Shrinks in Books and Movies @LucyBurdette

LUCY BURDETTE: Having Dennis visit yesterday and talking about the essays of "true confessions from both sides of the therapy couch" got me thinking about how I got started in this writing business to begin with. And part of it was my dismay at the way shrinks have been portrayed in books and movies. Often we were shown as crazier than our patients or sleeping with our patients or merely bumbling fools… You get the idea. Two movies that come to mind are "What about Bob?" (crazier shrink than patient) and "Tin Cup" (shrink nuttier than her patient and sleeping with him too!)

From the very beginning, I wanted to use my training in clinical psychology by including reasonable psychologists in my novels. The challenge was to dream up characters who could use the principles of psychology to help solve mysteries without imploding with self-importance, stumbling over personal issues, or crossing ethical boundaries. If I put shrinks in my books, I wanted them to be complicated people with possibly difficult backgrounds, but aware of keeping boundaries and the general weight of their work. I didn't want them to scare off readers or watchers from trying psychotherapy if they needed it. I wanted to do it right.

For that reason I loved Judd Hirsch's gentle but firm therapist in Ordinary People. Did you believe in that breakthrough moment when Timothy Hutton, the younger brother of the dead boy, finally realized what happened the night his brother died? I sure did!

 

And even Tony Soprano's psychiatrist felt real to me, though I wouldn't have chosen to take on a mobster patient LOL. I can remember so clearly the moment when she struggled with the urge to use her patient, Tony, for revenge after she was raped, but ultimately chose not to.

Stephen White’s series featuring a clinical psychologist in Colorado was another great model for me. And Hallie's first books, written with Don Davidoff as G. H. Ephron, were wonderful examples of a decent psychologist. (And of course that's why we met!) I hoped that my psychologist characters, like Rebecca Butterman in Deadly Advice, would spring to life like those.



Now over to you Reds—do you notice fictional psychotherapists? Who are your favorite or least favorite shrink characters in books or movies—and why?

DEADLY ADVICE #advicecolumn #mystery #ebook

LUCY BURDETTE: I have often wondered whether the mystery series I wrote before the food critic mysteries might have gotten more traction if it had been published in the era of ebooks and social media. No way to tell, of course, but the happy news is that the first book in the series, DEADLY ADVICE (written as Roberta Isleib), is now available for Kindle. 
 
The book stars Dr. Rebecca Butterman, a clinical psychologist and advice columnist living in Connecticut. She works out of an office in New Haven (in the same building where I had my private practice,) and she explores many of the places on the Connecticut shoreline that I've grown to know and love.

Although this series is a little edgier than the food critic mysteries, the books are close to my heart because they draw so much from my previous career as a psychologist. In a poignant coincidence, given the terrible news two weeks ago about Robin Williams, DEADLY ADVICE opens with the mysterious suicide of Dr. Butterman's neighbor. She feels doubly troubled about this death, thinking she should have noticed something was wrong--both as a professional and as a neighbor.

In addition to my sleuth’s background, that opening scene is also rooted in my graduate school days. During my final year, newly separated, I lived in an anonymous apartment complex with only a nodding acquaintance of the other residents. Each morning, my taciturn next-door neighbor left for work at 7:30, returning by six. Some nights she’d cook one hamburger on the grill outside her door. Medium well, I’d think, considering the time it sat on the coals. How sad, I’d think. Is that me? I’d wonder next.

One evening, I came home from the library and noticed a small U-Haul parked in front of her apartment. An older couple was loading the contents of her place into the van. Over coffee the next morning, I skimmed the newspaper as usual, and noticed a small article near the bottom of an interior page. Based on this paragraph, I realized that my neighbor had shot herself several days earlier. Her body had lain in the apartment next to mine for over forty-eight hours before someone found her.

I felt shocked and sad. Isn’t this every single woman’s worst nightmare—dead two days and no one even notices you’re gone? As you can imagine, this incident has always haunted me.

Years later, that’s where DEADLY ADVICE began. When Dr. Rebecca Butterman returns home to find her neighbor an apparent suicide, she's wracked with guilt.  As a psychologist and advice columnist, she’s an expert! She should have been able to help the young woman. But the neighbor’s mother suspects foul play, and soon persuades Rebecca to investigate the possibility of murder. 

When Rebecca Butterman is troubled, she cooks. Like Hayley Snow in the Key West mysteries, she loves to cook, to eat, and to share meals with her best women friends. But she doesn't think so much about the meaning of food the way food critic Hayley does. She's too busy puzzling over what makes people tick...

In honor of the launch of DEADLY ADVICE as e-book, I'm happy to share one of Dr. Butterman's favorite recipes, beef carbonnade. She would tell you to start the dish the day before you plan to eat it so it can sit in the refrigerator overnight, allowing the flavors to blend. She would also tell you that serving this meal to sad people might make their world a tiny bit brighter.

We hope you enjoy the book and the stew!

True Crime, Jungle Red Style

ROBERTA: The most realistic crime story in any of my eight books appeared in the first of my Rebecca Butterman series. While in my last year of graduate school, the woman who lived next door to me shot herself. Her body remained in that apartment for three days before anyone missed her. As you can imagine, the horror of that incident lingered with me for many years. It finally surfaced in DEADLY ADVICE. Of course, Dr. Butterman is quickly led to wonder whether the her neighbor's death really was a suicide and she sets off to solve the mystery. (Something I would never have done, no matter how badly I felt...)

How true to life is the crime in your books? Do you rip stories right from the headlines, or make everything up, or something in between?

HANK: I make them up. Totally make them up. Well, kind of. Stories I've covered as a reporter sneak into the books, in a way, but not specifically and not completely. And lawsuits my husband has handled sometimes work their way in, too.

Not word for word, you know. But just little tidbits. Snippets. Details.

I know there are big wig authors who just take the whole deal, plot, characters, outcome, all of it, and transpose it into fiction. That kind of feels like cheating to me. At this stage, at least!

JAN: I often get a germ from a real news story. Like the grandmother in Lowell who got killed in a staged accident, but then I turn it over in my head for years and it morphs into more the inspiration for the story, rather than the entire story (Yesterday's Fatal).

There's probably a bit of true crime in every novel I've written. But aren't we all awed and inspired by bad behavior?

HALLIE: Probably. Like Jan, for me real crimes are good jumping-off points. There was a case where a woman who'd been shot in the head testified against the man she said shot her. The defense questioned whether, given the extent of her brain injury, she could remember what happened. Twice there was a hung jury. What fascinated me about it was the idea that a person could "remember" something that didn't happen... and "forget" something that did. "Eyewitness testimony" is notoriously suspect. That was the the theme of my first mystery novel, "Amnesia."

RHYS: Several story lines in my Molly Murphy books have their origin in a real crime of the times. The Triangle Factory fire, for example, when the factory owners locked all the doors, thus burning the girls alive. And of course Death of Riley exactly follows the assassination of President McKinley. The Lady Georgie books have crimes that are too far fetched or silly to be real, but my short stories sometimes have their basis in something I've read in a newspaper.