By: Susan McCallum-Smith

Almost-true Life
A Q&A with Laura Lippman, author of Life Sentences
By Susan McCallum-Smith

Baltimore-based crime-fiction writer Laura Lippman’s new book, Life Sentences, was published in March by HarperCollins. The book is a stand-alone, not part of Lippman’s ongoing Tess Monaghan detective series, and is based on a true-life Baltimore story: In 1988, an infant disappeared. His mother refused to explain his disappearance and served seven years in jail for civil contempt.

In late February, Urbanite’s literary editor, Susan McCallum-Smith, talked with Lippman about getting permission to write about other people’s lives, researching at Nordstrom, and getting closure. (Spoiler alert: This interview includes discussion of critical plot points.)



At more than one point in Life Sentences, a person asks [the main character] Cassandra, “Why do you get to tell the story?” She asks because Cassandra is a memoirist. You’ve written stories as a journalist and you’ve written stories as a fiction writer, but you haven’t written memoir.

No, and I probably never will, because there are several people in my life who are intensely shy and private, and I don’t think they should be forced to sacrifice that just because they have a blood relative, a friend, who happens to be a writer. And I’m not a particularly confessional writer. People read the [Tess Monaghan] series and thought that I was the main character and I wasn’t at all, but I was very comfortable with that and I never worried about it. But when I began writing outside of the series, I began putting in far more autobiographical detail. At first I would just give it to all sorts of characters even when they weren’t at all like me, and I was moving my way toward writing more and more autobiographically even though the stories aren’t my own.

So, no, I can’t imagine writing a memoir, but part of the reason that question resonates throughout Life Sentences is because it’s a question people asked about What the Dead Know. Specifically, they wanted to know if I had gotten permission from the real-life family that inspired What the Dead Know. And there are two answers. One is them is about me as a nice person, and one of them is about me as not a nice person. And the first one is that I knew where the family was; I knew how to call them. I didn’t do that because I didn’t see it providing them with any comfort or solace, and I thought I would be intruding on them and I didn’t see that as being a benefit to them.

Secondly, I didn’t ask for their blessing or permission because I didn’t need it. Because I’m a writer, I get to write about what I want to write about and I’m not going to cede any territory as a novelist. I’m not going to ever say, “I’m not allowed to tell this kind of story,” and that’s true across gender lines, across class lines, across racial lines. The only limit is I can’t write about places unless I know them very well.


Is this why you write so much about Baltimore?

It’s absolutely why. I don’t know how to fake place. I’ve written a couple of short stories set in other cities. One in New Orleans—it was a big stretch, a really big stretch, and I thought, “Maybe I can just get away with it”—and one was in Dublin and I wrote about it as a tourist, because I couldn’t begin to “get” Dublin and to know what it was like day-in and day-out.
 

The inspiration for Life Sentences was another incident in Baltimore’s past. Are you ferreting around through old police records? I have an image of you in the Enoch Pratt library, ferreting …

A lot of it is from memory. In this case, I was here working and living in Baltimore when Jackie Bouknight [the inspiration for the character of Calliope Jenkins] was asked repeatedly where her son was, and she refused to tell anyone and invoked the Constitutional protection against self-incrimination [the Fifth]. And I was here when she was finally released. I ran into one of my old colleagues from the Baltimore Sun. She had just had an encounter with Jackie Bouknight in the courthouse, and it had left her with chills. And I started thinking about that case again. It’s a fascinating case.


It certainly is.

And not well known.


Your spine was tingling with trying to imagine why a woman would do such a thing?

What could the circumstances be? What would be an interesting story to tell? And as soon as I decide I’m going to answer one of these real-life mysteries—what happened to the missing child, what happened to the missing Lyon sisters [the inspiration for What the Dead Know]—I always try to tell readers at that moment that I’ve broken with real life. Now I’m off on my own. I’m not pretending to provide you with answers that fit the real-life model. I’m doing the work of fiction, and fiction has shape, fiction has answers, fiction has form. I’m really, actually, uninterested in the real-life story.


Where did all the Greek mythology come from?

As a kid, I had this amazingly nerdy, geeky attraction to Greek myth. It started with reading Jason and the Argonauts when I was in fifth grade.


Not by seeing the cheesy movie?

Then I did see the cheesy movie. And the cheesy movie is amazing because it ends with Jason and Medea in this happy clinch! And you think, “It’s not going to end that well!” I read the Greeks and even the old Norse myths, and I still have all these books lying around, and it made sense because [Life Sentences] is about self-mythologizing. Everyone in this book has some sort of myth.


They have an image of their own persona.

We all do.


That’s how we navigate the world, and then someone else comes along and says, “Well, no, actually, you’re not like that.”

Someone just sent me an e-mail. It was utterly innocuous and really harmless and, as a matter of fact, the story that was transmitted was a story that I know was told with nothing but affection and admiration. And what she said is, “I just met our mutual friend so-and-so, and he loves to tell the story about the time you plugged all those Steely Dan songs in the jukebox.” And I obsessed over this story. First of all, I don’t remember it being Steely Dan, I thought it was Johnny Cash. And what did he mean by “plugged”? I thought I had only put on one or two songs. Was I being obnoxious? Was I being off in some way? I don’t know how to fit that story into the persona I carry around. I don’t think of myself as a plugger of Steely Dan!
 

It’s going to appear your obituary, and it’s going to be so wrong.

Yes! Yes! Why is that the story? We’re all interested in our image. We have this version of ourselves, it’s really rich and it has context …


… And nuance, and no one else is getting it …

Right, and the world at large is reductive!


So what came first in terms of the Greek mythology?

Cassandra’s name. I have trouble with names but every now and then a character arrives with her name intact.


Her name is so wonderful …

Cassandra Fallows.


… because she never shuts up.

 And she’s very fallible.


She’s not a particularly likeable character, but she’s fabulously intriguing and complicated, and as the book progressed I liked her more and more.

That was always the delicate balance.


And Calliope is so humanized. Where did her obsession with baking come from? She achieves salvation through, of all things, a recipe book.

How To Cook Everything [by Mark Bittman]. I don’t want to be, nor do I strive to be, mystical or airy-fairy about how I do things. But I get about as deep inside characters as I can and see what suggests itself. Raymond Carver, I think, once noted that he began a short story knowing only that the first line was, “He was vacuuming the rug and the phone rang.” And Flannery O’Connor also was someone who wrote without knowing things that later you would think, “Well, how could you not know that? The whole book seems to turn on that detail.”

I work in the same vein with character. What would [Calliope] be like? What would she do? Her days are somewhat empty. She lives in her own little house. She has constructed a life that is very careful and orderly, which is quite an achievement for her. What would she do? And I thought she would bake, because baking is so quantifiable. You measure something. You follow the recipe. You get the outcome that you’re promised. And if, occasionally, you have failures—and I do happen to love to cook and bake—you can usually sort it through and figure out what went wrong. She’s felt so overwhelmed by not really getting the rules; she can’t find any recipe for her life. It’s been taken from her.


This is her tragedy. She is a tool that the gods have played with; they’ve used her and dumped her and taken her children. And they are not to be fooled with. [And Calliope is just one of the women who] we first see in the playground, then revisit as adults, and we realize that their relationships to one another are essentially the same.

Tisha’s still the leader, Donna is still perfect …
 

And in charge.

And usually without having to exert too much visible effort. And then there’s Fatima who’s still, even as a churchwoman—churchified—still kind of wild and sexy. I loved writing about Fatima; she was so vivid to me.


Speaking of Fatima, and of when Cassandra goes into Nordstrom, I thought, “This writer gets clothes and how they send signals to the rest of the world.”

I had enormous fun researching that section.


So how much time did you spend in Nordstrom?

I actually spent a lot of time online! I loved the idea of Teena, the fashion-mad former police detective. A lot of male detectives are peacocks, and there’ve been so few female homicide detectives in Baltimore that it’s impossible to make generalizations, but I thought, “Why wouldn’t a female detective have the same interest in clothes? Not every former cop has to become a security guard or a private detective.” Teena likes clothes; she works in Nordstrom.


Teena is haunted by the fact that she’s never managed to solve this case.

She doesn’t get the answer that she wants. Even though Cassandra has gone and come back and said, “OK, this is what appears to have happened.” It doesn’t fulfill Teena the way she thought it would, and so she says, “No, that can’t be the story.” She’s never going to have the answer; she’s never going to know why she dropped a gun, and why a car ran over her hand, and she’s never going to be introspective enough to really take control of her drinking.


I don’t want to ruin anything for anyone who might be reading this but there are two critical mysteries that remain not [definitively] resolved.

This will sound a little funny, but sometimes characters keep secrets even from people who make them up.


I like that, but I’m curious to see the reaction from other readers, because one of the things I find fascinating about America is its obsession with closure.

A hideous word! I know.


It is a hideous word, it always makes me think of zips and buttons and things … but people will read Life Sentences as a mystery and say, “OK, come on, where’s the moment when we find out precisely who this girl is, or precisely what happened to the baby?”

We never will. I happen to believe Callie’s version of events. Absolutely. At the same time, Callie doesn’t believe Callie’s version of events absolutely. One of the saddest things about her is—she says it herself—she’s never going to be one of those people who’s emphatic about anything. She doesn’t know who her own father is. Her mother was obsessed with propriety and was clearly abusive. And she was always the extra girl. Cassandra didn’t even remember her.


She was the spare.

She stood on the outside of their group. And even she got the pecking order. I think that she understood that only Donna or Tisha could extend an invitation for her to play with Donna, Tisha, Fatima, and Cassandra.


And it’s about class.

About the black middle class in Baltimore. One of the things that has frustrated me as a reader, or going to movies or watching television, is you get sort of three archetypes for African Americans. Poor/ghetto/slum, that’s one; and then there’s the middle class, not very often seen, in some books, or in some American situation comedies; and every now and then, the very, very rich upper class. But just within that middle section, the middle class alone in Baltimore, there are dozens and dozens of variations as there are in the white middle class. There is not one way to be black middle class.


And Cassandra doesn’t get it. She’s an author, someone who is supposed to be taking note, but at the beginning she tends to take note only of herself. By the end of the book, she starts to look a little less at “me” and a little more at everyone else.

Every now and then in your writing you come along to a line and you think, OK, that matters. And I knew that when Tisha said, “White people never think anything is about race unless it affects them and then it’s all about race.” Especially now, you meet whites who are very uncomfortable about any kind of racial discussion. Recently people went nuts because [attorney general] Eric Holder said that we were cowardly in talking [about race]. But, yeah! How could you even question what he is saying? We are cowardly about talking about race in this country.

A lot of whites can’t have the conversation [unless they can have it] the way they want to have it, which always begins with, “Well, OK, but you have to forgive me everything first, and then we’ll have a candid discussion.” But, no, I don’t. I don’t have to say I’m over certain things.

The example I come back to again and again when I talk about race in Baltimore is the Department of Motor Vehicles. When I go to get my driver’s license renewed, if the clerk helping me is an African American woman who’s over 50, I am extremely careful to be as respectful as possible because she has fought like hell to have that job. And to not respect her is really dangerous; she has power over me in that situation, and I must grant it and acknowledge it. And if she wants to be kind of mean to me, I have to take it. I just do. That’s how it goes. At the same time, sometimes I will see white clerks waiting on black applicants and they can be condescending. You see all this stuff bubbling under the surface, and it’s not just about race; also, it’s very generational. The older someone is, the more it seems to matter. I am fascinated by this and I really pay attention.


Do you think it is something you’ll write more about?

Sometimes I write about race and sometimes I don’t. What the Dead Know has absolutely no interest in race. The book I’m working on now, it’s hard to see it having a racial element. I had a character show up just this week …


It sounds like they knocked on the door …

She sort of did! [I thought,] “Oh, my goodness, I had no idea you were going to be in this novel! You’re fascinating!”

She began as a plot point. This character can be any race that I want but she has to be a woman. She’s a former Baltimore City schoolteacher who has been attacked by a student, and I’ve thought a lot about what her race should be. And she has a very odd name. Her name is Labarbara. And one character who considers herself to be very enlightened says to her husband, “Oh, is she black?” And he laughs and says, “Oh, look what’s just sneaked up!” So I think she’s not. But again, if she is, it has an impact on the story.


So you’re going to wait until she circles into a scene and it becomes necessary to describe her?

Yes, I’ll wait until she actually shows up, and she should be showing up soon. So far she’s only been talking on the phone.


Did you find it fun writing about a protagonist who is a writer?

In the wake of John Updike’s death, I listened to an interview between him and Terry Gross [the host of NPR’s Fresh Air], and he was talking about writing Bech [Updike wrote a series of novels about Henry Bech, an author] and he said, if you’ve been a writer for a long time, you know things about this world that are interesting and not well known, and it’s hard to resist the material. I think I felt that way. It’s pretty risky to begin a book inside the main character’s head at a book signing, and I had to be really careful about tone. I mean, I like book signings, I enjoy them.


I think most people reading this book are going to go, “Yeah, she’s right, everyone you do meet at a book signing is writing a book.” As a writer, [I understood] how she misses that high of a Friday.

She never has the low of Monday.


And never quite knowing what day it is.

Sometimes on Fridays in particular, I’m a little wistful, because I did have a job for a very long time and I remembered that one sometimes was in very giddy high spirits on a Friday. [Although] if I did get off-kilter, I could probably tell from the other people in the coffee shop what day it is.

[But] what goes on inside a writer’s mind is not always attractive. We stand back. We’re playing with words, thinking, “How will I tell this story later?” And you’re living on these two planes, and it’s very complicated.

 
You’re leading this double life.

Cassandra doesn’t even stop thinking during sex.


It’s the only time she shuts up, though.

It is the only time she shuts up! She is having this incredibly passionate first time with someone that she has truly yearned for, and she can’t quite still her brain and she’s thinking about Yeats and [his poem] “Leda and the Swan,” and is it somehow wrong to be thinking about “Leda and the Swan” and what does that mean? Oh, wait a minute. Now she remembers somehow why that was on her mind ...


Life Sentences is dedicated to James Crumley, a writer of hard-boiled crime fiction whose work should be better known. Is there a book that you would recommend to people who don’t know his work?

Almost all of my friends who admire him would say start with The Last Good Kiss. I’ve always had affection for The Wrong Case. The first one I read was Dancing Bear, and I always liked The Final Country.

Jim is one of those rare people who should probably have written and published more. Most of us should probably write a little less, publish a little less. Jim, he really did burn up a manuscript in the fireplace one night.
 

That takes a lot of guts.

I think that’s a loss. I would like to have seen those pages even if they weren’t quite publishable. He was someone I really cared about deeply, even though I could probably count on my two hands how many hours we actually spent in each other’s company. He is someone that a lot of writers my age, especially in the crime field, consider one of their inspirations.


Hopefully, more people will read him. You are working on a book right now, so what’s your structure like?

I try to write a minimum of a thousand words a day. The biggest challenge to what is a pretty structured, disciplined life—Monday through Friday, I do give myself weekends off usually—is when it’s time to go out on the road and talk about the new book. It gets harder, but I still try to do it. Luckily I can write on planes, I can write in hotels, I can write in coffee shops.


That eradicates all the excuses for not writing.

A minimum of a thousand words a day is definitely doable. Yesterday was a two thousand-word day.


Is this another stand-alone or is this a Tess?

The thing about Tess is that she just had a baby.


She’s busy.

She has a lot to figure out. She needs to figure out childcare! I think it’s going to take a couple of years to sort out Tess’ life. Now I’m working on a stand-alone for 2010. I won’t know what comes next for a while.


Read Susan McCallum-Smith’s review of Life Sentences, which appeared in the April issue.




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