LIES SHE TOLD--Or Did She?

HANK PHILLIPPI RYAN: Craig Johnson tells the story about how the biggest lie in fiction is that disclaimer in the front of the book that says: "This is a work of fiction. All characters, locations and events portrayed in this novel are products of the author's imagination....."  Something like that. You've seen it.

Well, sure they are. Products of our imaginations. But as the incredibly talented Cate Holahan says the author's imagination gets fueled by reality. So what's real--and what's made up?

CATE HOLAHAN: The hilltops smoked. I watched the swirling vapor as my boots sunk into the spongy, moss-covered ground beneath my new hiking boots. The wisps rose, not fell. I couldn’t ascribe them to the clouds that tumbled over the tallest peaks ahead in a slow motion waterfall. This was different.

 

This, as I would soon learn, was dangerous.

"Watch your step and stay close behind.” Our Icelandic mountain guide shouted over his shoulder at me and my fellow travelers. His name was Helgy, and he nearly matched my pre-conceived picture of an Icelandic wilderness guide. Tall. Tow-head. A modern-day Viking complete with broad shoulders propping up a water-proof, Gore-tex jacket. Only the beard that I’d imagined would cover the face of any proper Norse descendant was missing.

Helgy halted at a ridge and motioned for the stragglers to join him. He pointed below. “It’s twice the boiling point. Maybe more.”

I peered down at the milky pool steaming in the crater inches from Helgy’s feet, fighting my insane desire to strip down to my bathing suit. The water beckoned, a private blue lagoon for the five people in our hiking party. An escape from the island’s frigid summer air.

“I want to get in,” a friend said, echoing my thoughts.

“Well, you’d never get out.” Helgy’s smile dropped into a serious line that made up for the lack of beard. “It would melt off your legs and then, since there is nothing to hold on to, you’d sink below and disappear.”

I looked from the bubbling pool to admire the bucolic landscape boiling before us. “Wow,” I said. “There are so many ways to get rid of a body up here.”

And, just like that, I had a story idea. Later that night, in the safety of my hotel room, I sketched out an entire novel.

I retell this vacation anecdote because it touches upon the theme of my latest thriller, Lies She Told (Crooked Lane Books. Sept. 12, 2017). Where do writers get their ideas? How do they twist the truth to create fiction? Where are the lines beneath the lies?

     Lies She Told concerns a suspense writer, Liza, whose work-in-progress novel points at clues to a disappearance in her real life. The story alternates between Liza and the tale of Beth, her novel’s protagonist. After a body is found, the lines between Liza’s real life and her fiction begin to blur, forcing Liza to question the origins of her ideas. Has she subconsciously picked up on details about the people closest to her that could reveal a killer? How much of her art is an abstraction from her actual life? What is her fiction showing about her latent desires, suspicions, and frustrations? 

Whenever I write, I ask myself these same questions. My characters, I know, are amalgamations of people in my real life, fictional folks in admired novels, and myself. As my protagonist says in Lies She Told, “to be a writer is to be a life thief. Everyday, I rob myself blind.” 

When writing, I continually wonder where I am drawing the line and whether I am crossing boundaries that I shouldn’t.

Good fiction must have deep characters that are more than fractions of their creator. My people have to come from me without being boring, old me—or my lovely, but far-too-functional for thrillers, friends. 

I evaluate my characters against what I believe to have inspired them, constantly checking whether I have abstracted enough. Is this character too recognizable as my best friend from high school or have I stolen her speech patterns but actually based the personality on someone/thing else? 

Is a character reacting the way I imagine that I would in a similar scenario or is she being true to her backstory and responding in a way that is organic to how her was raised? Are my characters actions naturally leading to plot elements or am I orchestrating from on high, forcing plot points and the story I want to tell instead of the tale that would flow from my fictional people?

I think all writers must do a similar kind of analysis to make sure that they are telling a rich story with varied characters that act in accordance with their invented histories. Just because I am writing the story doesn’t mean I get to control it. My book’s protagonist, Liza, certainly doesn’t.

HANK: Authors, how do you handle real-life characters who try to get into your books?  Readers, do you think authors are making people up--or stealing from real life? 

Cate Holahan is the USA Today Bestselling author of The Widower's Wife (Crooked Lane Books, Aug. 2016) named to Kirkus' Best Books of 2016. Her third suspense thriller, Lies She Told (Crooked Lane Books, Sept. 12, 2017) was a September pick by Book of the Month Club.  In a former life, she was an award-winning journalist that wrote for The Record, The Boston Globe, and BusinessWeek. She lives in NJ with her husband, two daughters, and food-obsessed dog, and spends a disturbing amount of time highly-caffeinated, mining her own anxieties for material.  

LIES SHE TOLD:  The truth can be darker than fiction. Liza Cole, a once-successful novelist whose career has seen better days, has one month to write the thriller that could land her back on the bestseller list. Meanwhile, she’s struggling to start a family, but her husband is distracted by the disappearance of his best friend, Nick. As stresses weigh her down in her professional and personal lives, Liza escapes into writing the chilling exploits of her latest heroine, Beth.

Beth, a new mother, suspects her husband is cheating on her while she’s home caring for their newborn. Angry and betrayed, she aims to catch him in the act and make him pay for shattering the illusion of their perfect life. But before she realizes what she’s doing, she’s tossing the body of her husband’s mistress into the East River.

Then, the lines between Liza’s fiction and her reality eerily blur. Nick’s body is dragged from the East River, and Liza’s husband is arrested for his murder. Before her deadline is up, Liza will have to face up to the truths about the people around her, including her own. If she doesn’t, the end of her heroine’s story could be the end of her own.

Survival at Sea?

HANK PHILLIPPI RYAN:  Things I have never done: a cruise. Oh, wait. I did a story about the QEII and sailed from Boston to New York, which was cool, but not really a voyage.  But a real pack your bags, board the ship and (with flags fluttering and horns bellowing) take off for days on a floating hotel with a mizzendeck, lounge chairs and sixteen bars? Nope.

But the intrepid Cate Holahan did it. With two little kids, no less.

How bon do you think THAT voyage was?

But she got a fabulous idea for a book from it. And, as we all know, that makes it all worth it.

CRUISIN’ FOR A BRUISIN’

                             ByCate Holahan

         Neosporin. Cough medicine. Tylenol?

         I brought the clear plastic bag to the tip of my nose and jostled its zip-sealed contents. A red box shook to the front from behind a Benadryl bottle. Bubblegum flavored histamine blockers wouldn’t beat an epinephrine-filled needle jammed, Pulp Fiction style, into the thigh. Still, a spoonful would be better than nothing in the event of an allergic reaction. I’d never given my little crew shrimp. I had no idea whether or not they were sensitive to shellfish.

        

         I had no idea how I would survive the next five days.

         

     

   At the urging of a good friend, my husband had near-unilaterally decided that our two-year-old and a three-year-old should accompany his pal’s young family on a Disney Cruise. It was going to be GREAT!!!! Mickey. Tinker Bell. “Relaxing” by the pool and the ocean. ALL YOU CAN EAT! What could go wrong?

         

         The thriller writer in me wanted to inform him of Finagle’s law—or at least the fact that neither of our toddlers could swim. The wife in me saw his excitement and pressed her lips together. Yes, our kids hadn’t yet advanced from Yo Gabba Gabba to the Disney Princess stage. Sure, the stuff required to amuse and care for two children sub age-six would consume half of our 214-foot stateroom. Okay, so I’d be squeezing children accustomed to a sprawling suburban house into an area the size of the bedroom in my second Manhattan apartment. But, hey, it would be an experience! And, no, I didn’t want to offend our friends.

         “Do you think I have enough anti-nausea medication?” I asked.

         “Yes. The ship is a floating hotel. It’s so big that no one gets sick,” my husband responded.

         “The kids get car sick. Surely, they’ll feel queasy on the ocean.”

         “You worry too much.”

         “It’s my job.”

         My husband looked at me like he should have packed a Xanax prescription.

         The cruise was not a vacation. My kids didn’t care about the Disney characters. They didn’t like being “penned in” on the ship. The drinks were too watered down. Worst of all, my two-year-old’s body chose that week to develop molars. My floating pharmacy did not include Orajel.

         Several times, as my two-year-old howled in our cramped quarters about the gums that I could not soothe and my husband drank with his dear friend by the pool, I stood on our stateroom balcony, belly pressed to the mahogany railing just beneath my bust, and mused about disappearing into the azure Caribbean sea. Would I make a splash? How long would it take to save me? Could I swim to Cozumel?

         I never jumped. But the passing thought did make its way into my next novel, TheWidower’s Wife. The protagonist in my book is trapped by a crisis, partially, of her own making. Writing about her circumstances brought back the cruise. I could feel the warm wind on my skin and see the ombré ocean through the balcony bars. I remembered feeling caged in a floating prison guarded by Mickey Mouse. Those very real feelings influenced my fiction and my dramatic choices. I wrote what I knew.

         In the end, I can’t say that the Disney Wonder was a wonderful vacation. But it was an inspirational one.

HANK: Have you ever been on a cruise? Ever wanted to? Please report on your journey—or your thoughts on that journey! And a copy of The Widower’s Wife to one lucky sailor—er, commenter.

Catherine "Cate" Holahan is an award-winning journalist and former television producer.
Her articles have appeared in BusinessWeek, The Boston Globe, The Record and on web sites for CBS, MSN Money, NorthJersey.com and CNBC, and other sites. Her second thriller, The Widower’s Wife, was published by Crooked Lane Books on Aug. 9, 2016. Crooked Lane published her first book, Dark Turns, in November 2015.

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