6.Who are some of the writers you admire?
For my money, the greatest living writer is Alice Munro. She can write a thirty-page story that feels richer than most novels. She starts a story with two people who disappear ten pages later, and somehow that seems perfectly logical. She’s so good it’s hard to learn anything from her. I like Dan Chaon, Philip Roth, Raymond Carver, Daniel Woodrell, Margot Livesey. The Vanishing Act of Esme Lennox by Maggie O’Farrell and The History of Love by Nicole Krauss are wonderful novels. Two recent novels I loved are The Devil All the Time by Donald Ray Pollock and Billy Lynn’s Long Half-Time Walk by Ben Fountain. The books I like best all tell a good story. I think that’s what most readers want. It’s why airport bestsellers are mostly thrillers and mysteries. I’m not saying plot should be a writer’s first criteria, but I tend to lose patience with novels that plod along and never seem to go anywhere. I hate to admit, but I tried to reread Madame Bovary last summer and gave up after fifty pages. There’s only so much nuance my mind can endure.
7.All the authors you’ve mentioned are fiction writers. Are there other genres you like to read?
Yes, I read a fair amount of nonfiction—history, memoir, biography. There’s a book by British journalist Anthony Loyd called My War Gone By, I Miss It So, about the war in Bosnia. Terrific title and a heartbreaking account of what it’s like to be a correspondent on the front line in a world gone mad. I also admired We Wish to Inform You That Tomorrow We Will Be Killed with Our Families by Philip Gourevitch about the genocide in Rwanda. There’s a memoir called Gone Boy by Gregory Gibson about the murder of his son at Simon’s Rock College. The book came and went in a nanosecond, but it’s a searingly honest account of a parent’s grief and his attempt to find out the truth about his son’s death.
8.What is one thing you know now that you wish you knew when you started your writing career?
I wish I had known how long it would take for me to get my first book published. If I had, maybe I would have set a goal that was more realistic, like becoming pope or the host of Jeopardy! Last summer, when I got word from my agent, Laura Gross, that Sourcebooks had accepted Lies, I could hardly believe it. When I told my wife Elizabeth, she said, “It’s like you’ve been pregnant for twenty years.” It’s great to finally be published, but in retrospect, I spent too much time letting the desire to be published distract me from the simple joy of writing.
9.Did you get discouraged by all those rejections?
Yes, very much at times. The whole process feels very personal. People are telling you your work isn’t good enough to make the cut. There were several periods of four or five months when I hardly wrote a word, but I kept going back to it. I went to a reading by an author whose novel was rejected something like forty times before it ended up selling a gazillion copies. At the reading someone in the audience asked him how he could explain this, and he said, “The cream always rises to the top.” His book is wonderful, but I disagree with his response. I think there are hundreds if not thousands of fine novels languishing in drawers because the people who wrote them simply gave up.
10.That’s one good piece of advice for aspiring writers: Never give up. Anything else?
The only thing any writer can do is write the next line. You don’t have to escape to a cabin in the woods for three weeks to get something done. If you’re lucky enough to have that opportunity, sure, go for it. You may get an entire short story written or the first chapter of a novel. But when you come back to your everyday life, you have to find a way to keep it going. The trick is to let the story take hold of you. You can write the next line when you’re out jogging or standing at the deli counter in the supermarket. Actually, once you get going, the hard part is trying to find a way to leave the story behind and join the real world from time to time. People get annoyed when you’re having dinner with them and you’ve got that faraway look in your eyes. They want you to pass the salad dressing while you’re sitting there wondering if your heroine should tell her husband about the money she found hidden in the basement.
11.Is that what you love about writing, getting caught up in a story?
Absolutely. I love it when the characters start talking to me. My wife thinks that is slightly crazy, the idea that there are imaginary people floating around out there telling me all sorts of stuff. But that’s what happens. Of course, half the time the characters are mumbling, so I can’t really hear them. Other times the things they say or do are so trite and predictable that I have to slap them around and demand something else. But that’s all part of the process. A wise person, I wish I could remember who, once said, “Writer’s write to find out what they didn’t know they know.” That’s a great description of what is exciting about being a writer—allowing your mind to take you places you never thought you’d go. Some of those places can be pretty scary or very hard to get to, but the best writers find a way to dig down and take us on that journey with them.
12.How do you know when a story is finished?
Andre Dubus used to say that a story is never really finished, it’s just abandoned. That’s not quite true for me, but what does happen is that sometimes I think a story is finished, then I let it sit for a while, and when I go back to it, I find there are changes I want to make.
13.Let’s talk about Lies You Wanted to Hear. What inspired you to write this story?
Around 1998, there was a front-page article in the Boston Globe about a man who was arrested for kidnapping his children eighteen years before. He’d been turned in by a lawyer who found out his secret and was hoping to collect a reward. The kidnapper had two daughters who were accomplished young women in their early twenties, and they stood behind him completely. They refused to even meet with their mother—who had become an academic research scientist—unless she agreed not to press any charges against him. According to the newspaper coverage, the man had difficulty telling the truth and lived off the money that came from a succession of rich wives, but he appeared to be a great father to his daughters. I let the story marinate for about a year before trying to turn it into a novel. When I began writing, I started with the premise that both the kidnapper and the mother who loses her children were essentially good people. The story didn’t have much appeal to me if either of them were a monster. Beyond that, I always knew that in my novel I wanted it to be one of the children who discovered the secret of their kidnapping. I can’t say why I felt this so strongly, but it obviously adds another dimension to the story that is missing from the original. I wrote about sixty pages before I lost interest. Ten years later the story started speaking to me again. Even though I’d kept a file folder with all the old newspaper articles from the true-life case, I decided not to reread them until I had finished writing the novel. I didn’t want the facts of the true story to interfere with my imagination.
14.How did you come up with the idea of the alternating chapters for Matt and Lucy?
My goal was to let both characters have their say and see how readers responded to them. In the first draft, I wrote in the third person, limited perspective. In the second draft, I decided to try first person with the hope that it would force me to look at my characters more deeply. That turned out to be exactly what happened, especially when they began to explain to the reader why they did what they did.
15.Is there one character in the novel you feel most closely connected to?
No, I can’t say that there is. Lucy turned out to be a lot more complicated than I had anticipated, so it was interesting to see where she would take me, but I don’t feel any closer to her than I do to Matt. Maybe it’s like having kids; you love each one and couldn’t possibly say which is your favorite.
16.What’s the next book you’re working on?
It’s a novel called The Jukebox King, set in 1962 in Pittsburgh, where I grew up. My rock ’n’ roll novel. The protagonist is an inveterate entrepreneur who has a complicated relationship with his wife and
two sons. I wrote a draft of it about fifteen years ago. Now I’m having fun revisiting it. There’s a good story there, but I feel like I’m a much better writer now.
Acknowledgments
I would like to thank the people who helped make this book possible.
My first mentor, the late Andre Dubus, never stopped encouraging me to make my work deeper and richer. Leslie Epstein, writer extraordinaire and poker pal, has been a constant source of advice and laughter.
Don Arbuckle read every draft of Lies You Wanted to Hear and occasionally talked me down off the ledge. His belief in my work, along with that of my friends Jack Herlihy, Pete Hogg, John Pennington, and Dan Roble has been unflagging.
Susan Barrett, Nat Butler, Donna Cameron, Joan Crockett, D.A. Hayden, Chris Konys, Jan Levin, Margot Livesey, Amelia McCarthy, Danielle McCarthy, Helen Peluso, Flippy Polikoff, Connie Thomson, Jessica Treadway, and Peter Weinbaum all read drafts of the novel. Their feedback sometimes made me sulk or argue, but their willingness to be honest with me ultimately made this a much better book.
Lt. Brian Grassey of the Natick Police Department assisted me in establishing various points of fact regarding Massachusetts law and procedure. Dale Smith, Linda Champion, and Dell Redington of the Morse Institute Library answered numerous questions, as did Maria Young, the librarian at Memorial Elementary School.
Libby Plum cheerfully printed many versions of the manuscript.
Adriana Flores made sure I got the Spanish right.
Debby Smullyan proved to be an incomparable line editor, rooting out typos that were hidden like termites on every other page.
Simon Lipskar believed in me when so many publishing insiders did not.
Walt Bode challenged me to take the novel to another level and offered insight and guidance every step of the way.
My agent Laura Gross looked me in the eye the first time we met and said quite simply, “This novel will be published.” Her unflagging effort on my behalf has been amazing, and I thank my lucky stars to have found her. Kudos as well to her very efficient assistant, Amaryah Orenstein.
Shana Drehs is just what I wished for in an editor. She has been enthusiastic and responsive, never demanding more from me than she asked of herself. Her suggestions about the text, which ranged from major cuts to small word changes, were wonderfully discerning.
The entire staff at Sourcebooks has been terrific: Katie Anderson, Heather Hall, Heather Moore, Valerie Pierce, Nicole Villeneuve, and the entire production and design team.
My artistic children, Meg, Brett, and Kelly Thomson, have all championed my work over the years and helped me keep the faith. Ditto for my stepsons, Brian and Kevin McCarthy, along with Jodi Sperbeck Thomson and Tim Edwards.
My wife Elizabeth never lost patience with my quixotic undertaking. (Well, almost never.) I cannot thank her enough for her many hours of careful reading and editing, and for her constant love and understanding.
About the Author
James Whitfield Thomson grew up on the North Side of Pittsburgh and attended Harvard College on scholarship. After graduation he served three years in the Navy as navigator of a supply ship off the coast of Vietnam. Jim earned a Ph.D. in American Studies at the University of Pennsylvania, writing his dissertation on the detective novelist Raymond Chandler. Following a brief stint teaching literature in academia, he joined a start-up venture as a salesman. The company’s rapid success allowed him to retire early and devote himself to writing. He has published stories in a number of literary magazines including Agni and The Ledge and has been a Massachusetts Council for the Arts grant recipient. Jim and his wife, Elizabeth, live in a Victorian farmhouse outside of Boston and have five globe-trotting children. Lies You Wanted to Hear is his first published novel. You can find him on Facebook or at www.jameswhitfieldthomson.com.
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