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The idea for my next novel, Down a Dark River, began with a story I read years ago about a white judge who had freed a white drunk driver who had run down and killed a black girl as she crossed the street. As you might expect, the article focused a good deal on the obvious racial aspect–the pernicious alliance ostensibly forged between the judge and the driver based on their race. But it occurred to me that there might be a different, less obvious issue at stake. As I reread the story, feeling the injustice of the trial’s outcome, and empathizing with the rage and pain of her family, I wondered, Would the judge have responded differently if someone he loved had been killed by a drunk driver? That is, would an experience of similar pain (one that would perhaps call up a natural empathy) have caused the judge to forge an alliance with the girl’s family that would trump that of race?

Clearly, no verdict could bring the girl back to life. But a guilty verdict would at least have provided the family with a sense that their daughter’s (taken) life had value, and that their tragic experience was recognized rather than callously disavowed. In the absence of that acknowledgement, how did the family feel–for were they wounded not once, but twice?

From there, my imagination took over with the “what ifs.” Would the father of the dead girl think about killing the judge’s daughter? (Does this make me twisted? Perhaps. But it doesn’t make me original, certainly. We’ve seen this plot before; the book that comes to my mind is John Grisham’s A Time To Kill.) The life-for-a-life sounds akin to the behavior of the kid on the playground who steals somebody else’s toy because somebody stole his first. But no matter what he does, the father can’t steal his daughter back from death. So is there something else going on? Maybe, at bottom, part of what would cause the father to take revenge is to make the judge understand his pain. Maybe there’s a logic of revenge that runs like this: If I can’t make you empathize with my pain through my words, I’ll make you feel it directly. I imagine that in cases where pain is acknowledged in the symbolic realm (in language), there may be less of a need to reenact, or recreate, it in the material one.

So no more spoiler. There’s lots of revenge … and eventually some empathy … in my next book. 

I pulled out John Fowles’s French Lieutenant’s Woman from my bookshelf last night. A college boyfriend gave it to me when I was twenty. It’s the edition with Meryl Streep, peering out from a black hood, on the cover. The creases in the spine suggest I turned the pages. But I am fairly certain I had no idea about half of what was going on. The reference to Marx would have gone over my head. As would the mentions of Gladstone and Disraeli. And the significance of the breach of promise suit for Tina. Does what I did count as reading?  

Some people don’t reread books; but I do, sometimes dozens of times. Sometimes I don’t get anything “more” out of them except the same pleasure I had the first time, with an added dose of contentment because it’s familiar. Comfort food for the brain. The bookwormish equivalent of mashed potatoes. (I know someone who says it’s a waste of time to reread, given all the good books out there. We aren’t quite friends.) But other times, especially if it’s a book I read years ago, rereading provides me with a sense of how much I’ve changed. And as I made my way through the first few chapters of The French Lieutenant’s Woman, I wondered just how much I’d let go over my head, back when I was twenty, in the interest of pursuing the main plot of the story. It’s intriguing from the beginning … who is this unhappy woman standing in the wind? What happened to her? And how will Charles be affected by her? But the sideways references to Marx’s Das Kapital, to the convulsive politics following the repeal of the Corn Laws, to the social and economic implications of a breach of promise suit? These are all things I learned about ten years later, in grad school, while I was studying Victorian literature. I have a feeling when I first read this novel (spurred, no doubt, by wanting to impress my boyfriend who was five years older than I and seemed so very sophisticated), I was like my son Kyle the first time he saw Nemo, missing all the wink-wink, nudge-nudge jokes that made me laugh as I sat beside him on the couch. And I find myself winking at my younger self now.