"The Daylight Marriage"

Heidi Pitlor grew up in Concord, Massachusetts. She got her B.A. from McGill University in Montreal and moved out to Colorado, where in Denver and Boulder she worked as a nanny, receptionist, freelance writer, bus girl, rape crisis counselor and counselor to homeless and runaway teenagers. She moved back to Massachusetts to earn her M.F.A. in Creative Writing from Emerson College and worked as a temp at Houghton Mifflin Company. Soon after, she was hired as an editorial assistant in the company's trade division. She eventually became an editor and later a senior editor at Houghton Mifflin (now Houghton Mifflin Harcourt). She wrote fiction early in the mornings before work and published her first novel, The Birthdays, in 2006. She has been the series editor of The Best American Short Stories since 2007. Her writing has appeared in such publications as Ploughshares, The Huffington Post, and Labor Day: True Birth Stories by Today's Best Women Writers.

Pitlor applied the Page 69 Test to The Daylight Marriage, her second novel, and reported the following:

Page 69 gives the reader a good sense of the mounting tension within The Daylight Marriage. In this novel, a husband and wife get into a painful argument, and the next morning, she disappears. On page 69 the husband, Lovell, is talking to his wife Hannah's friend to see what the woman might know about Hannah’s disappearance. Sophie, the friend, ends up knowing more than he thought she would. The reader is on the same footing as Lovell—surprised by what Sophie knows. This page is almost all dialogue-- and dialogue is important in the book. Quite a lot is revealed or hidden in dialogue throughout.

Visit Heidi Pitlor's website.

--Marshal Zeringue