"I Just Laugh at Having Two Ex-Husbands"

A Conversation with Laura Lippman

Last weekend I read Sven Birkerts’ The Miro Worm and the Mysteries of Writing, which had been sitting on my nightstand for so long that I could no longer remember who had recommended it. I enjoy reading writing about writing mostly because I often recognize my own inclinations and processes, and it makes me feel like I’m finally doing the thing for which my mind and disposition are most suited.

In his introduction, Birkerts writes about what AI means for writing and for readers. He includes a quote from Bill Pierce who, referencing Annie Ernaux’s account of her abortion, writes that “AI will never write a book that tells us something…new about being human.” This, Birkerts writes, is the “telling anomaly…which can only emerge from the context of a lived life.” The whole intro actually made me think of all that pearl-clutching about the personal essay – whether the boom is over or just relocated to Substack; whether personal writing is a vehicle for beauty and connection or oversharing and voyeurism – and the role the personal plays in what will eventually, or might perhaps already, distinguish human art from its machine counterpart.

It also made me think about this month’s interviewee, Laura Lippman, both because she’s a plaintiff in an AI class action lawsuits and because, in recent years, the prolific crime novelist has taken to writing personal essays that, she says, force her to think very hard about things that she hasn’t thought very hard about. Unlike her novels, Lippman doesn’t actually know what the essays are about until she starts writing. An essay about the albums she owns on vinyl, for example, can turn into a meditation on the way the men in her life have always condescended to her about music.

We’re drawn to personal writing in part because we’re dying to know what other lives look like, how other minds think. We want to know what other people have experienced and we also want to see them struggle to make sense of it. But machines don’t have to make sense of things that have happened to them, and they always know where they’re going. Do we want to read a personal essay written by a computer? Do we care about what’s happened to a large language model, or what’s inside of it? Is there a world in which we ever could?

I love getting to peek inside Laura Lippman’s mind through her novels, essays, and Substack posts, and it was a pleasure to talk to her about her first cozy, Murder Takes A Vacation, how she broke into fiction writing all those years ago, whether she could have had a kid earlier in her career, and her dream project.

Photo Credit: Vickie Gray Images

You’ve been doing this for so long and so prolifically that I could probably spend hours only talking about the specifics of your process. But talk to me a little about being in it for the long haul.

First and foremost, it takes so much luck. But the thing about luck is that you can't be lucky if you don't go to the casino or you don't buy the lottery ticket. And I think that's a notion that the American work ethic is kind of at war with, which is if you work hard, you will be rewarded. Unfortunately, a lot of people work really hard and they don't get what they deserve. And I think it's really disingenuous to not note that. And I feel like, for whatever reason, I just surfed this really lucky wave. And along the way, I saw some really talented peers kind of get pulled under or thrown from their boards And there's really no difference between us except luck. And they were doing the work. So I can't tell people, Oh, if you just show up and do the work, you will be rewarded. I wish I could say that. I'm friends with a lot of younger writers and my early years, more in the newspaper business than anything else, seems like a fantasy to them.

Things have changed so much.

I graduated in 1981. My first newspaper job in Waco, Texas, the first six months I actually worked part-time as a waitress. That's how little money I made, even in Waco, Texas, even in 1981. But by the time I got a job in San Antonio in 1983, I went on from ‘83 to 2000 to make a really good middle class wage with benefits as a newspaper reporter. I didn't know that world was going to disappear, but I've watched my younger writer friends struggle with the fact that those jobs are just in very short supply right now. What I wanted, though, is I wanted to be a full-time novelist. That is not something you say and people are like, ‘Oh, sure.’ I mean, I had an ex-boyfriend laugh at me when I said I was going to be a full-time novelist. And this is when I had published like three or four books at the time.

Did you always want to write novels? Was that always the dream?

Always fiction. It's what I always wanted but I didn't know anybody who was a novelist and I had the example of my dad who was a full-time newspaper person. So it was like, if you want to be a full-time writer, you have to go into journalism. And I never regretted that because I was a full-time writer from the time I left college And I learned a lot from journalism that I brought into my fiction. But fiction was always the goal.

Aways the thing. Just a question of how you were going to get there.

I looked at the people who took the path of getting an MFA and they had to teach, you know, six sections of English composition. Pretty early in my publishing career, I met Dennis Lehane, who's younger than I am but published a little bit before I did. He had his first book out when my first book came out and we had the same publisher so we met. He had either a PhD or an MFA in creative writing. And he was like, ‘Okay, wait a minute. I can go to a small college, be untenured, teach all these courses, and then try to write in my spare time. Or I can get a job that leaves me the brain space and the time to write.’ And I believe he drove a limo at one of the big hotels in Boston. He had a legal pad and he wrote all the time, and at the end of his day, he had all his intellectual power for himself.

That’s amazing.

I teach in this very compressed way two weeks a year at most, every January. Dennis is the person who hired me for the program at Eckerd College, it's called Writers in Paradise and it's for people of all ages who pay to be in the program. It is exhausting. And I love it so much, I've made some of the dearest friends of my life in this program, and part of the reason I've been going back every year since 2006 is because I know it makes me a better writer. But during the eight days I'm there, I don't write a single word.

Yeah, there's nothing left when you’re teaching.

And what I found out as a newspaper reporter when I got serious about it and decided I Am Going to Write A Book- I actually spent over a year studying with Sandra Cisneros. She was teaching in Austin and was not well known at the time. She had published only poetry and The House on Mango Street, and she really encouraged me a lot. I had written short stories and was kind of trying to find my way into a novel. I met a woman who helped me find my first agent, and she told me that a lot of women need to use the mask of genre to get started. You know, women are socialized to be self-deprecating, modest in our ambition. And she said, ‘I don't know a lot of women who sit down at their desk and say, I'm going to write the great American novel but I do know a lot of women who say, I'm going to write a romance, I'm going to write a mystery.’ And that was my way in and to figure out how I was going to do that with a full-time job- I was married to my first husband at the time and I really believed I needed to buy a Mac Classic II. And we made a deal that if we made that expenditure – I swear a Mac Classic II in 1993 cost more than a MacBook Air costs today – that I would have a book in a year.

Pressure!

And so I was like, how am I going to do that? I looked at how my time was constructed and I was a full-time feature writer, so my hours were kind of orderly. I said, okay, I'm going to get up every morning and write for two hours before I go to work. And it's like that advice about how to save money, you pay yourself first. You put money into a savings account and it’s gone, you never see it. I gave myself the first two hours of the day and that way, working at a newspaper, I was prepared for a day that went really long. I'm very much a morning person. When I came home at night, I didn’t want to write.

Yeah, I'm the same. I don’t think my brain works after 3 PM.

So that's kind of how I got started and, talk about being lucky, the woman who said that thing to me about women writing in genre, her name is Michelle Slung. She was the former editor of Washington Post “Book World” and she helped me find my agent. What she had said was, ‘I'll read your book and if it's good enough, I'll help you find an agent. If it's not good enough, I'll tell you.’ There's so much luck in it.

But you have to be good enough for the luck to stick.

I had to write the book for her to look at. I worked with some really talented people at the Baltimore Sun. They were so talented and, I think, so praised and complimented that they thought that one day the phone would ring and it would be like, you know, ‘Hi, it's the editor of The New Yorker, don't you want to write a piece for me?’ or like, ‘Hi, don't you have a book in you?’ or ‘Shouldn't that piece you wrote become a book?’ And those calls never happened. And my second husband – such a great story of my two ex-husbands – he once said- and people think this sounds mean and it is not mean at all, he was being utterly factual and he was actually praising me when he said this. He said, ‘No one looking at the Baltimore Sun newsroom in 1994/1995 says ‘Laura is going to be The New York Times bestselling novelist in this room.’ I mean, I was well-regarded, I did good work, but I wasn't a shiny, shiny star.

But you were hungry.

You know, I’m a real big believer in having a little grit. In a book that I adore, The Serial by Cyra McFadden, there's a term that all these Marin County, evolved, consciousness-raised people use, gnats in the yogurt. It's good to have some gnats in the yogurt. You need some resistance, I think. It helps to feel like you’re pushing at something or pulling at something or that there's something- a little sand in the works. That worked for me at least.

And so eventually you leave journalism and go to writing full time. Did that change the process, those bankable early morning hours?

Not by much. It sort of went from like two to four at most. And I'm probably wasting more of the time. I wrote seven books while working full time at the Sun. And I didn't have kids. I always feel like that's really important to say. I don't think I could have done this with kids.

I’m not convinced. I mean, kids are the ultimate gnats in the yogurt.

You know, I say that, and I think I'm only talking about myself. I think it would have been hard for me. I was just reading someone on Substack who talked about how when her children were young- oh, I know who it was, it was Connie Schultz, the great columnist from Cleveland who's married to Sherrod Brown. She was a single mom and got up at three in the morning to write.

There’s a great photo of her I would have loved to steal for this Substack. I think her daughter's on her lap and she’s in front of a typewriter, and the look on her face- I was just like, this is it.

Yeah, and Mary Higgins Clark did the same thing. So it can be done.

Toni Morrison.

I don't know if I would have done it. I'm talking only about my own personal limitations. I mean, when my kid finally came along, I was pretty established. I had contracts, I was determined to keep writing, and I got a lot of pushback about, ‘Oh, you're not going to write as much, your career is going to suffer.’ And I was just so determined that that wouldn't happen.

That's interesting. Was it because you had all those books under your belt that you were able to push through? Or do you think maybe you're the kind of person who would have pushed through no matter what?

I don't know why I doubt myself so much on this score. I'm not given to a lot of self-doubt. I have learned about myself that even when I have amazing help- I mean, I had a babysitter for 35 hours a week from the time my daughter was like basically six months old so I always had the time. But I guess what I'm thinking about is that in the circumstances I was in in my first marriage. I wasn't married to someone making television money and we wouldn't have been able to afford the kind of help I had in my second marriage. And even in the second marriage, with all that help, it was so darn hard. And my daughter's going to be 15 in two weeks and in some ways it's easier than ever and in some ways, it's harder than ever. Sure, I have time but I think I worry more about her now that she's a teenager.

Right, when they're young, you'll lose a day to snow, illness. You can keep working if your teenager is out of school but there are other things that get in the way. I do think you're right. It’s the in the head part, that's more… blocking.

Yeah, so when I first made the transition I thought I would write twice as much and I couldn’t really write that much more.

Someone once told me that you can only really write for four hours a day.

I agree, and even that’s stretching it. Philip Roth claimed to write for eight hours a day and I just freaking don't believe it. I think he was in his little writing hut eight hours a day.

Right, like, define writing.

I had an editor at the Baltimore Sun, one of the best editors I ever had. Not one of my favorite people, but a truly great editor. And I did some really great work for her and I'm grateful for what she taught me because she happened to come to the paper at a time when people were doing a lot more longform narrative and there I was, the person trying to write novels in my spare time, and I was kind of perfect for the experiment. And one thing that she said to me that has stuck with me all these years is we don't spend enough time thinking. Newspapers have this bias toward action and thinking really counts. I'm sure I've used this comparison before – my writing is like an app that's always on in the background. Always. And it’s often when I'm not trying to write that really important ideas come to me because I'm not trying to write.

Well, let me ask you about this, because now that my kids are getting older, I’m realizing that I was able to do more thinking when they were babies. And I think that's related to what you alluded to, the psychological aspect of parenting older kids. Because ok, you have to hold a baby, that's really hard, you can't type while you're holding a baby. But you can think all of your thoughts, the baby doesn't care, right? When I’m with my kids now, I am on. There are so many questions and negotiations, which I mostly love, but the app, as you put it, has to be way in the background.

Yeah, the app is definitely way in the background when you're super engaged with your kids as they grow older. Where it kind of surges to the front of the screen for me is often during exercise. And that's part of the reason I walk all the time. During the pandemic I made this arbitrary decision that I was going to try to walk five miles a day and I've done that now for over four years. And even if I'm listening to a podcast, even if I'm listening to music, there are going to be moments when things kind of bubble up. I don't go for a walk in order to stir up my imagination but I know that often that will happen. In one case I got an entire book out of listening to a podcast.

Right, Prom Mom!

Right. And, you know, I do a word quota, like a minimum of a thousand words a day, and that works. Sometimes I can do that so fast it would disgust people.

What's the fastest you've ever done it?

I once wrote a thousand words in 20 minutes. And I did it off of a Facebook prompt. I didn't know what to do with my novel and I actually said on Facebook: give me a word and I'll give you a chapter. And people put in these words and the word was supplied by a woman I have never met, but I knew through a Facebook group. She was a cousin of a friend of mine. And I was like, yeah, I can do that.

Which novel?

It was Sunburn. I feel like the word was risotto. And the two main characters the lovers are in bed and the woman says to the man, what are you thinking about? And there's this long interior monologue, but it ends with- I think it was risotto, but it's actually all about his doubts, his fears, his mistrust of her. And yeah, and I did it in 20 minutes. Being a fast or slow writer, I think it's like having a fast or slow metabolism. It's just kind of inborn.

So how do you decide on a project? How does a person who can write anything decide what to write?

So you could name my entire bibliography- like it could actually be called What I'm Interested in Right Now volumes one through whatever. I know I'm going to write a crime novel because that's what I do, but I'm always writing about what's of particular interest to me. And when I sat down to write Murder Takes a Vacation, I was very much interested in this increasingly big problem of the provenance of stolen antiquities. I'm a docent at a museum. It's a visionary art museum, so we don't really have a lot of provenance issues, but these were everywhere around 2020. The New York Times would be like ‘You know so and so just found out all their art is stolen, what are we going to do?’

This sounds familiar.

I was interested in that on an intellectual level. And on a personal level I was really interested in writing a novel about a 60-something woman whose life was turning out very differently from how she'd anticipated. I mean, that's just straight up autobiography for me. And I'm not a lot like Mrs. Blossom. She's had a much more sheltered life. She had a very long and fulfilling marriage. She's only briefly worked outside the home and that was after she was a widow. She's shy, she's cautious. When I first started writing about her, we were about 20 years apart and now we're only two or three years apart. Isn't it funny how that works?

Some kind of sorcery, for sure.

And I just felt like I know a lot of women who are in their 60s. They're not done. They're not over. And I wanted to see what would happen if- one of the inspirations for this was the film Charade, which I've probably seen like 15 times. And I'm like ‘Oh, what if the guy was the really young, good-looking one and the woman was older and wiser. What if you flipped it? What would happen? And so that was part of it. I do like to set up challenges for myself and I have to say writing a so-called cozy is one of the hardest things I've ever done because it requires a lot of restraint. You can't, as Philip Marlowe famously said, just send a man through the door with a gun. You actually have to be kind of judicious in your use of violence and profanity and sex.

You can't get to interiority through intimacy.

It was really, really hard. I always forget how hard every book is to write. And every book should be hard to write. I tell myself and I tell others that the day I quit is the day that I'm sitting at my desk day after day after day saying, ‘Well, this is easy. This is breezy. I know how to do this.’

So did you set out to write a cozy with this one? Or did it evolve into one?

No, I did. I knew this was a character with real strong Miss Marple overtones to her. She is well suited to a cozy. I love Mrs. Blossom so much, I wouldn’t want to put her in a more hard-boiled book. And I just thought this is interesting. The thing I like best about my career is that I never really write the same book twice. I try very hard not to because that would bore me.

Murder Takes A Vacation does lot of thinking about women who find themselves alone after a lifetime of being socialized as caregivers. I was struck by Muriel being told by her daughter that she's entitled to a life of her own, and the sense that, to Muriel, it sounded kind of like a punishment or at least like a gift she's not sure that she wants. But then she does a lot of thinking about love and what it means to be happy and she comes to the conclusion that she doesn’t want to be anyone's wife again. I think that’s something our culture is thinking a lot about, what marriage can do to women.

I don't want to marry again and I don't want to cohabitate with anyone. And once I had that conscious thought, I was sort of like, oh, well then as a 66-year-old woman, I can't date because that's all men want. There's an essay that I've been trying to write for years, and I keep circling back to it, about bachelors. Because I grew up in a time of the myth of the bachelor, like it was the best thing to be if you were a guy and women just existed to try to like corral you and domesticate you. And this is just the biggest lie. Men love being married.

Why wouldn’t they?

And I just read something in Lyz Lenz's Substack yesterday about satisfaction within marriage and how men married to women had among the highest satisfaction. Women married to men had the lowest. I think men married to men were the happiest, if I remember that correctly. So it was interesting to sort of have this thought of, okay, wait a minute, I mean, sure, I'd like to go out to dinner every now and then and dabble in romance, for want of a better way to explain it. But I don't want to get married and I don't even want to cohabitate. And all the men in my peer group that's really what they want. So I'm just taking myself out of that situation. And as I was writing this book, I think there's a pretty natural inclination to reward a single character with romance and relationship. And Mrs. Blossom definitely has opportunities at romance and relationships in this book. But, probably a little bit of a spoiler but I'll try to be as general as I can, in the end, I was like, okay, the friendships have to be much more important than the romances.

That’s so rare in books and movies.

I love, love, love the film version of About A Boy. I think it might be better than the novel. I feel badly saying that because I love Nick Hornby and I think I've even met him and he's lovely. But it ends with the voiceover of the boy saying couples are no longer the future, you need backup. And I just love that idea. And it's certainly a way that I've been trying to live my life, with a lot of emphasis on friendships, trying to show up more for my friends. That's sort of been one of my big, overarching resolutions for several years now and I had to kind of teach myself how to be social again because I was married for so much of my adult life. And socialization seems to happen pretty organically when you're part of a couple. And, you know, the timeline is simply that my husband left me, the next month was COVID, and I got used to being hunkered down in the house with my kid. And I like being hunkered down in the house. Last Friday, talk about, you know, showing up for a friend- I have a 50-50 custody arrangement. So it's like one week on, one week off And when my daughter's with me, I rarely make plans to do anything that don't involve her. But it was the birthday of someone I feel has been a really good friend to me. She would have been the first person to understand if I'd said, I can't come to the birthday party, it's Friday night, that's our night to eat crappy food and watch movies together. Everyone would have been fine with it. And my kid was also fine with me going out. But I was like, no, I need to show up. I need backup. Because the person I spend the most time with is going off to college in three years, knock wood. And that's a transition I'm a little nervous about because right now being her mom shapes so much of my life. And it gives the life structure.

I'm so interested in all these transitions that we don't really talk about. There’s now, thankfully, a lot of writing on the transition into motherhood. But you become so shaped by that transition and then it flips and becomes this slow process of letting it all go and finding a new shape. And so having a protagonist like Muriel Blossom, making friendship the main thing, it’s a rethinking of plot itself. I remember, in one of your essays, you wrote about how a friend told you to stop writing happily ever after at the end of your friend's stories, that you always assumed your friends’ lives were good and perfect, and that stories are really never finished. And I know you wrote that essay when you had what we would consider a happy ending and I think a lot of the most interesting writing by women right now is thinking about all those alternative plots, or what comes after what we have been trained to think of as the happy ending.

I had such a great role model in my mom. She was 83 when my father died and she would live another 10 years. And eight of those years, she lived on her own in this small town in Delaware that was a beach town that nine months out of the year was pretty sparse. My mom had friends. My mom volunteered at the library. Everybody loved my mom. And when she moved into continuing care because it was just getting dicey for her to live three hours away from me, she made new friends, she joined committees, and she led a really active, happy life up until the last three weeks when you know an injury just probably ended up giving her an embolism and she just died very quickly. And my mom always said women are fine alone. Women are fine when they retire. Women know how to do stuff. It's the men who don't have hobbies. It's the men who haven't done anything outside the house. They’ve only had their job. My dad didn't do well after he retired. There was definitely a sense of a decline. And the same is true of my father-in-law in my second marriage. My second husband, my second ex-husband- I just laugh at having two ex-husbands.

It's such a good character detail for you.

Oh my God. We were both really scared to stop working because we saw our fathers decline. And that's why my mother said, oh, you don't have to worry, you'll be fine. I actually worked out a kind of big picture plan for myself at the end of last year. And I wrote my agent and said God and HarperCollins willing I'd like to work for about 10 more years and then I'm going to stop because I'll be in my 70s, I still want to travel. Again, knock wood, my daughter hopefully will be in college and, I hope, launched. I plan to retire to New York City. And my agent wrote back and she said, this sounds great, but you're never going to retire.

I don't believe it, either.

She said, I had one client, he retired at 75. He made it a year and then he just started writing a book again. But I do want to travel more. I do want to take advantage of the abundance in my life, there's been just a lot of good stuff. And I'm thinking mainly of my health. I think my mom wished that she had traveled more. My dad was a longtime newspaper man and my mom was a city librarian and when my mom died, given that context, she had a ridiculous amount of money. That's probably in part because she worried about my sister who's already in assisted living because of Parkinson's. But my mother was a Depression-era kid and very, very careful with money and very proud of how careful she was with money. But man, my heart kind of broke because she could have taken just like one great trip a year.

I want to ask you about personal essays. You've written about your initial rejection of the form. Did having a kid change that for you? Am I doing the math right?

It does happen about then. First of all, I'm always looking to do new things and I'm very impressed by a lot of personal essayists. And the thing I like about the form is that the personal essay forces me to think very hard about things that I haven't thought very hard about. And to find my way into telling the story. So when I write crime fiction, it's a pretty durable narrative. There are so many ways to do it but they're known ways and you just have to be like, what kind of story is this going to be? But when I'm writing these personal essays. I don't actually know what they're about until I start writing them and I find that fascinating. I've spent the past two days working on an essay that will be up on the internet at some point in June that's about- there's a wonderful woman who runs a site called I've Got That on Vinyl And we just sort of knew each other back from Twitter days. And I wrote her and I said, I want to write an essay about how the only things I own on vinyl are my mother-in-law's records and it is turning into an essay about my life as a woman involved with men who were always talking to me about music very condescendingly.

A journey!

I mean, it feels almost selfish to talk about it this way. It's almost like, you know, this is kind of like my therapy and I'm working something out. But part of the interesting thing about writing My Life as a Villainess is that I'd written these four essays for Longreads. They had been very popular online and my editor of long standing said, now let's do a book. And then she's like, ‘And you have to write X number of new essays in there,’ and it was like, well, that's not really how I do it, sorry. I just kind of noodle along and I've really had so much fun over the past year writing these essays for Oldster that are all Something Something and I Don't Know Why. And I 100% do not know why when I start writing. Why am I still shaving my legs? Why do I have three breakfast trays? Why do I put so much thought into my ex-husband's holiday gifts? Why can't I open this ice cream? I love it because it involves a lot of cutting and compressing, compressing, compressing. And I love revision. I love tightening. I love killing darlings. I think that's all the old reporter in me. In general, I don't buy into the generational- like, you know, fine call me a Boomer, call me Generation Jones, I don't feel like any of that. But one key difference between people my age and younger writers is people my age tended to come up writing for physical space. And younger writers have trained on the internet where space is theoretically infinite. And there are some well-regarded young writers, and I think they're very good, but in my heart of hearts, I'm always like this is kind of baggy

You also came up with good editors. And obviously I think Substack is a good and helpful platform. I’ve been introduced to so much good writing here and it allows me to publish these interviews that I really enjoy but man, would I love to have an editor.

Yeah, I totally get that. And I think it's interesting that some Substackers who are making significant money actually hire editors, which I think is great. It's true. Everybody needs an editor.

Yeah, and it does take money.

Also, the more you're edited, the more you learn how to do that tightening. I could go on a tangent on that which we won't do right now but here's my dream project. I really want to talk about this. I keep pitching it to poet friends. And so far no one has taken me up on it, but I know I'm right about this. Imagine an epistolary work in which a somewhat established writer like myself who cannot write poetry at all learns how to write a poem from someone who writes and teaches poetry and we write letters back and forth to each other. And I just keep polishing and polishing and polishing.

That's the intersection of two of my obsessions. I love anything epistolary and I’m fascinated by process.

This is my dream project. It'll probably end up being my vanity project. I think everybody wants to write poetry and actually, nobody knows how to. And I love poets and poetry so much. And I read it with so much reverence. That's the dream project. Putting it out into the universe. I know so many poets and none of them have said yes to me yet.

I'm here for it.

But someone has to fall in love with the idea as much as I do. The poet needs to want it as much as I do.

Order Murder Takes A Vacation here.