I'm Anne Bocock, and welcome to "Between the Covers."

Laura Lippman is "The New York Times" bestselling author.

Her books have been published in 30 languages, and she's won just about every award in the genre.

The Edgar, the Anthony, Agatha, to name drop just a few.

She's the author of a brilliant candid collection of essays, "My Life as a Villainess," and her latest book, "Dream Girl," is a tale of psychological horror centering around, of all people, an author.

You have no idea how long I've been waiting for this conversation, so please welcome, Laura Lippman.

Hi, Laura.

Hey, thanks for having me.

I'm really looking forward to this.

Oh, let me talk about "Dream Girl" for a moment.

It's dark, it is suspenseful, psychological horror, and it centers around a novelist, which I love, Jerry Anderson.

He's had this freak accident.

He's confined to bed.

Now, can you take it from here a little bit?

We don't want to spoil anything, but just embellish on that part of the story.

Jerry has led a blameless life in his mind, and he feels like he can define himself as a good person, primarily when compared to his father who was, well, a bigamist and someone who hurt his mother quite badly.

So Jerry's like, yeah, I'm a good guy and I don't have any regrets, I haven't hurt anyone.

But when he has taken this fall and he's confined to bed, he begins receiving a series of mysterious communications by letter, by phone, from a woman who says, I'm the titular character of your book and I'm coming to see you soon.

I am the dream girl, which is the book within the book in his most successful novel of all time.

And the thing is, is that Jerry knows there is no such person.

So he doesn't know what's happening.

Is he beginning to develop dementia, which is what killed his mother?

Is he suffering from delusions because of the drugs he's taking?

Or is there someone dislikes him enough to prank him in this way?

And if so, what could he have possibly have done?

And to me, Sort of the center of "Dream Girl" is how ludicrous it is for anyone to reach the age of 61, which is what Jerry is, and to think that they've led a blameless life.

That seems to me to be a pretty, pretty dangerous and heuristic concept of oneself.

And so that's what I was really interested in.

I'm always interested in the danger of people who see themselves as being good.

Because if you see yourself as being good, you begin to think that all of your decisions are therefore the right decisions because you're coming from a place of goodness and morality.

Laura, I want to pick up on something that you just said.

Now, as I'm reading the story and learning more about the backstory, Jerry's backstory, he becomes much more interesting and much less likable, to me, as a character, but he's got these exwives, several exwives.

He has a current ex, Margo, who is like gum on your shoe.

You can't get rid of her.

You know, the women in the story, to me, are so fascinating.

Were they more fun to create than Jerry?

Were they equally as much fun?

I definitely had a lot of fun creating Margo.

Margo to me was a fascinating character for whom I had an almost grudging respect.

This kind of woman who depends on men for her livelihood, but it's transactional, but she's giving what's expected of her.

I mean, Margo is someone who expects to be supported in grand style.

What do you get in return?

You get a charming, socially capable, bed partner.

I mean, she understands, she's basically an old fashioned, I wouldn't call her a mistress, she's not running around with married men, but she's someone who lives as a companion and gives value for that.

You know, she's, you can take her anywhere.

She dresses beautifully.

She can speak well, she's intelligent.

She's almost like an old fashioned courtesan.

So Margo was a great deal of fun to write.

All of the people in this book were fun for me to write.

I think, if anything, sometimes I think about the characters that I didn't really write.

We learn very little about Jerry's third wife.

She doesn't even show up on the page because at that point he's just sort of coming and going through marriages with way too much speed.

But Jerry himself was a really fun character to write.

And he is unlikable, but he's not bad company.

He's smart.

The little interior monologue can be quite funny, even when it's terribly politically incorrect.

And it is politically incorrect.

I mean, unlike Jerry, I'm someone who prides myself on listening to people and paying attention to how language is changing.

And I believe language should change.

And sometimes you have these moments where I'll find myself thinking, no, I can't do that one.

And then I'm like, okay, listen to yourself.

You know, I recently was listening to a podcast that made the point that certain phrases stigmatizes mental illness, and we shouldn't talk about things being crazy.

So, you know, yeah.

So I'm very different from Jerry that way, but I didn't like him, but I wasn't distressed to be in his company for the period of time it took me to write the book.

Oh, I loved reading about him.

I loved this story.

But this story is also about isolation.

And, you know, timing is everything, but we've all experienced isolation much more than we wanted to in the last two years.

So this became very relatable to the readers, being stuck, maybe not to the degree that Jerry is, but certainly relatable.

It was unexpectedly relatable Where I was when I started this book, and I started this book in early 2019.

And at the end of 2018, I had been watching a horror film.

And I was thinking about the fact that so many horror films depend on a literal kind of isolation.

You know, you're out in the country, communication is down, there's no one who can help you, there are no people for miles, you're on your own.

And I was intrigued by the idea of trying that within an urban setting.

I doubt that I was the first.

You're never the first to do anything, but I had a hunch in my heart of hearts that we were all a little bit more alone than we knew.

That the busyness of our lives and the buzz of social media and the sort of 24/7 connectedness was disguising, perhaps, how shallow some of our relationships are.

And that when it came down to it, who would be there for you if you needed them?

I mean, Jerry doesn't really have anyone.

His three marriages have ended.

He doesn't, he has broken up with his girlfriend quite deliberately and is trying to get away from her.

He doesn't have any old friends because of his two closest friends, one is dead and one doesn't speak to him anymore for reasons we don't find out until well toward the end of the book.

I mean, his only real friend is his literary agent.

And when your best friend is someone who gets 15% of your money, I don't know what kind of friendship that is.

Although saying that, I actually do consider my literary agent a true friend.

But it's an interesting existence.

And you know, I felt that that's not typical of my life, but then, you know, I'm in a household.

I have a kid, I know my neighbors.

I'm very different from Jerry that way.

It's like, yeah, I mean, it's like if something happened to me, people would notice and people would be paying attention and I would know who to call and who could come help me.

You know, you chose to be a writer.

You chose this isolated life anyway.

I'm curious if the pandemic was a blessing or a hindrance to your own writing process?

What I found out during the pandemic, so I went into the pandemic and this book was due and I turned it in on June 1st.

And it was a blessing to have something that required that amount of focus during the early months of the pandemic.

And it's been a blessing to continue working.

I mean, since the pandemic, I finished "Dream Girl," I wrote an original novella that's in a collection I have coming out in January.

I've written a couple of, not quite as personal essays, but sort of journalism pieces.

And I wrote something specifically about the pandemic for "The Guardian" newspaper.

I've been working on a piece about creativity.

So I've had my writing and that has been a blessing.

What broke for me, and I kind of think everybody broke something in their brain during the pandemic, my reading brain really broke, and it broke hard.

And reading, which is such a big part of my life, suddenly became very difficult for me.

And I almost had to do a kind of PT, personal therapy, where I would just have to say to myself, you are going to read today for an hour no matter what happens, no matter how hard it is, no matter how jumpy you are.

And when I do that, the muscle comes back really quickly, but I have to keep doing that.

And I do find that I really need to read for pure pleasure now.

That it has become very difficult for me to do this kind of pay it forward thing that I've always tried to do where I'm blurbing and endorsing other writers' work ahead of publication, because that even as good as the books are, there's this sense of obligation.

And it's like, I need this to just be pleasure again.

I need my, for now.

I mean, I've actually started telling people I'm not blurbing right now because my brain broke.

I feel kind of silly saying that to people, but that's what happened.

Laura, it is so refreshing to hear you say that 'cause so many people have said they could, they had a hard time reading.

And that brings me to, there's a clever, you have several clever references about the publishing business in "Dream Girl."

One that made me laugh out loud is Jerry is annoyed with Colson Whitehead's "Underground Railroad" book attention.

And in contrast to the accolades that authors usually give to another author, or are so proud that they won the whatever award it is, but no, you turned it upside down.

So thank you.

That was real, that was funny.

Well, it was fun to do.

I mean, I felt like I could get away with it because I've met Colson Whitehead and fangirled all over him when he was at my local library.

And I am, I mean, to me, Colson Whitehead, and this was before he won two Pulitzers back to back for fiction, he represents to me the embodiment of my dream of the best kind of writer.

I'm not even saying it's the kind of writer I'm trying to be because I continue to work within this one form, which is the crime genre.

To watch someone who's like, I'm gonna write a zombie novel, I'm gonna write a coming of age novel, I'm gonna write speculative historical fiction, I'm gonna write straight forward historical fiction, and now I'm gonna write a heist book.

It is just breathtaking.

It's so exciting.

And he's so down to earth and matter of fact about his work.

You know, he's kind of the opposite of Jerry in some ways, I think, which is probably what is annoying Jerry so much.

Because he's getting the work done, he's getting all the prizes, and he's, you know, and he's so wellliked.

I was so glad you put that in there.

Jerry also uses this special, I guess it's a special computer display that resembles the page of a book, which I really didn't even know existed.

And then I think it's almost in the same paragraph, he's realizing that the, yes, visual context is critical, but then people are reading on their phones.

They're reading a sentence or a paragraph.

So is this you having, telling us that authors are being out of step when it comes to technology?

Or is this more about us, readers as consumers?

I think Jerry is a bit of a Luddite, which is not a quality I admire.

I mean, it's like, do what you want to do, but don't make it a fetish.

Don't make it your religion.

Like, oh, I don't do this, I won't do that.

If people want to read it on their phone, they can read on their phone.

I use a tablet sometimes, primarily for travel or if I need a book fast for some reason.

But like a lot of people, I would prefer to read a book book.

And I don't like the people who make fun of us.

There are people who are like, oh, it's so silly.

Why are people...

It's like, I was like, no, the book is a technologically perfect object.

It is a great object for what it does.

And it hasn't actually been improved upon by technology, except in terms of weight and capacity.

Like if you're going on a trip and you take a tablet, you can take so many books.

And I've been on long trips before the tablet where there were like weight limits because of the way we were traveling and I couldn't have books with me and it was like so frustrating.

So I get that.

But other than that, I actually tweeted about this a couple of weeks ago.

I came home from the bookstore and I just took a photograph of the two books I had bought.

And they were so physically beautiful.

And it wasn't that they were illustrated books.

Books are just gorgeous.

So I do know people who have computer screens that make it look like they're working on the page.

I'm not one of them, but I've always been fascinated by that.

And I happen to believe that readers, whether they realize it or not, are experiencing books visually.

It's like basically books engage, they engage sight, they engage feel, they engaged the sense of smell.

I don't know if you can argue that they engage hearing because you're not really hearing things, you're hearing it in your head.

The one thing I know for sure is books don't engage the sense of taste, unless you're a big old weirdo who likes to eat pages.

And I'm sure those people exist because every kind of person exists.

But I really care about books as physical objects.

In terms of the reading, I've reached an age where I'm less attached to owning them.

So I buy books and I give them away.

I think it's really important to buy books if you're a writer.

It's like, if you're not going to buy books, why would you expect anyone to buy your book?

It's like, you know, it is on me to buy books.

And then I just sort of give them wherever I can give them.

I've given them a way to readers.

Before the pandemic, I was giving away a dozen titles every month that I culled from my own shelves 'cause I'm like, I'm done with this book, I don't need it anymore.

Sometimes it was like, you know what?

I'm not going to actually ever read this book.

I just have to admit it and let it go.

And I need to start doing that again.

You know, there was a time there were people who didn't want packages so I fell out of the habit, but when my office, which is under renovation is completed, I will probably start sending those boxes of books back out into the world.

You know, I've always looked at crime fiction as one of the best ways to face societal issues, whether it's race or religion.

And when I read your books, yeah, I love the stories, but I sense you want to give us more than a good story because you give voice to the victims, and that's by choice isn't it?

Yeah, it's something that I figured out pretty early in my career as a crime writer, was that I wanted to create stories that would allow people to feel empathy for victims.

I was a journalist for a long time, 20 years.

I wrote crime stories sometimes.

And if you think about the way we experience crime stories in the news, there's a certain lack of empathy, which is natural and built in.

When we read true stories, we are looking for the moment in which we can assure ourselves that this would never happen to us.

I don't even feel prepared to take on the kind of gleeful armchair detective world that has emerged because of podcasts and true crime documentaries.

You know, people who were, you know, sort of gleefully trying to solve the disappearance of the young woman who disappeared on the road with her boyfriend, Brian Laundrie, and her body... Like that, that's so distasteful to me that I haven't had time to think it through yet.

And I need to think it through because people could come back at me and say, how are you different?

You make a living off of writing these stories of crime and violence and they're often inspired by real life.

But I was very much aware that, whereas in reading a piece of journalism, like, let's say, like, let's say there's a carjacking in your neighborhood and you're reading a story in the local paper.

You may not realize it, but you're sort of looking for that moment where you can tell yourself this won't happen to me.

And that's a good way to be, that's human.

'Cause if you open your mind up to the fact that anything could happen to you at any time, you might become subject to such crippling anxiety you won't leave the house.

So it's like, oh, I wouldn't be out at two in the morning or I don't drive a fancy car, I'm gonna be okay.

But with fiction you can kind of lure people in to seeing all sides of the story and to especially see what happens to the people who were related or to victims or loved victims.

The idea that, you know, no one really deserves to be the victim of a horrible crime.

I was really working against this tradition I saw in my beloved genre of the crime novel as a redemptive arc for the crime investigator, which I think we need to be careful about that.

I think we need to be careful about stories in which lots and lots of people die, but the investigator becomes a better person so it's a happy ending.

Or, you know, he went home and he hugged his daughter, yay!

I was very consciously pushing against that.

And I still am.

You know, I think the last two books I wrote, the last year novels I wrote, "Dream Girl" and "Lady in the Lake" beforehand, are raising and not necessarily answering some really naughty questions about appropriation.

Whether you're appropriating across your own identity or outside of your own identity, I should say, or whether you're taking someone else's story and using it, which I have undeniably done.

And I feel like I can justify it, but some people don't.

And we're talking in a week in which the internet has gone bonkers over this story called the "Bad Art Friend" that's going to be in "The New York Times" Sunday magazine by the terrific, terrific writer, Robert Kolker.

Actually, I think he goes by Bob Kolker, so I want to get that right.

And so people are talking about this story endlessly, which center on one writer using another writer's experience for her short story and even using some of her words.

And what's interesting to me about it is that people want to be so definitive.

They want to say, well, this is the villain.

Or they want to say she's wrong and she's right.

Or they want to say they're both wrong, or everybody behaved badly.

And it's so interesting to me that people want to have these incredibly, like can't we just like experience this as like a really interesting story about how people experience their own lives and their own art and what some people think is fair play and everyone's a little bit gossipy and caddy, that's just a given.

So I'm constantly wrestling with this, and I'm wrestling with it right now in the work that I'm working on.

Although it's a case in which the three people, I would say, are everyone's... My three major characters are white, and they're basically all of my social class.

And this is not really based on a true story, but it's based on a genre of true story, which becomes immediately apparent when you know that the novel I'm working on is called "Prom Mom."

The idea of this tragedy that has happened a shocking number of times in our culture.

But yeah, I'm really, really interested in so many things that go beyond the crime novel.

And yet the great thing the crime novel is it's this sturdy, flexible form that can take on a lot of stuff.

It can be the social novel.

It can be about violent partner crime.

I don't like to call it domestic violence anymore.

It can be about so many things.

Absolutely, and you've nailed it.

I do want to let our viewers know that about a hundred pages into "Dream Girl," who shows up, but Tess Monaghan.

And I'm kind of going to leave that one at that, but thank you for doing that.

I really appreciate that she, that she did show up even if it's just for a little bit.

You wrote another book.

You wrote a book of essays, "My Life as a Villainess."

I've got to tell you, that that may be the bravest thing I think a writer can do is to bare their soul.

It's gotta be so much harder than doing fiction.

And if you wouldn't mind, on the very back cover of the book is you and your words.

And would you read that?

Would I ask you to do that, please?

This was taken from the introduction of the book.

"The question that hovers over anyone "who dares to write personal essays, especially a woman, "is who the hell do you think you are?

"Before you can answer, "you will be told who and what you are not.

"You are not Nora Ephron.

"You are not Joan Didion.

"You are not Susan Sontag.

"You aren't all that interesting.

"The list goes on and on, "the question is always rhetorical.

"I will answer the question anyway.

"I am a mother, wife, daughter, sister.

"I'm a writer.

"I am a person with six decades of life experience "under my belt.

"I am a Patriot.

"I am in therapy.

"I am silly, I am serious.

"I am an insomniac.

"I'm a grudge holder.

"I am a friend, although not a good one."

You are Laura Lippman.

Laura's latest book is "Dream Girl."

Well, it has been such a pleasure to talk with you today.

I just want to thank you so much for taking time out of your day and spending it with us.

Oh, it was such a pleasure.

And I hope I didn't ramble on too much.

You know, one of the side effects of being in the house so much is when you get to have a conversation, I get really revved up.

It's like, I have a lot to say!

And I loved it.

Thank you, thank you.

I'm Anne Bocock.

We invite you to connect with us.

You can also listen to our podcast, "Go Between the Covers," and I hope you join me on the next "Between the Covers."