Clea Simon's Blog, page 52

Gratitude

This year, I have so much to be grateful for. My beloved Jon and I continue healthy, Some of our friends and family are dealing with health issues, but right now, everyone seems to be coping and we are all here to share and to help. I have work I love doing, and I have you, dear readers, to cheer me on.

For me, this will be a weekend of visiting and cheer – from Jon’s 101-year-old mom to old (but younger!) friends who always pass through town this time of year. We will eat and drink and toast each other, hug and maybe cry. I know this is a difficult holiday for many, and this has been a challenging year. But if I could grant you all one holiday wish, it would be to share the love and companionship that I am grateful for, and to include you all in the warmth.

Happy Thanksgiving

Memories tried and not so true…

Here’s the full essay that ran last month in the wonderful Crimespree blog.

How reliable is memory?
According to neuroscientists, not very. While we may view any particular memory as a continuous film of a past scene, those who study how the brain processes describe it as something more like a collage. As a 2012 Psychology Today article summarized, every time we conjure a memory, we are not so much reviewing a complete set of stored data as re-configuring a complex scene from disparate parts. In other words, every memory is newly re-assembled, and even if the pieces are accurate they may be prone to reinterpretation. Our current situation may sublimate the pain of a heartbreak – or accentuate the regret over a path not chosen – to shift our focus. In the process of recall, therefore, we may be reacting more to our present lives than to anything that happened way back when.
This unreliability is why eyewitnesses cannot always be trusted, particularly when contradicted by physical evidence. In fact, one-third of cases overturned through the work of the Innocence Project through DNA testing were originally based on eye-witness testimony, according to a 2010 Scientific American article.
Such questions about memory are at the heart of my new mystery, WORLD ENOUGH. The answers won’t necessarily explain the deaths – one twenty years ago and one in the present time of the book – that we hear about at the start of the book. But they are key to how the narrative unfolds, and what will happen to our protagonist, a woman named Tara Winton who finds herself at personal and professional crossroads.
WORLD ENOUGH opens in Boston, 2007, right before the financial crisis, when the city – much like my protagonist – seems poised on the edge of the unknown. Bored at her corporate job, divorced but still seeing her ex, Tara lives for her nights out with the old crew – other forty-somethings who still play and enjoy the music they created twenty years before. When she is solicited to write an article revisiting those days, she leaps at the chance. Who wouldn’t want to relive the best period of one’s life?
As Tara recalls it, the ‘80s was a decade of community and creativity. On her own for the first time, she found herself drawn to the music then being generated by dozens of young bands in Boston. When a chance acquaintance had suggested she help him start a “zine,” a fan magazine, she seized the opportunity to jump-start her life. Not only could she recast herself as a writer – a dream so deeply buried she had barely articulated it to herself – but by doing so she could install herself in the nocturnal world. She was no longer a “tourist,” or fan; she had a role to play. A reason to come out each night to the clubs.

For a while, everything was wonderful. She built a reputation and traded the ‘zine for a paying job. She made fast friends and met the man she would marry. She felt herself an integral part of an artistic movement. And then, suddenly, everything fell apart. While she knew there had been problems – drugs, alcohol, a fickle music industry, and the general unsustainability of the frenzy – she still wonders what happened. Even as she interviews the survivors and revisits old haunts, Tara looks back on the decade as a golden period for herself and all those in the scene.
But was it? Were there clues she missed, in herself and among her friends? Was her little punk paradise really, as her favorite song went, world enough?
To write this book, I drew on my own life, including my past as a rock music critic. But this experience is not exclusive to any one subculture or time, except possibly to time of life – somewhere past forty and no longer up to going out every night. For those of us who have reached this point, it is, perhaps, natural to idealize our youth. We had more energy, and more potential. Everything seemed more exciting, because it was new to us. And the frustrations of those days – the insecurity of fledgling careers and relationships – are easy to dismiss in retrospect years later. These are factors Tara faces as her assignment takes on added meaning. As she must break down all she once accepted to find out what is real and what never existed at all.
Maybe such re-evaluations are also part of life, of looking forward. One early reader of WORLD EHOUGH called it a “coming-of-middle-age” book, and I believe there is some validity to that. The Tara who finds herself once more researching a story – revisiting those long-gone days – is a different person than the young zine writer we have also come to know. The older Tara has more information and, just maybe, more perspective. They say the truth will set you free, but in Tara’s case, it may simply raise more questions as the mystery unfolds.
Clea Simon

Going dark…

You should write romantic suspense.

That was how it started. A possibly offhand comment by my publisher over drinks at Crimefest that sent me off into a tizzy. After 22 mysteries ranging from cozy to paranormal, I was being directed to change things up. I’d written harder books, for sure (my Blackie and Care mysteries are positively dystopian), but all my mysteries had an essential sweetness to them. And cats – lots of cats – all based more or less on either my late, great Cyrus or my constant companion and muse, Musetta. Romantic suspense? I didn’t know where to start.

“Do you have any ideas?” My agent echoed the question my editor had voiced, when I’d next touched base. “Something you’ve always wanted to work on, perhaps?”

Well, yeah, I told them both. I did have a manuscript in the drawer – what writer didn’t – but I wasn’t sure if …

“Why not try it?” I don’t remember if my agent said that, or my husband, or some voice in the back of my head. All I know is I dug out that file – 100 pages I had worked and re-worked so many times I couldn’t remember – and I thought, “yeah, I could do this.” I read the opening scene, and I thought, “I want to do this.” A few pages later, and it hit me: “I’m ready to do this.” The book I had wanted to write for more than ten years was something I now could write. At some point, I broke it to my agent that the project I was diving into wasn’t anything at all like romantic suspense. By that point, I was already committed.

Those pages became the basis for my new World Enough, a rock and roll mystery that’s as close to a true noir as I’m ever likely to write. The setup is simple: A woman walks into a bar. It’s a bar filled with old friends, for sure, but also with history. The band that’s playing that night is one she’s followed for more than twenty years, as has the rest of the sparse crowd gathered there. The woman – Tara Winton – is a corporate PR drone, but back when the band was in its heyday, she’d been a rock critic, part of the garage-punk club scene. Back then, anything had seemed possible. Drugs and other dangers had taken their toll on the scene, but Tara is glad to be out. Glad to be among her surviving crew. Until, that is, she finds out that another of the old gang has died. Before long, she’s covering the scene again – asking questions that calls not only the present but her idyllic memories of the club days into doubt.

Yes, I was a rock critic, back in the day. I covered bands like the Aught Nines and the Whirled Shakers. But no, as I have now told several early readers from those days, I am not writing a thinly veiled exposé about any real bands. It’s funny, but none of htem ask if I’m writing about myself. If Tara, with her illusions and faulty memory, is me. That would be a harder one to answer, and it would touch on why it took me so long to be able to write this book. Why it took me so long to get the club world right.

How did it feel it leave cozies behind for sex and drugs and rock and roll? In this case, liberating. In this new voice, I could depict the world I remember, without inhibitions. I could work through more complex, conflicting emotions than I’d felt capable of tackling before. Bigger issues – and, yes, I already have ideas for the next book. A rocker, getting on in years, who must re-visit the trauma that both made her and kept her stuck in place as the world moved on.

It also made me appreciate my cozies more. World Enough is rough, at least emotionally, and I missed the warmth and whimsy of magical cats and benevolent spirits. I confess, I found myself longing for a career like Catriona McPherson’s, alternating cozies with harder-edged books. Maybe that’s why I dove into another Pru Marlowe while waiting for World Enough to come out. And why I’m absolutely thrilled that Polis Books has now picked up my “Witch Cats of Cambridge” series (look for the first book, A Spell of Murder, probably in early 2019). I got the news of the Polis offer during a particularly rough couple of weeks, which saw the decline and death of Musetta, so the idea of withdrawing into a magical world of friendly felines has been just the comfort I need. I like to think that this new series will offer readers that same kind of haven – playful and homely and sweet.

The first book is due in January, by which point I will have been talking about World Enough for several months, even pairing up with some of the rockers from those days here in Boston. Will I want to go dark again, after spending time with the warm and fuzzy? Maybe. We’ll see where the muse takes me – or the spirit of Musetta, perhaps, inspiring my next move.

This originally ran on the Wicked Cozies blog

Chatting with Julie Kramer of RadioBDC

Back in the day, Julie spun vinyl on WFNX. These days, all the music is digital, and the radio station is too. ‘FNX is long gone, but RadioBDC lives on – and Julie had me on her lunch-hour show to chat about the days of the Rat and the Channel, Boston’s great live music scene, and, of course, World Enough. You can listen here.

Of memory and music…

When I visit bookstores, I want to do more than just read. I want to give a little context. Introduce some of the themes of World Enough, and explain that, no, I’m not just writing all the dirt I couldn’t … back in the day. This is more or less what I’ve been saying. And, as at those bookstores, I’m happy to take your questions.

Why do we trust our memory? Is it because we trust ourselves? “I was there, man. I remember…” Or is it because we have invested so much else in our memories – our sense of who we were at some point, and, thus, who we became – with memory serving as the evidence? The proof that things worked out as we believed, as we want to believe, they did?

I’ve been thinking about memory, because it’s at the center of my new book World Enough. In a way it’s essential, because World Enough came about in the space between two very distinct careers I’ve had. In my first professional incarnation, roughly 30 years ago, I was a rock critic. I wrote about music and about the local Boston music scene in particular. And while I tried to educate and inform as part of my criticism, at the same time I focused on only one aspect of the scene – the music – while I pretty much ignored everything else that I saw going on. Fast forward: More recently, for the last dozen years or so I have been writing crime fiction – mysteries. Books set in made-up worlds where crimes are solved – often with the help of cats – and all is put right at the end.

But World Enough, my new mystery, kind of straddles these worlds. And the questions I have been getting have stressed to me that this exchange is not always an easy one.

To start with, nobody seems to get that although I did report on the music scene – including shows at the Rat and the Channel, Jumping Jack Flash and Jonathan Swift’s – this is fiction. So let me state for the record. No I am not writing about your band – or about any specific band that you or I saw or loved. Yes, I am sure that at some point your drummer also got too drunk and vomited and fell off his stool before the band could even start to play, just as I know there were backstage blowjobs and plentiful substances shared and sold in our favorite venues. That was the world we knew then. But no, I am not slyly digging on one band or another. This is fiction – simply fiction in a world that at one point I knew well and that, mostly, I remember fondly.

Speaking, again, of memory: World Enough actually opens twenty years after those club days. As Tara, my protagonist, maybe like some of us, goes out to hear some of the old bands. She’s hoping to recapture the old magic. The bands were so great. The scene so cohesive – so supportive, she thinks. But as she goes back to that time, she finds herself reconsidering everything she thought she remembered.

Sound familiar? Yeah, to me too.

Maybe that’s why it took me so long to write this book, to mine my first career for use in my current one. Maybe I needed distance more than I needed memory – emotional accuracy rather than exact recollections of who did what, or whom, when.

Beyond that? Well, that’s where memory slips can actually prove useful to a writer. In fact, because this is fiction, I was able to take liberties – to get at the heart of what our community meant, to me anyway, and how our tight little world enabled both our best, creative selves and also our most self destructive. Because, no, I am not writing about your band, but I am writing about our scene – at least as I remember it. And I am writing about memory – the stories we tell ourselves. Stories that helped make us who we are.

New England Crime Bake!

Crime bake, here I come!

Yes, this wonderful conference started yesterday, but I’m so behind in my work that I didn’t get there for the pizza party, or the desserts, or the movie… SIGH. But I am looking forward to a full day today. I’ll be starting with my panel. Called “Alone: Inside the Writer’s Studio,” I’ll be joining Frankie Y. Bailey and Susan Reynolds, and Edith Maxwell will moderate as we discuss our writing routines (and oddities) – you know, the basics of How We Get It Done. Should be great, right? Afterward, I get to meet with two fledgling authors whose manuscripts I’ve been asked to look at (another great reason to sign up for Crime Bake – we share what we know). And tonight – BANQUET! I don’t think I’ll be going in costume, this year. But look for the pictures, because you know they’ll be great.

See you there!

Before I was a writer…

Writers talk about finding their “voice” – their personal style – as if it’s a positive thing. But, sometimes, that means discovering that you are completely tone deaf.

I’ve always loved music, maybe as much as I love writing. And long before I became an author, I was a musician.

Drawn to the string bass in grade school – it was so big! The sound so rich and deep! – I was playing in community orchestras by my teens. Of course, by then, I was consumed by rock and roll, too. And since my friends all wanted to be guitarists or singers, up front and center, I was recruited. For the grand sum of $35, I purchased an electric bass, used, at the mall. Someone got a drum kit – a birthday? Christmas? – and we formed a band. It was heaven of the loudest sort, and I was sure I was besting John Entwhistle, playing and singing harmony too, nights and weekends in basements and garages all over town.

I still recall our first professional gig – playing a friend’s Sweet Sixteen. We ran out of tunes about 45 minutes in, and jammed on Neil Young’s “Like a Hurricane” for a good hour longer. Yeah, I learned how to solo early on – I did it all!

I didn’t intend to keep playing in college, but once again I was recruited. A bass player – one with actual musical training – will always be in demand, especially if she sings. Before long, we were gigging at campus parties and frat houses around New England, known for getting people dancing with our mix of originals and New Wave covers and a professional sound system that could fill a room. (We were less popular at our weekly Tuesday slot at the local pub. I can still hear the thwack of darts hitting the board, in the silence between numbers.)

With that sound system, we saw the opportunity to improve. We could tape ourselves, and we did, sitting down to listen track by track: Lead guitar, singer, rhythm guitar. Backing vocals… Good lord! How had I never known? I don’t recall if any of my bandmates said anything as we listened to my out-of-tune caterwauling. They didn’t have to. I stuck to bass from then on.

I continued to play in bands for a while after college, even as I began writing about music instead. Over the years, I turned from music journalism to the fiction that now occupies my time. I still sing in private, too. But I’ve found better uses for my voice.

(This essay originally ran in the Dear Reader email newsletter on Oct. 24.)

Why this book now? A conversation with NYT-bestselling author Caroline Leavitt

Caroline and I are old and dear friends, and so it was with great joy that I sat down with her (virtually) to chat about books, writing, art, and aging…

Clea Simon talks about her brilliant new novel WORLD ENOUGH, Boston’s 1980 punk rock scene, cats and crime, and so much more

 Oh yes, I first met Clea Simon on a website and we soon formed a fast friendship. We’ve been to each others’ houses, held each others’ hands through various personal and publishing disasters, and no one makes me laugh as much as Clea does. I’ve read all of Clea’s books, from nonfiction like Mad House: Growing Up in the Shadow of Mentally Ill Siblings (Doubleday, 1997), Fatherless Women: How We Change After We Lose Our Dads (Wiley, 2001), and The Feline Mystique: On the Mysterious Connection Between Women and Cats (St. Martin’s Press, 2002).Her new, darker Blackie and Care mystery series starts with The Ninth Life and continues with As Dark As My Fur (Severn House).



The Theda Krakow mystery series was launched in 2005 with Mew is for Murder and continued with Cattery Row and Cries and Whiskers, and Probable Claws (Poisoned Pen Press).



Her Dulcie Schwartz series launched in 2009 with Shades of Grey and continues with Grey Matters, Grey Zone, Grey Expectations, True Grey, Grey Dawn, Grey Howl, Stages of Grey, Code Grey, and Into the Grey (Severn House). The Pru Marlowe pet noir series started with Dogs Don’t Lie and continues with Cats Can’t Shoot, Parrots Prove Deadly, Panthers Play for Keeps, Kittens Can Kill, and When Bunnies Go Bad (Poisoned Pen Press). She’s also a regular contributor to The Boston Globe.



Clea’s new novel WORLD ENOUGH is unlike any of her other books. And I went absolutely nuts for it. She catapults you into Boston’s burgeoning punk-rock scene. And I’m not the only one:



With a colorful cast of characters, a gift for detail, and intricate plotting, Simon takes her readers deep into the esoteric world of the Boston music scene.

– Lisa Unger



WORLD ENOUGH is excellent – a twisty, bittersweet trip back to the glory days of the Boston club scene, with just the right mix of edge and nostalgia.

– Joseph Finder



And yo, New Yorkers! Clea will be at Mysterious Bookshop, 58 Warren St., NY on Wed., Nov. 8, at 6:30!

Thanks Clea and see you soon!

Why this book now?

I have two answers for that. The first is horribly prosaic: This is my 23rd mystery,  and my first mystery to not feature cats somewhere in the mix.  And on the most basic level, it came about because Edwin, the publisher of Severn House (which has published 12 of those cat books in two different series), wanted me to write something different. We were having drinks in Bristol, at the Crimefest conference, and he said, “Why don’t you write romantic suspense?” Well, this is not romantic suspense, by a long shot, but it did get me thinking of something outside of what I had been doing. Something darker, sans cats.

The deeper answer is that I was probably ready to write this book. I first started writing one version of it about 20 or 25 years ago, not long after my stint as a rock critic. I wanted to capture that feeling of excitement I remembered. I specifically recalled the feel of the frozen earth crunching beneath my shoes as I ran across the median strip toward the front door of the Rat so vividly – the brittle quality, the urgency, like the earth was rushing me toward the club. But back then – I’m talking early ‘90s – I had neither the distance nor the skills. I’d been writing professionally, both as a rock critic and a journalist, but I wasn’t a novelist yet. I kept reworking the first 100 pages and then it all just petered out.

Then, about ten years ago, I went out to hear a band I used to love and wrote a version of the opening scene. But still… I was writing mysteries by then, but even if I had started to develop the chops, I didn’t have the emotional distance.

So that first scene – which takes place ten years ago – was you?

Well, I was in a similar place as Tara, my protagonist. That’s probably why it took me another ten years to write! I needed to be well past that time, able to look back. Tara isn’t me, obviously. But she is in a place that I recall. She’s still nostalgic for “the scene,” and, of course, for her own youth. Over the course of the book, she gets some perspective.

But not just on the scene, I think.

No, I don’t think so. She unravels the mystery aspect – what happened and who was involved – but in the process, she learns to see herself and the people around her more clearly, too.

One of the comments about World Enough is that it’s about a middle-aged artist looking back on the scene. Does that make sense?

Yes, among other things. When we’re young, we don’t have a sense of limits – of where our art will take us or what it will mean if it doesn’t change the world. I like to think that as we age, we learn to value our arts simply for themselves. I mean, fame and fortune – or being able to earn a living doing what we love – would be wonderful. But do they still have value without these measures of success? Does their value change?



This is probably your first morally ambiguous book.

Yeah, more realistic, I guess. I mean, I hope that the ending makes the “what happened” part clear. But as to what will happen next for Tara … I don’t know.



What will happen next – for you?



I’m returning to cat mysteries for a while! I’ve got the next dark cat mystery (literally, the next book in my dystopian black cat Blackie and Care series) Cross My Path coming out next summer and another Pru Marlowe pet noir, Fear on Four Paws, scheduled after that (think snarky/funny amateur sleuth) – both are in various stages of editing and production. And I’ve signed with Polis Press to write a truly cozy series about the witch cats of Cambridge next. I think it will feel good to get back to whimsy and sweetness for a while. But, yeah, there’s another dark rock noir on the horizon. I’m taking notes and part of me is itching to get back there.



In another ten years?



No, this will be sooner than that! I promise!

Mysterious Bookshop tonight!

As you read this, I’m on my way to NYC! I’ll be reading and chatting at the renowned Mysterious Bookshop tonight at 6:30 (58 Warren St.) – the world’s oldest and greatest mystery fiction specialty store. Hoping to see some old friends and family – and maybe some new friends as well! But if you can’t make it, please feel free to call the store today at 212-587-1011 and order your copy of World Enough. I’ll sign it for you tonight and the store can mail it out.

Musetta in the bardo

We didn’t plan on traveling so much. Some things simply work out.

As our Musetta was declining, I re-read the passage I’d written about the last days of Cyrus, our previous feline companion. After his death, I wrote, we had traveled fairly extensively. Our house simply felt too empty without the long-haired grey cat who had been first my companion and then a member of the home Jon and I built for more than sixteen years.

Musetta’s decline was much more precipitous than Cyrus’s months-long final illness. She did not come down to join us on Friday evening; on Wednesday, she was gone – and so the following few weeks had already been planned. At the time, with various outing already booked (a weekend in New York, Bouchercon in Toronto, etc.), I told myself the timing was a mercy. We wouldn’t have to leave her, as she had already left us.

On our first weekend away, 10 days after losing her, we visited friends in the Berkshires. They knew we were in shock and grieving, and let us choose the weekend’s agenda. But since we were there, and because art is healing, we went to Mass MoCA. There we saw an extraordinary exhibit by Laurie Anderson, “Forty-Nine Days in the Bardo,” a series of monumental charcoal drawings chronicling the passage of her late and beloved dog Lollabelle through what Tibetan Buddhists call the bardo. Lollabelle, as Anderson saw it, progressed through memories of music and toys, people and confusion. Ultimately, the little terrier with the big eyes moved beyond.

The bardo, I have since read, is the transitional, or liminal state, immediately following death. The 49-day period before a soul is reborn. For an evolved soul, it can be a period of great insight. Basically, you revisit your past life and may learn from it. Then… you move on.

I’ve found this idea greatly comforting. Partly, that’s because I keep “seeing” Musetta around the house. A bag left on the floor and I start. A shadow under a table, only that shadow doesn’t materialize into a black and white kitty, readying to leap up onto the sofa. I know this is common after a loss: our nervous systems take time to adjust. We see what we expect. We mourn. We miss our kitty, the soul of our home. That it also fits with the idea of the bardo – that our kitty, as she transitions, is revisiting her old haunts, learning, evolving, and ultimately readying her soul to follow her body into a next stage – comforts me. She is still here, for a time, anyway. Something of her is still making her rounds.

The concept of the bardo also works for me in its timing. Immediately after Musetta died, we were in no state to properly mourn her. As our vet said, she was ready – but we never would be. We certainly weren’t then, and it was hard to even wrap our minds around the rapidity with which she went from an involved member of our household to nonexistence. But tomorrow, Nov. 8, is the 49th day since her death – the end of her time in the bardo – and, maybe, her absence has begun to sink in. And, as was planned long before we knew Musetta would be leaving us, I’ll be traveling again, alone this time – to a reading at the Mysterious Bookshop, while Jon must be at work.

So, tonight we will light a candle. Take some time to think of our dear companion, the spirit of our home. Tomorrow, I go to New York, and Musetta goes – on. As do we all.

Peace.