses and tragedies. The books are a fascinating study of twentieth century Italian social forces. But what’s most electrifying about Elena and Lila’s story is the way they circle each other, sometimes connecting, sometimes losing each other again.
Miscommunication in families and between close friends is not just a plot device; it’s an inescapable part of modern life – particularly in a family context. Just think of every advice column, or our collective anxiety over Thanksgiving dinner. Frankly, it would be hard to convincingly write a modern family where everyone is simpatico and shares a common world view. Yet most books about family struggles involve a monster – a violent father, an emotionally abusive mother, or some trusted adult who is secretly a child-abusing pervert. Bogeymen have a place in fiction, but stories with perfect moral clarity are often less intriguing than tales where the central tragedy is not caused by evil, but by misunderstanding and two people’s inability to reach each other. That psychological gulf can set up a crisis that is simultaneously inevitable and tragically preventable.
Miscommunication and a desire to connect can be a particularly strong plot device in crime fiction. Julia Dahl’s terrific I Dreamed of Falling alternates between the perspectives of two people, each one flawed, ordinary, and struggling. Ashley and Roman are long time partners in an open relationship. They love each other but are together more out of loyalty and circumstance than understanding or compatibility. Life has run them ragged. Soon, they find themselves bickering over little things, like couples do when the cracks begin to show. The last thing Roman says to Ashley before she turns up dead is a nasty quip about her grocery shopping. Roman’s subsequent investigation of her death keeps readers hooked because it’s not a straight-up hunt for justice. As Roman gets deeper into his search for answers, he discovers new truths about Ashley and constantly needs to reassess who she was, and the nature of their relationship. The character study and mystery aspects of the book complement each other and make for a riveting read.
In my mystery, Burn This Night, I build a novel around two families of decent people, struggling to communicate and relate to each other.
Kate, my protagonist, is an agnostic, divorced private investigator mired in a custody battle. Still grieving her father’s death, she feels betrayed and unsettled to discover in her late thirties that she is the product of sperm donation. Meanwhile, Kate’s mother, a deeply religious woman who doesn’t believe in divorce, and who was married to a cop in the eighties, feels that she was protecting her family by concealing a secret she viewed as shameful.
In writing about Kate’s experience, I spent a long time listening to NPE, or “not parent expected,” podcasts. I heard dozens of heart-wrenching stories of adults who felt betrayed that a fundamental part of their family history was kept from them. At the same time, some parents talked about their motivations for keeping a family secret, which were often born out of exceptionally difficult circumstances.
Around the time that Kate learns about her father, she discovers through a genetics website that she is related to an unknown cold case killer. Kate looks into this decades-old crime for free when she is hired to investigate another murder that occurred in the same town: Jacob Coburn, a mentally ill man is accused of starting a fire that killed his sister, Abby.
The Coburns are the second family in my book, torn apart my miscommunication and difficult decisions. A chunk of my book is told in flashbacks from the perspective of Abby, Jacob, and their sister Grace. Early in the book, Jacob discovers methamphetamine. He slowly destroys his brain with drug use. His sisters are shattered by Jacob’s addiction but respond to it in opposite ways. Grace pulls back as he spirals into violence and criminality. Meanwhile Abby upends her life in an effort to help her brother. Despite her efforts, Jacob becomes harder and harder to reach, as he loses touch with reality. All three siblings become estranged from each other as Jacob spirals downward and Abby tumbles after him.
The Coburns are inspired by families I encountered as a line prosecutor in Los Angeles. Jacob is also partly based on someone I know very well who severely injured their brain with methamphetamine. California is the epicenter of a massive health crisis. While fentanyl gets more media attention, methamphetamine is causing mass brain damage, which is not always reversible, and wreaking havoc on communities. In Burn This Night, I explore how this crisis is affecting families and what happens when relatives respond to it in different ways – denial, avoidance, attempted interventions.
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