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Laura Lippman: Prolific crime author talks about her literary likes and dislikes
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What’s the best book you’ve read recently?
My reading life is like an airport where a bunch of planes circle in a holding pattern, then — boom, boom, boom, several come in for a landing. So I have three: Helen FitzGerald’s “The Cry,” Elizabeth Hand’s “Illyria” and Tom Nissley’s “A Reader’s Book of Days.” “The Cry” tackles the toughest subject in crime fiction, the death of an infant, and it surprised me, which is rare when I’m reading crime fiction. Hand’s book is a YA literary mash-up of “Flowers in the Attic” and Noel Streatfeild’s “Theater Shoes.” Nissley’s book offers monthly reading lists, and I’m a sucker for such lists. January includes HP Lovecraft, Zadie Smith and Arthur Hailey — what’s not to love?
Your husband is David Simon, creator of “The Wire” and co-creator of “Treme.” Do you share the same taste in literature? Has either of you opened the other up to different kinds of books or favorite authors?
I don’t read enough nonfiction, and David tends to read fiction as homework for new projects. (A bunch of books about the Spanish Civil War and the Abraham Lincoln Brigade showed up in the house recently.) David’s reading more novels by women, and I’ve started Sheri Fink’s “Five Days at Memorial.”
Both of you are former journalists. How has that experience affected your sense of story? To what extent do your novels arise from reporting you did at The San Antonio Light and The Baltimore Sun?
In my newspaper days, your endings could be literally sliced off in the composing room, so it was dangerous to get attached to them. Yet I think this has made me work harder on endings in fiction. Twenty years as a reporter left me with a healthy but not obsessive desire to get things right, as did Mary McCarthy’s “The Fact in Fiction,” a seminal essay for me. It also left me with a real distaste for anyone who fabricates, or passes off nonfiction as fiction, and yes, I’m sorry but that includes David Foster Wallace.
What kinds of stories are you drawn to? And how would you describe the kinds of books you steer clear of?
I like books steeped in the quotidian — details about work and place. You can learn how to run a chicken-and-waffle restaurant by reading “Mildred Pierce.” And I like fiction about money. I wish there were more novels inspired by the economy, from the micro (Jess Walter’s “The Financial Lives of the Poets” and Eliot Perlman’s “Three Dollars”) to the macro (John Lanchester’s “Capital,” Adam Haslett’s “Union Atlantic”). I am leery of writers who are too in love with their protagonists and assemble choruses of secondary characters to sing their praises. She’s so beautiful! She’s so smart! Nancy Drew is a prime example, but it happens in literary fiction, too.
What was the last book that made you laugh?
“CivilWarLand in Bad Decline.” I’m late to George Saunders. I’m often late.
The last book that made you cry?
“CivilWarLand in Bad Decline.”
The last book that grabbed you to the point you found yourself telling others, “You must read this book?”
“Whatever Happened to Baby Jane?” The film is true to it, but the book is better.
What does your personal book collection look like? Do you organize your books in any particular way?
I’m a librarian’s daughter. I know the Dewey Decimal System, and I am familiar with the Library of Congress classification system because it’s used by Baltimore’s public library, the Enoch Pratt. My fiction is alphabetized by author, divided between adult and children’s literature, hardcover and paperback.
I let my husband organize nonfiction. It breaks my heart, but I let him.
What books are you embarrassed not to have read yet?
There’s so much. There’s so much that I’m beyond embarrassment. I should hang a sign around my neck that says, “Oops, majored in journalism.” Maybe I’ll go back to college with my daughter when she heads there in 14 years, take a degree in literature. And won’t she love that?
What book are you most eagerly anticipating in 2014?
“The Fever,” by Megan Abbott. Megan is a friend, but I was a fan first. With each novel, she creates a fresh voice, a voice integral not just to the characters, but to the milieu. The druggy dreamscape of “Bury Me Deep,” the rat-a-tat “Sweet Smell of Success” rhythms in “The Song Is You,” the coiled gymnastic energy of “Dare Me” — I can’t wait to see what she does with a town full of girls suffering from the same mysterious affliction.
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