Shaved Meats, Piled High: July 2018
The Book that Matters Most
And I thought I was sad last month.
On Thursday, June 28, I submitted the "first" pass on my next book, The Lady in the Lake. (If Raymond Chandler can allude to Sir Walter Scott, then I guess I can, too.) I put "first" in quotes because the book has been revised many times over the past 16 months. But now it's time for editors' notes and I might even get paid, so it felt like a milestone. I spent a giddy few hours on Twitter, then my daughter and I headed to the beach town where my mother lives. Just over the Bay Bridge, I called my mother after our dinner stop, predicting we would be there in two hours.
"Did you run into traffic near Annapolis?" my mother asked.
"Just the usual rush hour stuff."
"There was a shooting. I thought that might have slowed you down."
"Where?"
Pause here. In this split-second between my question and my mother's answer, I was almost blasé, so dulled to this information. Another shooting. School? Workplace?
"The newspaper."
My mother didn't know that I knew someone at the Capital Gazette, my former Sun colleague Rob Hiaasen. For the next two hours, I talked to my husband, friends as I drove. Via bluetooth, because I'm law-abiding. Had Rob checked in on Facebook? No, but let's engage in the magical thinking that Rob wasn't very active on social media. Could he be one of the injured? It's looking bad, one friend texted from vacation in Michigan. A New York Times reporter told my husband that Rob's name was on the list of the dead. They're working on his obit at the Sun, another former colleague told me. As I turned into the subdivision where my mother lived, it was official: Rob had been killed. I literally fell asleep that night while drinking gin and Googling real estate in Ireland.
The next morning, I woke up to an email from a news organization that wanted to interview me. I decided to go to the beach with my daughter instead, pretty sure it was the choice Rob would have made. But when I came back at lunch and there was another request, via an editor who knew one of my best friends, to write about Rob, I took two-three hours to do it. Then I spent the weekend trying to make sure my daughter had fun. Mini golf, water park, soft ice cream, all the beachy pleasures.
Back home in Baltimore, I picked up a book that had just arrived, an advance copy of Ann Hood's Kitchen Yarns, a series of essays with recipes. Sometimes, the right book arrives at the right time to save you. My friend Ann knows about grief. Ann knows too much about grief. Her daughter, Grace, died at the age of 5, from strep. Ann lost her mother, Gogo, earlier this year. Yet Ann, while always frank and unblinkered about grief, is a joyous person and her new book sings with life, in all its complications, highs and lows. Whatever happens, we have to eat, which means someone has to cook.
The day before what turned out to be the day that Rob and his five co-workers were slain, I happened to tweet this passage from Love Story, my favorite book by Ruth McKenney. It is a passage I come back to time and again. It reminds me of Candide: We must cultivate our gardens. But we also need to be engaged with the world, to fight -- yes, fight -- for what we believe in. Our hearts need to be able to grieve and celebrate, sometimes in the same day. Plant the lilacs, head to the barricades. You can do both.
When The Lady in the Lake is published next year -- knock wood, one never wants to presume -- it will be dedicated to the memory of Rob Hiaasen, Gerald Fischman, John McNamara, Rebecca Smith, Wendi Winters. And to any other journalist killed on the job in 2018.
Let's hope the list doesn't grow. Don't be surprised if it does.
READ/READING (in addition to Kitchen Yarns): How Hard Could It Be, Allison Pearson; The Killing Habit, Mark Billingham; The Old Religion, Martyn Waites; A Noise Downstairs, Linwood Barclay.
REREADING: Groucho: The Life and Times of Julius Henry Marx, Stefan Kanfer.
ME, ME, ME: The paperback of Sunburn has been released in the UK and will be published in the US on July 31. The first weekend of August, I will be one of the keynote speakers at the Betsy-Tacy convention in Bloomington, MN.
Laura Lippman
July 2018