"How I Came to Write the Book"
Libby Fischer Hellmann
True Confession
I do remember the Sixties.
Especially 1968. That was the turning point in my political “coming of age.” I was in college in Philadelphia on April 4th when Martin Luther King was assassinated. I watched as riots consumed the inner cities. I was saddened and disappointed -- as a teenager growing up in Washington DC, I’d gone to plenty of concerts at the Howard theater where blacks and whites grooved to Motown artists together. I actually thought we were moving towards a color-blind
society -- I was young and idealistic then). So the frustration and rage expressed through the riots was – in a way– confusing.
Two months later I understood. My college boyfriend had been tapped to head up the national “Youth for Bobby Kennedy” program. I was really excited; I planned on dropping out for a semester to work with him. For some reason I couldn’t sleep the night of June 5th and turned on my radio. Bobby had been shot just after winning the California Democratic primary. He died the next day. So much for the Youth for Kennedy campaign.
Sadness soon gave way to bitterness. The country was falling apart. Over the years some of our brightest lights had been snuffed out. Internationally our government seemed to be supporting the “bad guys.” And underlying it all was an unwinnable war that – perversely -- was escalating and risking the lives of my peers. I began to question why I should work through the system, especially when the system wasn’t working for us.
I wasn’t alone. Plenty of others yearned for change. Fundamental change that would rebuild our society and culture. The next few years were tumultuous and volatile, but in the final analysis, we failed. Maybe the task was impossible -- how many Utopias exist? Sure, there were cultural shifts. But political change, in the sense of what to expect from our leaders and our government? Not so much. The era left me with unresolved feelings. What should we have done differently? Are all progressive movements doomed to fail?
At this point you’re probably wondering what this has to do with writing a thriller. And you’d be right. It’s never been my intention to write a political screed. I am a storyteller whose stories, hopefully, you can’t put down. I realized that if I was going to write about the Sixties, I needed a premise that would hook readers in the present, regardless of how much they know or remembered about the Sixties.
I found that premise in a film. Do you remember SIGNS, starring Mel Gibson? It came out in 2002, and I thought the first half was the most riveting film I’d ever seen. Gibson’s family is being stalked, but they don’t know who and they don’t know why. The second half of the film, when we discover it’s just your garden variety aliens, was an enormous let down. Putting a face, an identity, on fear reduces its power. But NOT knowing who’s targeting you -- or why -- is the most frightening thing I can imagine.
So that’s what happens to Lila Hilliard, a thirty-something professional who’s come home to Chicago for the holidays. Someone has killed her family, and now they’re after her. She has no idea who or why. As she desperately tries to figure it out, she finds wisps of clues that lead back to her parents’ activities forty years ago. In the process she discovers that her parents were not the people she thought.
The relationship between the past and present, the consequences of events that occurred years ago fascinate me. I also love stories that plunge characters into danger and make them draw on resources they didn’t know they had. SET THE NIGHT ON FIRE was the way to combine all those themes. Writing the book was an exorcism of sorts, a way to make peace with the past. And while I enjoyed reliving the past, I loved putting it behind me even more. I’m finally
ready to move on.
I hope you enjoy the read.
Libby Fischer Hellman is the author of a series of books about Georgia Davis (Doubleback, Easy Innocence, etc), the editor of CHICAGO BLUE and the author of many short stories. SET THE HOUSE ON FIRE is her first standalone novel.
6 comments:
The Sixties are a "hard rain" that won't stop falling. Hellman's writing of the death of a family is an apt metaphor for the violent death of an America imagined by an idealistic generation. I'm glad the writing of a novel helped put to rest the lingering ghosts of that era for her. Appropriate title, too, from the Doors. Thanks.
I agree about the movie "Signs." I really liked the first part of it. The rest not so much. I lived out the sixties in relative obscurity in Arkansas, where there wasn't much political goiing on except some good old boy stuff. I do remember when Bobby Kennedy was shot, though.
Patti - Thanks for hosting Libby.
Libby - Thanks for sharing the way your passions and goals of the Sixties influenced you. I think authors really are influenced by things they care (or cared) very much about. That, to me, anyway, is one thing that fuels good writing. I wish you much success.
One of the reasons I liked TROPHIES AND DEAD THINGS so much was that Marcia Muller, through McCone, was clearly working out the kind of self-assessment the deaths of Hoffman and Newton so close together tended to inspire, and what that meant for the present...now more than two decades ago rather than four. I will probably be looking into this one, too...even if I was more likely to be Clean for Gene if I'd been much past the learning to read stage in 1968.
We aren't a colorblind society, but we're a hell of a lot closer than we were in 1965, I gather, or 1975, about which I can testify firsthand.
I was Clean for Gene until it became clear he had no chance of winning. A real Adlai Stevenson type. Knowing what I know about Bobby now, I am not sure he would have been a good president either. Maybe Humphrey would have been okay.
Well, Sidney Lens was among the leftists trying to get MLK to run in '68, with Benjamin Spock as VP candidate (Spock eventually did run as the presidential candidate of what became of that effort, the People's Party). Had there been a few fewer successful shootings, that would've added some fire to the race, a phrase that can be taken several ways. But a few fewer racially motivated fires and fired weapons would also, one hopes, have been the result of some lesser accuracy in that decade.
One wonders if the Democrats would've wooed King in '72.
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