A Woman Fakes Her Death on 9/11: The Story Behind the Story

They say you need to be able to summarize your novel with one, solid sentence. I’ve always had a hard time with that. I feel the need to go into paragraphs of description, with lots of “First this happens and then this happens…”

Then, in 2009,  I stumbled upon the kind of idea that has an immediate hook, and that idea became my debut novel, People Who Knew Me. My one-sentence description: It’s about a woman fakes her death on 9/11 and starts a new life in California.

The first question anyone asks me is, “How did you get the idea?” I joke, “Well, it’s autobiographical” and get uneasy laughter in return. The truth is the story was inspired by a couple things that collided in my psyche.

Years after 9/11, I heard about people who faked their deaths for insurance purposes. I started to wonder, “What if someone was supposed to be in the towers and was out sick, or playing hooky? What if they faked their death to run away?” According to my favorite morning radio show, leaving life behind and starting over was ranked as the #1 non-sexual fantasy.

The main character in my book is Emily. I didn’t know when I started writing why she was going to fake her death or what she wanted to escape in New York. This is where a little non-fiction comes into play.

When I met my husband, he was reluctant to get into a relationship because his parents were both ill–his dad with ALS, and his mom with a mystery (some said Parkinson’s, some said Lyme Disease). We did get into a relationship (as is obvious by the fact that he is now my husband), and I got a very close look at the difficulties of caregiving.

In People Who Knew Me, Emily is married to Drew and Drew’s mother is ill with Parkinson’s. Drew takes giant steps away from his marriage to care for his mother. Emily and Drew are young (in their twenties) and have no resources or familial support.

Basically, I put them in a worst-case-scenario situation (which, thankfully, was nothing like the situation my husband and I had). I made their communication terrible. I made a love interest for Emily come on the scene. I made Drew kind of a lost soul. So, real circumstances planted the seed, but imagination made the story grow.

It’s hard to say if fiction is ever really fiction. Obviously, an author’s thought processes and sense of humor and life perspective are baked into paragraphs. My best friend read my book and said, “I felt like I was talking to you, even though none of this is real. It’s weird.”

It is weird. If you know me, you can see how the book is “mine.” There are a few obvious similarities to my own life (I work as a copywriter at an ad agency, as does Emily; I’m runner, as is Emily; I grew up in the San Fernando Valley, which is where Emily escapes to), but beyond that, the story has my voice. It is very obviously…me.

In This is the Story of a Happy Marriage, Ann Patchett writes:
“What exactly is a made-up story? I used to take a great deal of pride in the fact that people who read my novels, even all of my novels, wouldn’t really know anything more about me or my life at the end of them than they had known when they started. I’ve written novels about unwed mothers in Kentucky and a black musician in Memphis. I wrote about a gay magician in Los Angeles and a hostage crisis in Peru. The amount of real knowledge that I had on any of these subjects would weigh in about as substantially as an issue of People magazine. In my books, I make up the experiences and the characters, but the emotional life is real. It is my own. I think this is probably true of most novelists. The bright-green space alien with three heads and seventeen suctioning fingers in the latest science-fiction novel may be unrecognizable as a human, while in fact having the same emotional composition as the author’s mother.”

I read fiction with the assumption that the story is loosely tied to something in the author’s life. It might be an emotional tie, or a circumstantial tie, but there is a tie, something that made the writer choose that story. As a reader, it’s tempting to make guesses about what the tie is.

I admit that after I finished reading Gone Girl, I Googled Gillian Flynn to see if she was married. I was afraid for her husband, quite frankly. She is married, by the way, and he is alive and well, as far as I can tell. Clearly, I’m just one more person who likes to wonder if the story in the book reflects the author’s life. It’s fun that way. But the truth is the reflection is rarely that literal.

I have to assume that all the people who ask what inspired People Who Knew Me want me to say that I knew someone who faked their death on 9/11, or that I had a dramatic escape story myself. The much-less-interesting truth is that a variety of things motivated the story—from things I heard on the news to my own memory of 9/11 to caregiving experiences. That’s the magic of writing—the way things intersect at just the right time to create a 300-page new world.

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Tags: featured, fiction, women writers

Category: Contemporary Women Writers, On Writing