Laura Lippman is so free of affectation that it can be hard to remember the crime writer is one of our living greats. (Superfan Stephen King called her “the closest writer America has to Ruth Rendell”.)
Lippman, who lives in Baltimore and has been publishing a crime novel every year or two since 1997, was a beat reporter at the Baltimore Sun when she published the first of her Tess Monaghan series, about a reporter turned private investigator that read like Nancy Drew for smart grownups. Over the past decade she has been focusing on standalone titles, which pulse with the energy and wit she became known for but lean into her fondness for noir. Her impostor story What The Dead Know was shortlisted for the Crime Writers Association Dagger Award, Every Secret Thing was adapted into a film written by Nicole Holofcener and starring Diane Lane, and Lady in the Lake is soon to be an Apple TV+ limited series starring Natalie Portman.
Despite what its title might suggest, there is little of the lurid or cheap in Lippman’s latest, Prom Mom. Lippman drew inspiration from the real-life episode that made headlines in 1997 when the New Jersey teen Melissa Wexler gave birth to a 28-week-old baby who was found dead in the bathroom during her high school prom.
Also partly set in 1997, her slippery and satisfyingly feminist story takes place in Baltimore – or “Smalltimore” as she calls it – and casts disgraced Amber “Prom Mom” Glass as a member of a love quadrangle. Once called by the tabloids the “Cad Dad”, Joe Simpson has leveraged his white-guy privilege and surrounded himself with an adoring trio of women, his beautiful and successful wife Meredith included. Joe is a Trump voter with a vanity plate, a mama’s boy whose unwillingness to accept responsibility for anything sends everyone’s lives spinning out of control.
Fans of 1940s noir will delight in the story’s slow burn and hairpin twists at the end. Lippman pulled off another extraordinary feat: she managed to write about life in the early pandemic in a way that doesn’t feel drab or impede narrative momentum (the Library Journal review declared Prom Mom “a future Covid classic”).
Lippman has been in physical therapy to tend to the shoulder injury that appears in the original essay she published earlier this year on the digital book platform Scribd. The Summer of Fall chronicles the tumultuous backdrop against which she finished writing Prom Mom. She was looking after her school-age daughter; caring for her mother, who’d suffered a serious fall at her senior living facility; looking after her sister, who lives in a memory care unit as a result of her Parkinson’s; and dealing with her own slip on the subway steps in New York City. Oh, and she was healing from the dissolution of her marriage to the writer and The Wire co-creator David Simon. In the essay she ponders her current situation (“I have time to myself every week. It is, I think, ironic: Every mother I know yearns to be alone in her own house, yet the only ones who regularly achieve this bliss are divorced”) and reflects on the plane ride when she knew her marriage was beyond repair (“My soon-to-be-ex worked furiously on his laptop for most of the eight-hour trip. I was used to him working furiously, all the time. But, in this case, he was writing me a goodbye letter, which he gave me five days later, after announcing his decision to leave our marriage.”).
The Guardian spoke with Lippman a week before Prom Mom’s publication. The interview has been edited and condensed.
Prom Mom centers on a teenager with an unwanted pregnancy, which makes it one of your more political novels to date.
When I was writing it, I didn’t expect it to become so timely. I did not see the overturning of Roe v Wade – I should have, but I didn’t. There’s this old quote about writing that it’s the choice between, you know afflicting the comfortable or comforting the afflicted. I think a lot of novelists choose to comfort the comfortable, and flatter their readers. Those books read like a hot knife through butter. I don’t do that. There were other things in Prom Mom that made people nervous.
Like what?
Well, for one thing, Meredith is an MSNBC viewer. One of the things that I’m playing with in the novel is that Meredith is a thoughtful, conscientious person who is comfortable with the way the language of the culture is changing. She’s very progressive. What she is not is particularly empathetic. It’s important to me not to make stuff easy for readers.
Is Prom Mom your only book that was directly inspired by a tabloid story?
It was inspired by a podcast episode [of You’re Wrong About] that was called Prom Mom. When I looked into it, I found out this happens a lot more than people think. I found stories going back into the 1950s – you know, a teenager giving birth at home to a baby no one knew existed. What got my interest wasn’t really the tabloid aspect. But [the host] Sarah [Marshall] made this offhand sarcastic comment like, “Oh, of course the teenage girl knows her body so well.” That’s it! I mean, you really could be a pregnant teenager and convince yourself that you’re not [pregnant]. You really could just have somehow talked yourself into believing this can’t be happening. And you survive that somehow. To me, that’s the most amazing thing, that these girls survived these unassisted births. I just started thinking about that. When I started writing this book, I felt that most people who read it would be like, well, you know, thank goodness that this isn’t something that continues to happen today. And, no it continues to happen.
There’s a feminist spirit driving this book.
I feel like there’s a fuck-it feminist spirit to pretty much everything I do. You know my marriage ended in a way that’s pretty collegial. I have a great co-parent and my ex-husband and I get along really well, and we’re doing a great job raising our kid together. So now I’m back out in the world. And you know, at first everyone’s like, oh, you have to go on the apps and you have to start dating again. At some point, I was just like, I don’t want to date. Why would I want to date? I don’t want to marry again. I’m really happy. I can take care of myself and take care of my 13-year-old daughter and take care of my 92-year-old mother and help out with my 67-year-old sister. My friend said: Laura, I want you to go back and open up and I’m like, no, no, you don’t understand. I’m 64 years old. I have lots of friends. I have a life that really makes me happy and I know right now I’m totally in charge.
In your Scribd essay you say you relate to Hestia, the Greek goddess of the hearth.
I’m totally into my Hestia vibes. She had to tend to the fire of Mount Olympus pretty much 24/7. I’m like: Zeus, I can’t get married. I’m taking care of the hearth. I’m doing a lot of stuff here. Leave me alone.
Tell me of the challenge of setting a novel in the time of Covid.
That was just a really dark time. And it was kind of perfect for the mood of the book. There’s no silver lining, but I developed ways of coping. I developed a wonderful habit of menu planning and going to the grocery store only once a week. It was so efficient. That feels so long ago, I’m back to my old habits.
How did your past life as a newspaper reporter come into play in the writing of Prom Mom?
I worked at newspapers from 1981 to 2001. I wrote my first seven books in the mornings while I was working full-time. So far, I haven’t been able to write a book without weaving in some reporting. For this one, I interviewed Ronnie Mund, who was Howard Stern’s limo driver. I knew from listening to the show that Ronnie used to take kids to proms right in the era that I was writing about. His reputation within the show is as this wild sexual adventurer, but he was such a gentleman when we spoke. We talked about little things like how do you judge who’s a good kid? Did you ever let two kids have sex in the limo? The research I worked hardest on was learning about commercial real estate. Luckily, I had a former colleague from the Baltimore Sun who works at the Baltimore Business Journal, and I talked to her about the difference between commercial strip centers that were classified as like A, B or C. To me, that was poetry. And there was a Baltimore woman I know from Twitter, and she knew a lot about real estate law. She really helped me sort of design Joe’s financial situation.
The last Tess Monaghan came out in 2015. Are we ever going to see her again?
She’s gonna come back. I need to figure out how to write her a proper ending. I had a long conversation with my film agent in the spring, and the only television project that I have any interest in working on is a Tess Monaghan television show. I have a very elaborate vision for it.
The vibe would be different from how Tess stories used to be, I imagine.
Yeah, my vibe’s gotten really dark. It happens that the book I’m working on right now is about a minor character from the Tess Monaghan series. I took this 68-year-old woman and put her on a cruise. I think of it as a mash-up of From the Mixed-Up Files of Mrs Basil E Frankweiler and Charade. It’s a sweet book, but of course it’s still a crime novel.
Laura Lippman is so free of affectation that it can be hard to remember the crime writer is one of our living greats. (Superfan Stephen King called her “the closest writer America has to Ruth Rendell”.)
Lippman, who lives in Baltimore and has been publishing a crime novel every year or two since 1997, was a beat reporter at the Baltimore Sun when she published the first of her Tess Monaghan series, about a reporter turned private investigator that read like Nancy Drew for smart grownups. Over the past decade she has been focusing on standalone titles, which pulse with the energy and wit she became known for but lean into her fondness for noir. Her impostor story What The Dead Know was shortlisted for the Crime Writers Association Dagger Award, Every Secret Thing was adapted into a film written by Nicole Holofcener and starring Diane Lane, and Lady in the Lake is soon to be an Apple TV+ limited series starring Natalie Portman.
Despite what its title might suggest, there is little of the lurid or cheap in Lippman’s latest, Prom Mom. Lippman drew inspiration from the real-life episode that made headlines in 1997 when the New Jersey teen Melissa Wexler gave birth to a 28-week-old baby who was found dead in the bathroom during her high school prom.
Also partly set in 1997, her slippery and satisfyingly feminist story takes place in Baltimore – or “Smalltimore” as she calls it – and casts disgraced Amber “Prom Mom” Glass as a member of a love quadrangle. Once called by the tabloids the “Cad Dad”, Joe Simpson has leveraged his white-guy privilege and surrounded himself with an adoring trio of women, his beautiful and successful wife Meredith included. Joe is a Trump voter with a vanity plate, a mama’s boy whose unwillingness to accept responsibility for anything sends everyone’s lives spinning out of control.
Fans of 1940s noir will delight in the story’s slow burn and hairpin twists at the end. Lippman pulled off another extraordinary feat: she managed to write about life in the early pandemic in a way that doesn’t feel drab or impede narrative momentum (the Library Journal review declared Prom Mom “a future Covid classic”).
Lippman has been in physical therapy to tend to the shoulder injury that appears in the original essay she published earlier this year on the digital book platform Scribd. The Summer of Fall chronicles the tumultuous backdrop against which she finished writing Prom Mom. She was looking after her school-age daughter; caring for her mother, who’d suffered a serious fall at her senior living facility; looking after her sister, who lives in a memory care unit as a result of her Parkinson’s; and dealing with her own slip on the subway steps in New York City. Oh, and she was healing from the dissolution of her marriage to the writer and The Wire co-creator David Simon. In the essay she ponders her current situation (“I have time to myself every week. It is, I think, ironic: Every mother I know yearns to be alone in her own house, yet the only ones who regularly achieve this bliss are divorced”) and reflects on the plane ride when she knew her marriage was beyond repair (“My soon-to-be-ex worked furiously on his laptop for most of the eight-hour trip. I was used to him working furiously, all the time. But, in this case, he was writing me a goodbye letter, which he gave me five days later, after announcing his decision to leave our marriage.”).
The Guardian spoke with Lippman a week before Prom Mom’s publication. The interview has been edited and condensed.
Prom Mom centers on a teenager with an unwanted pregnancy, which makes it one of your more political novels to date.
When I was writing it, I didn’t expect it to become so timely. I did not see the overturning of Roe v Wade – I should have, but I didn’t. There’s this old quote about writing that it’s the choice between, you know afflicting the comfortable or comforting the afflicted. I think a lot of novelists choose to comfort the comfortable, and flatter their readers. Those books read like a hot knife through butter. I don’t do that. There were other things in Prom Mom that made people nervous.
Like what?
Well, for one thing, Meredith is an MSNBC viewer. One of the things that I’m playing with in the novel is that Meredith is a thoughtful, conscientious person who is comfortable with the way the language of the culture is changing. She’s very progressive. What she is not is particularly empathetic. It’s important to me not to make stuff easy for readers.
Is Prom Mom your only book that was directly inspired by a tabloid story?
It was inspired by a podcast episode [of You’re Wrong About] that was called Prom Mom. When I looked into it, I found out this happens a lot more than people think. I found stories going back into the 1950s – you know, a teenager giving birth at home to a baby no one knew existed. What got my interest wasn’t really the tabloid aspect. But [the host] Sarah [Marshall] made this offhand sarcastic comment like, “Oh, of course the teenage girl knows her body so well.” That’s it! I mean, you really could be a pregnant teenager and convince yourself that you’re not [pregnant]. You really could just have somehow talked yourself into believing this can’t be happening. And you survive that somehow. To me, that’s the most amazing thing, that these girls survived these unassisted births. I just started thinking about that. When I started writing this book, I felt that most people who read it would be like, well, you know, thank goodness that this isn’t something that continues to happen today. And, no it continues to happen.
There’s a feminist spirit driving this book.
I feel like there’s a fuck-it feminist spirit to pretty much everything I do. You know my marriage ended in a way that’s pretty collegial. I have a great co-parent and my ex-husband and I get along really well, and we’re doing a great job raising our kid together. So now I’m back out in the world. And you know, at first everyone’s like, oh, you have to go on the apps and you have to start dating again. At some point, I was just like, I don’t want to date. Why would I want to date? I don’t want to marry again. I’m really happy. I can take care of myself and take care of my 13-year-old daughter and take care of my 92-year-old mother and help out with my 67-year-old sister. My friend said: Laura, I want you to go back and open up and I’m like, no, no, you don’t understand. I’m 64 years old. I have lots of friends. I have a life that really makes me happy and I know right now I’m totally in charge.
In your Scribd essay you say you relate to Hestia, the Greek goddess of the hearth.
I’m totally into my Hestia vibes. She had to tend to the fire of Mount Olympus pretty much 24/7. I’m like: Zeus, I can’t get married. I’m taking care of the hearth. I’m doing a lot of stuff here. Leave me alone.
Tell me of the challenge of setting a novel in the time of Covid.
That was just a really dark time. And it was kind of perfect for the mood of the book. There’s no silver lining, but I developed ways of coping. I developed a wonderful habit of menu planning and going to the grocery store only once a week. It was so efficient. That feels so long ago, I’m back to my old habits.
How did your past life as a newspaper reporter come into play in the writing of Prom Mom?
I worked at newspapers from 1981 to 2001. I wrote my first seven books in the mornings while I was working full-time. So far, I haven’t been able to write a book without weaving in some reporting. For this one, I interviewed Ronnie Mund, who was Howard Stern’s limo driver. I knew from listening to the show that Ronnie used to take kids to proms right in the era that I was writing about. His reputation within the show is as this wild sexual adventurer, but he was such a gentleman when we spoke. We talked about little things like how do you judge who’s a good kid? Did you ever let two kids have sex in the limo? The research I worked hardest on was learning about commercial real estate. Luckily, I had a former colleague from the Baltimore Sun who works at the Baltimore Business Journal, and I talked to her about the difference between commercial strip centers that were classified as like A, B or C. To me, that was poetry. And there was a Baltimore woman I know from Twitter, and she knew a lot about real estate law. She really helped me sort of design Joe’s financial situation.
The last Tess Monaghan came out in 2015. Are we ever going to see her again?
She’s gonna come back. I need to figure out how to write her a proper ending. I had a long conversation with my film agent in the spring, and the only television project that I have any interest in working on is a Tess Monaghan television show. I have a very elaborate vision for it.
The vibe would be different from how Tess stories used to be, I imagine.
Yeah, my vibe’s gotten really dark. It happens that the book I’m working on right now is about a minor character from the Tess Monaghan series. I took this 68-year-old woman and put her on a cruise. I think of it as a mash-up of From the Mixed-Up Files of Mrs Basil E Frankweiler and Charade. It’s a sweet book, but of course it’s still a crime novel.