Life Plus...: Ex-reporter's fiction goes beyond the facts

Two girls vanish from a suburban shopping mall.

An 18-month-old boy goes missing, and his mother is jailed for contempt for seven years because she refuses to say where he is.

Laura Lippman is not a reporter anymore, but like any good writer, she's still gathering things from real life to slide onto the page.

A former journalist at the Baltimore Sun, Lippman is a mystery and crime writer who has reached the league of pop novelists whose names are in larger type than the titles on their book covers. She's currently on tour to promote her latest book, Life Sentences (HarperCollins, 2009), and will be in Mocksville on Wednesday. The novel revolves around the real-life case of Jacqueline Bouknight, a Baltimore woman who was jailed for seven years after her baby disappeared and she refused to say where he was.

In Life Sentences, fictional best-selling author Cassandra Fallows hears about a similar case: She went to elementary school with a woman who refuses to say anything when her 3-month-old infant goes missing. Fallows decides that the story will be good fodder for her third memoir -- two previous ones have been her most successful books. But when she starts to reconnect with childhood friends, she discovers that her version of events doesn't always match up with theirs.

Life Sentences had "lots and lots of little impulses," Lippman said in a recent interview, nuggets that she gathered and stored away until it was time to work on the book. There was the friend who was briefly mentioned in another writer's memoir, and thought that he was misrepresented. There was a grade-school friend Lippman reconnected with, and who mentioned that someone in their class, a quiet girl, had probably come to a bad end. There were the people who asked at readings for What the Dead Know -- Lippman's 2007 book inspired in part by a pair of sisters who went missing in 1975 during a trip to a mall -- if she called the girls' family.

She didn't. She's a novelist, for one. And she didn't think that contacting them would be the right thing to do. "I didn't see that being positive for them, and me needing comfort and solace," she said.

But the emotions at the readings struck her. Who owns stories? Who has a right to tell them? Do we have double standards about that?

"I saw this really genuine confusion, particularly around real-life stories. And I began to think about memoir because no memoir is about any single life; it's about lots and lots of lives. And I couldn't imagine what it would be like to be in someone's memoir.

"We're all memoirists; we're all storytellers. But I've never met someone who doesn't have a lot of well-polished anecdotes about life, and they gradually kind of lose their moorings in fact."

Slippery slope

Memory is slippery, Lippman said, and flawed, and that fascinates her. "No one in this book is getting things wrong on purpose. Everyone in this book has a story that sort of makes things OK. Almost every single person is lying to himself or herself in a big way."

Lippman was a reporter for 20 years and was at the Sun for 12, covering beats as varied as social services, the Maryland legislature and politics, and later, features.

But she had in the back of her mind that she would like to be a fulltime novelist. She was pragmatic, though -- she thought a pop genre such as mystery would be the best way to do that. It seemed reachable somehow, even if there was some unlikeliness to it, she said. In 1993 she started writing fiction in earnest, writing in the mornings before work with a goal of 1,000 words a day. Her first novel, Baltimore Blues, was published in 1997. Because it had taken her so long to find an agent, her second book was ready by then, too, and also published that year. She didn't leave the Sun until November 2001; by then, she had written seven novels.

"Sure I was tired sometimes and sure I was resentful sometimes, but it was what I wanted," Lippman said. "It wasn't easy, but I didn't know that it wasn't easy. I understood it was the only way to have a shot at what I wanted. It's all luck. To be lucky, you have to show up and do some of the work everyday. You can't be lucky if you're just sitting there waiting to be lucky."

Forgotten stories

Lippman didn't cover Bouknight's case, though she was at the Sun when Bouknight was released in 1995. And a former colleague, an editorial writer, told Lippman about running into Bouknight at the courthouse. "She's still dropping these tantalizing hints, that it's not what you think and only if she could tell what happened," Lippman said. "In real life, she implies that her son is still alive and that no one knows where he is.

"I wanted to write about a forgotten story," she added. "And I really hope that people will read this and think about fleeting kids in the news."

Lippman is married to another former Sun reporter who has had success away from the newspaper -- David Simon, co-creator, writer and producer of The Wire, a critically-acclaimed TV series.

Life Sentences is Lippman's 14th novel in 12 years. Many of her books center on the exploits of private investigator Tess Monaghan, but Life Sentences is an example of her ability to craft self-contained novels, too.

Her next book, due out next year, will be about a person on death row in Virginia. She's doing research, but she now has a novelist's freedom.

"I like my work to be grounded in the real world, but I love sitting by myself and making stuff up."

■ Laura Giovanelli can be reached at 727-7302 or at lgiovanelli@wsjournal.com.

If you go

"A Conversation with Laura Lippman" will be held Wednesday at Raylen Vineyards and Winery, 3577 U.S. 158 in Mocksville.

Lippman will read from her newest novel, Life Sentences, and discuss her career, writing and her works. Doors open at 6:15 p.m. for general-admission ticket holders. Tickets are $16 and include a reception. Premier tickets are $75 and include a copy of Life Sentences, heavy appetizers and reserved seating. Doors open at 5:30 p.m. for those ticket holders.

The event is hosted by Bookmarks. For more information and tickets, go to www.bookmarksbookfestival.org, or call 800-838-3006.