Broad Thoughts From A Home: NAH, IT DIDN'T HAPPEN - a guest post by Joan Livingston

Sunday, 20 May 2018

NAH, IT DIDN'T HAPPEN - a guest post by Joan Livingston

Today my guest is the lovely Joan Livingston, whose mystery novel Chasing the Chase has just been published. The book is the first in a series featuring the amateur sleuth Isabel Long.

Welcome, Joan!

It’s the question I invariably get about my fiction: How much of it is true? I believe it’s an honest question, and I will give an honest answer. Certainly, people, especially those who know me personally, might speculate about my new mystery, Chasing the Case.

But let me back up a bit and say that I have been inspired by people and places I have met. That includes the rural hill towns of Western Massachusetts, in particular Worthington, where my family and I lived for twenty-five years. I even set the mystery in a town called Conwell, a name that has a connection to Worthington. But is it really Worthington? Nah.

There are other nahs in Chasing the Case.

A woman did not disappear from a hill town of thousand people 28 years ago. I made that up.

I will admit there is a lot of me in the protagonist Isabel Long. The mystery is written in the first person, so I couldn’t help myself there. We’re both nosy, sassy women. But she’s a widow and I’m not. She has three kids and I have six. She got canned when her newspaper went corporate. I didn’t. And after leaving the newspaper biz, I haven’t become an amateur P.I. as she did. Frankly, I am not that brave.

As for the other characters, I do model Isabel’s 92-year-old mother, her Watson, after my own mystery-loving mom. (She was amused.) But my mother doesn’t live with me. Isabel’s three kids are inspired by a few of my own. Yeah, there’s a lot of my own spouse in Isabel’s late husband.

But the rest? The characters – from the missing woman’s family to the gossipy men in the general store’s back room to the clients at the bar where Isabel works part-time to the bar’s owner – are made up. I repeat: they are made up.

I once had a New York agent who wanted me to write a tell-all nonfiction book about my life in Worthington – something on the order of Peyton Place. He read the first couple of chapters and wanted a whole lot more dirt. But I couldn’t do it. I loved the people and the town too much.

So instead I write fiction. I use what I’ve experienced, as I’ve said before, and have my way with it. I believe this is true of many or most fiction writers.

The previous novel I published – The Sweet Spot – centered on a scandal involving the young widow of a soldier killed in Vietnam eight years and her married brother-in-law. Did it happen? Nah.

But I’d like to think I wrote it with enough authenticity that one could believe it happened. The same goes for Chasing the Case.