How I Came to Write This Book: Robert Swartwood

I love a good title. Sometimes—for me at least as a writer—a story begins first by a title and evolves from there. So was the case when, for some strange reason, the title “True Confessions of a Serial Killer’s Wife” entered my head out of nowhere a few years ago. The idea stayed, because I thought it would be interesting to look at the family members of a serial killer and how they’re affected by the killer’s despicable acts. And so I sat down one day and wrote about a woman whose life is suddenly turned upside down when the FBI shows up to arrest her husband of being a serial killer. This woman is a middle school science teacher, has had no idea of her husband’s terrible deeds, but what is worse is she has just given birth to a baby boy. And as the story unfolded, it becomes clear she’s worried about her newborn son. How whatever evil is inside her husband might also be inside her baby, and wouldn’t she be doing the world a favor by putting the baby out of its misery?

This was one of the story’s themes, the idea of nature versus nurture. Throughout the story the woman has only two close friends she can rely on. Her mother is dying of cancer. Her brother is in the Peace Corps, off in another country. She wants nothing more to do with her husband. Her life as she knows it is over. And so she decides to escape, taking her baby boy with her, still uncertain about whether or not he too will bring the same kind of evil as her husband into the world. The story ends with her driving away with her son strapped in the backseat, the early morning sun shining through the rear windshield creating a sort of halo around the baby’s head.

The story was long—maybe 7,000 words—and I knew it needed work, so I set it aside and kind of forgot about it until one day when I was getting together some novel pitches to send to my agent. One of them was picking up with the serial killer’s wife five years after she disappeared and managed to start a new life. It was going to be a straight-up thriller, very fast paced, about a woman whose son gets abducted by someone who knows of her former life. This someone wants her serial killer husband’s trophies—the fingers he cut off each of his victims—and so to save her son she has no choice but to return to the life she once fled.

It was easy starting the novel, seeing as I had already laid out much of the background in the short story. All of the characters who appeared in that story appear again in the novel. Only—and here’s the fun part—much of what I knew about the characters when I wrote the story changed as the novel progressed. Just like my novel’s protagonist, Elizabeth, much of what I thought I knew was merely a lie, and by the time the novel was finished, I was just as shocked as I know many readers will be.

Robert Swartwood’s work has appeared in The Los Angeles Review, The Daily Beast, Postscripts, ChiZine, Space and Time, Wigleaf, and PANK. He is the editor of Hint Fiction: An Anthology of Stories in 25 Words or Fewer, which was chosen by The Nervous Breakdown as one of their favorite books of 2010, and was featured on NPR’s Weekend Edition Saturday with Scott Simon. His latest novel is The Serial Killer’s Wife.

Robert invites you to visit him at his website www.robertswartwood.com on August 1^st, at 7:00 pm EST for a live reading.