“special, even extraordinary,” and Gillian Flynn wrote, “She is simply a brilliant novelist.” Her books have won most of the major awards in her field and been translated into more than twenty-five languages. She lives in Baltimore and New Orleans with her teenager.
Lippman applied the Page 69 Test to her new novel, Prom Mom, and reported the following:
On page 69 of Prom Mom, Meredith, a woman who has married and devoted her life to a man despite a dark secret in his past, is working out on the elliptical at her gym on Christmas Eve while watching MSNBC. She thinks: "The news is terrible. The news is always terrible." It's 2019; she has no idea that 2020, waiting in the wings, is going to say: "Hold my beer." A native New Orleanian living in Baltimore, her thoughts drift to the way that people who believe themselves not part of the states that formed the Confederacy (Maryland was a slave state that was forced to fight for the Union) tend toward a view of American history) tend to project the USA's troubled, racist past on the South, as if racism didn't exist in the Union states at all. Meredith and I believe that this dichotomy exists to this day, that there are white people who think they are exempt from the country's racist history because they were born north of the Mason-Dixon line.Visit Laura Lippman's website.
This test works beautifully for my book -- but you would have to read to the end to understand how perfectly it encapsulates the book's multiple themes. In order to avoid spoilers, I will say this much: Prom Mom centers on three individuals, all of whom have secrets and/or regrets from their adolescent years. Meredith, for example, believes that her bout with cancer spared her, but destroyed her parents' marriage. Her husband, Joe, took a girl he didn't really like to the prom, then ran off with another girl. His date, grade grubber Amber, ended up giving birth in a hotel bathroom to a baby that didn't survive. The death was ruled a homicide.
These three people are, by design, people with whom I might be friends. Meredith and I agree on almost everything, politically. Amber owns a gallery that specializes in visionary art. Joe is just one of those guys that everybody likes and, I confess, I would not be immune to his charms.
I am not particularly interested in writing likeable characters and while my characters are relatable to me, I recognize they might not be to every reader. But I am committed to not taking the easy way out. And it's too easy to write a novel where the bad guy (or gal) is a white supremacist who kicks dogs. In my fiction, I seek to afflict the comfortable and comfort the afflicted, a quote that turns out to have an extremely complicated backstory. I don't do comfort reads. I don't pat my readers on the shoulder and say, "But you, you're one of the good ones." I ask them to contemplate, as I have contemplated, what damage to which they have borne witness -- or benefitted.
I will note here, as I have before, that I am descended from slaveholders. That is an ugly truth that cannot be mitigated or excused. It is a stain on my family. But recognizing my family's villainy has made it easier for me to see the USA's foundational problems. I am literally descended from villains.
The Page 69 Test: Another Thing to Fall.
The Page 69 Test: What the Dead Know.
The Page 69 Test/Page 99 Test: Life Sentences.
The Page 69 Test: I'd Know You Anywhere.
The Page 69 Test: The Most Dangerous Thing.
The Page 69 Test: Hush Hush.
The Page 69 Test: Wilde Lake.
My Book, the Movie: Wilde Lake.
The Page 69 Test: Sunburn.
The Page 69 Test: Lady in the Lake.
The Page 69 Test: Dream Girl.
--Marshal Zeringue
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