Laura Lippman: By the Book
The author, most recently, of “After I’m Gone”
likes books steeped in the quotidian. “You can learn how to run a
chicken-and-waffle restaurant by reading ‘Mildred Pierce.’ ”
What’s the best book you’ve read recently?
My reading life is like an airport where a bunch
of planes circle in a holding pattern, then — boom, boom, boom, several come in
for a landing. So I have three: Helen FitzGerald’s “The Cry,” Elizabeth Hand’s
“Illyria” and Tom Nissley’s “A Reader’s Book of Days.” “The
Cry” tackles the toughest subject in crime fiction, the death of an infant, and
it surprised me, which is rare when I’m reading crime fiction. Hand’s book is a
Y.A. literary mash-up of “Flowers in the Attic” and Noel Streatfeild’s “Theater
Shoes.” Nissley’s book offers monthly reading lists, and I’m a sucker for such
lists. January includes H. P. Lovecraft, Zadie Smith and Arthur Hailey — what’s
not to love?
Your husband is David Simon, creator of “The
Wire” and co-creator of “Treme.” Do you share the same taste in
literature? Has either of you opened the other up to different kinds of book or
favorite authors?
I don’t read enough nonfiction, and David tends
to read fiction as homework for new projects. (A bunch of books about the
Spanish Civil War and the Abraham Lincoln Brigade showed up in the house
recently.) But David’s reading more novels by women, and I’ve started Sheri
Fink’s “Five Days at Memorial.”
Both of you are former journalists. How has that
experience affected your sense of story? To what extent do your novels arise
from the reporting you did at The San Antonio Light and The Baltimore
Sun?
In my newspaper days, your endings could be
literally sliced off in the composing room, so it was dangerous to get attached
to them. Yet I think this has made me work harder on endings in fiction. Twenty
years as a reporter left me with a healthy but not obsessive desire to get
things right, as did Mary McCarthy’s “The Fact in Fiction,” a seminal essay for
me. It also left me with a real distaste for anyone who fabricates, or passes
off nonfiction as fiction, and yes, I’m sorry but that includes David Foster
Wallace.
Sell us on your favorite overlooked or
underappreciated writer.
Edward Eager wrote a series of children’s books
that are in danger of being forgotten. But they’re divine, stories about
ordinary kids who stumble on magical things — a coin, a lake, a book, a thyme
garden, a well. The magic changes them, they try to change the magic, the magic
moves on. Great female characters, too — strong, smart, capable, not killjoys.
“Half Magic” is his masterpiece, but I have a soft spot for “Knight’s Castle,”
which is set in Baltimore.
http://www.nytimes.com/2014/02/16/books/review/laura-lippman-by-the-book.html?ref=books
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