What If I Actually Know What I'm Doing?

Also: Fuck fealty and my feelings!

It was announced last month that Lady in the Lake will premiere July 19th on AppleTV+. Five years from publication to limited series may seem like a long time to some people, but it’s actually pretty swift, especially when one factors in the 2023 strikes.¹ To be clear, the production of LitL, as I shall now refer to it here, was not affected directly by the strikes — production wrapped in fall of 2022 — but there were still scheduling repercussions.

The issue of adaptation fascinates me. The fact that I adore the film Adaptation, based on Susan Orlean’s The Orchid Thief, should give you an inkling of where I stand on this topic: Fuck fealty! I don’t write for the screen, I write for the page. I have almost anti-cinematic instincts. I was happy to entrust LitL to Alma Har’el. I think the best way to think about adaptation is to imagine two chefs presented with a pantry full of ingredients and asked to make whatever they like.

My version of LitL was an attempt to work out the ethics of what I do — and also write a valentine of sorts to the newspaper culture of my father’s generation. When I watched the first episode of LitL, I was put in mind of one of my favorite works in the American Visionary Art Museum², an untitled painting by James Franklin Snodgrass. It’s essentially two different paintings, depending on where one stands in the room. From a distance, it’s an impressionistic portrait of two reclining women; get up close, and it’s hundreds, maybe thousands of people. When it comes to LitL, I feel that Alma focused on the two women at its center, while I was playing with a more granular portrait of Baltimore in the mid-60s. Maddie Schwartz and Cleo Sherwood are the two main characters, but there are 20 discrete POVs from the men and women who cross Maddie’s path, each one with a resonant story to tell — if only she would stop and listen. As I have often said of Maddie: If you want to be a human interest reporter, it helps to be interested in humans.

Cleo’s role has been expanded for the series, a good call, an essential call. While Cleo is a ghost in the book, she insists on owning her own story; she is the first and last character to address the reader, via her imagined dialogues with Maddie, who she sees as her nemesis.³ But her story, condensed on the page, needed to be expanded.

I would also like to mention this: LitL is a consciously meta book. It centers on a white lady writer who uses Black pain to further her career ambitions. I’ve been writing crime novels for a long time and I’m still wrestling with the ethics of taking inspiration from real crimes and creating fiction. While there are obviously real-life cases that parallel the events of Lady in the Lake, it is wholly a work of fiction. I was interested not in the lives of the actual victims, worthy as those lives were, but what the juxtaposition of two deaths — a white girl, a Black woman — could tell us about Baltimore/the world in 1966.⁴ Who got the front page? Who was ignored?

Two views of my "text-free" outline for LitL The book begins and ends with Cleo, the titular corpse.

When I started writing this month’s newsletter, I was filled with petty grudges, but then — I am always filled with petty grudges. I had been mulling over some slights I have experienced, sometimes even at the hands of friends. A lot of people treat me as if I'm, well, kind of dumb? I was going to dish on those experiences, the hurtful things people have said to me, but then I decided I’d rather celebrate the people who have helped me along the way. Fuck my feelings!

So here’s an inevitably partial list of the teachers/friends/pros who believed in me when I was just getting started: Meredith Steinbach, Sallie Gaines, Sandra Cisneros, Michele Slung, Joan Jacobson, Vicky Bijur, Carrie Feron, Lynda Robinson, Lisa Gallagher, Michael Morrison. (“Just getting started” doing a lot of work here, taking us from 1980 to 2005. Also, let’s give both ex-husbands a shout-out! They were definitely believers and boosters.)

Oh, and I’d also like to thank Natalie Portman and Moses Ingram — a Baltimore native, fyi — for making Maddie Schwartz and Cleo Sherwood absolutely theirs. And Alma for the passion she brought to this project, and the producers . . . at this point, the orchestra is playing me off. The point is, I have far more people in my life to thank than scores to settle. I need to remind myself of that from time to time.

Read/Reading: The Divorcées, Rowan Beaird; Summers at The Saint, Mary Kay Andrews; Fear of Dying, Erica Jong; Columbo, David Martin-Jones; student work for my June teaching gig. Joyful Recollections of Trauma, Paul Scheer. (audio)

Reread: Pick a New Dream, Lenora Mattingly Weber. I will aways be fascinated by this particular Beany Malone book, in which Weber chose to recognize that her series protagonist did not, in fact, have a writer’s temperament. If you’re a fan of Betsy Ray (me) or Jo March (not particularly)⁵, you have to marvel at a writer who went to pains to point out that her longest-running character did not, in fact, have the stuff.

Me, me, me: I honored a pre-pandemic commitment and traveled to Bristol, UK, for Crimefest and, boy, was I glad I did. Saw old friends, made new ones, won the eDunnit for Prom Mom, disgraced myself in the general knowledge portion of the quiz. I also participated in this nifty podcast. But — and I have to be circumspect here — what I will remember forever are the gorgeous Scottish vowel sounds in a certain sentence repeated over and over by Denise Mina.⁶ Denise has a way of showing up when I need her the most.

1. Another more high-profile novel acquired about the same time as LitL has yet to make it anywhere near production, despite reports of multiple large options and big-name players. One of my older books is on its fourth or fifth option — and it has a mega star attached. It’s a tough business and William Goldman was right: Nobody knows anything. Although the good news is that Alafair Burke’s The Better Sister is in production with a killer cast.

2. Is this newsletter just a stealth advertisement for AVAM? YES.

3. Billy Wilder came to me in a dream and reminded me: Why not have a dead person tell the story?

4. The real-life cases happened in 1969, but I was much more interested in 1966. And that’s a pretty significant change, another reason I don’t like the term “ripped from the headlines.” My work does not traffic in wink-wink roman à clef; most of the real-life stories that have inspired me aren’t particularly well-known.

5. Sacrilege, I know.

6. I’ll never tell.

I still take selfies, but this terrible little drawing from May 27 is my favorite photo in my phone this month. I gave it to my daughter on her 14th birthday and she seemed genuinely touched. Or maybe she just has good manners. Hey, it’s a win either way.