Years later, Lauren is surrounded by uncertainty. Startling revelations force her to peek under the floorboards of her carefully constructed memories, put aside the version of history that she has clung to so fiercely, and search for the truth of what really happened that fateful night long ago.
Years later, Lauren is surrounded by uncertainty. Startling revelations force her to peek under the floorboards of her carefully constructed memories, put aside the version of history that she has clung to so fiercely, and search for the truth of what really happened that fateful night long ago.
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Overview
Years later, Lauren is surrounded by uncertainty. Startling revelations force her to peek under the floorboards of her carefully constructed memories, put aside the version of history that she has clung to so fiercely, and search for the truth of what really happened that fateful night long ago.
Product Details
| ISBN-13: | 9780345494498 |
|---|---|
| Publisher: | Random House Publishing Group |
| Publication date: | 08/14/2012 |
| Pages: | 288 |
| Sales rank: | 261,636 |
| Product dimensions: | 5.34(w) x 7.80(h) x 0.68(d) |
About the Author
Read an Excerpt
1
“A road trip,” said Alex, sounding hopeful for the first time in a long time. “To see Gramma. We can visit her and then go to the beach. We can rent a cottage in Galveston. We can rent a condo.”
“A condo?” I said, clamping the phone to my ear with my shoulder as I gathered tomatoes in the produce aisle.
“I have some news, Lauren. Can you get away this weekend, so we can talk?”
“I don’t know,” I said. “It’s a hundred and ten degrees. I have three open houses on Sunday. What do you mean, news?”
“Well, at least you have your priorities in order.” My brother sounded like he was pouting. I remembered the way he would hide under the kitchen table when our parents fought, refusing to come out.
I placed tomatoes on the scale, printing out the price and pressing it to a plastic bag. It was August in Austin, and the cost of tomatoes was rising with the temperatures. “Oh, Alex, I don’t know,” I said. “Just tell me the news. Is it good news?”
“I get it,” said Alex. “Mr. Cheapskate won’t let you out of his sight?”
I shut off my phone and stowed it in my handbag. I picked out a bunch of bananas, just a bit green, then gathered organic baby spinach, fresh thyme, and new potatoes. In the meat department, I asked for lamb and a pound of ground chuck. I passed the lobster tank, grabbed a six-pack of Lone Star and a bottle of cheap white. I tossed two boxes of strawberry granola and a pint of Mexican vanilla ice cream into the cart. Cheddar cheese, skim milk, bagels, baguette, warm tortillas, chocolate-chunk cookies. I was shopping for a family of five, it seemed, though it was just Gerry and me in the one-bedroom rental. I smiled when I thought of Gerry: the slight curl in his auburn hair, his broad shoulders. Gerry had been a wrestler in high school and still had a rangy, stocky build. He was my height, and when we swayed in the kitchen to a slow tune on the radio, we fit together like wooden jigsaw pieces. Like Illinois, nestled next to Missouri in my old puzzle of the United States.
By the register, I grabbed a lemon soda and a bouquet of tulips. I paid with my MasterCard, my shock at the total assuaged by the knowledge that I was earning a hell of a lot of airline miles. Besides, what was money for if not sumptuous evenings with your boyfriend? By the time Gerry finished work—or “work,” as he labored for himself, and what he was doing in the shed in his sweatpants was nothing I recognized as taxing or taxable—I would likely be curled in bed, asleep, but hope sprang eternal, and romance (I believed) was about faith and expensive groceries.
Though I had finished squiring around a couple named the Gelthorps by four, dropping them at the Four Seasons for dinner and discussment (Mrs. Gelthorp had assured me she’d call in the morning with an offer on either the Tuscan-style palace in Pemberton Heights or the Provençal villa in Westlake), it was already dark as I wheeled my booty out of Central Market. I angled the cart toward my Dodge Neon. I had hoped for a glamorous convertible, but Gerry had been firm, armed with a stack of old Consumer Reports and Epinions printouts. I unlocked the car, opened the trunk, and screamed when someone tapped me on the shoulder.
“I’m sorry,” said my brother, panting in the cool evening.
“How did you—”
“You had that calm I’m buying foodstuffs tone,” said Alex. “I rode my bike over.”
“From the hospital?”
Alex nodded. He wiped his forehead. “I came to say I’m sorry,” he said. “I didn’t mean to insult Gerry.”
“It’s okay,” I said. “He is Mr. Cheapskate, after all.”
“I just think a trip would be fun. The two of us. We need to visit Gramma—and I’ll reserve the campsite, or condo, whatever. We haven’t camped since . . . since we were kids, you know? I’m feeling a bit mortal.”
My older brother filled me—always—with bafflement, irritation, and gratitude. He had never recovered, not really, from that morning. I had not made it all the way upstairs, so in some sense, I had been spared. By the time I saw my mother, she had been cleaned and made up, slipped into her favorite dress. He had taken care of me ever since. Instead of parents, I had Alex.
“When are you thinking?” I said.
“How about tomorrow? We can leave first thing in the morning.”
“Tomorrow! Can you help me with these bags?”
“Time’s wasting, sister,” said Alex, grabbing bags roughly and tossing them into the trunk.
“What does that mean?” I said. “Be careful—that’s wine!”
Alex placed the paper bag down gently. He turned around and held me by the shoulders. “Have you heard of Doctors Without Borders?” he asked.
“Oh, God,” I said. “I have a feeling I’m not going to like this news.”
“I applied last year,” said Alex. “And I just got my assignment. I’m going to Iraq, to Baghdad.”
“You . . .” I said, trailing off. I felt as if I had been sucker-punched. “You can’t leave.”
“I’ll go in a few weeks,” said Alex gently.
“What about me?” I said.
“Lauren, this has nothing to do with you.”
In the Central Market parking lot, beneath the citrus frenzy banner, I began to cry. “I’ll be all alone,” I said.
“Lauren, you’re thirty-two,” said Alex. “Get ahold of yourself.”
“Go to hell.” I threw the last bag in the car, slammed the trunk, and went around the side to the driver door, wiping my nose with my arm. I felt alarmed, woozy. I opened the door and tried to breathe evenly.
Alex ran to me and grabbed my elbow. “I knew you’d freak out,” he said.
“It’s so sudden,” I said.
Alex hugged me, smelling of sweat and fast food. “Let me just lock up my bike,” he said. “I’ll come over for dinner.”
Gerry and I lived in French Place, a historic neighborhood on the wrong side of the interstate. Fault lines made foundations crack and shift; while many houses looked great up top, there were problems under the surface. As opposed to Hyde Park, where professors and rich hippies lived, French Place was for the young and working-class. I loved it. Our landlord had painted the wood siding purple, which would not have been my choice—I preferred sage green—but the trim was a soothing yellow. Some people in our neighborhood went all out, with giant metal roosters or actual chickens in their yards, but we’d splurged on two lemon-colored chairs and a café table from Zinger Hardware and called it a day. When we had our fabulous pumpkin-carving party every year, nobody minded sitting on the steps or on one of the blankets we spread across the lawn.
Our street, Maplewood Avenue, was situated behind an elementary school. In the mornings, I could sit on our sagging front porch and watch kids arrive for school, their hair still mashed from bed, small fists rubbing their eyes. We had a house of bike messengers on one side of us and an elderly couple on the other side. Gerry and I often shared a cold six-pack with the neighbors.
When I turned onto Maplewood, I could see that the lights in our purple shed, which was now called “The Studio,” were still on. “How’s that all going?” asked Alex. “The, uh, podcast or whatever.”
I shrugged. Gerry had lost his job at Dell six months before, and after a week or so of moping around, he had declared his life’s dream. I thought my boyfriend’s “life’s dream” was finally getting me to marry him (he had been asking for years), but no. In his boxer shorts and a dell bowling ’08 T-shirt, Gerry had stood in the living room and announced that he was going to start a blog and begin calling himself “Mr. Cheapskate.” Wild-eyed, he showed me elaborate plans scrawled in a notebook he’d bought at Walgreens in the middle of the night.
“There’s this guy who loves wine, okay?” Gerry had said the next morning as I edged my way into the kitchen and began spooning coffee into the French press.
“Okay,” I said. I had to admit that he looked absurdly attractive with his unshaven face, his eyes alight.
“So he makes podcasts, YouTube videos, the whole nine yards. He talks about wine. And now he’s rich! And you know how I always wanted to be a stand-up comedian?”
“I thought you wanted to perfect neural networks,” I said.
“Before that, before that,” said Gerry. “When I was in high school, I wanted to be a stand-up comedian. I won talent shows, the whole nine yards.”
“You don’t really tell jokes or anything,” I ventured.
“ANYWAY,” Gerry snapped, “my point is that I have personality.”
“I’ll give you that,” I said. I put the kettle on to boil.
“So, and I’m cheap,” said Gerry. He was cheap, of this there was no doubt. Gerry refused to order coffee when we went to a coffee shop, insisting he could sip from my cup. He fished newspapers out of the trash and exited airplanes scanning the seat backs carefully, hoping for free magazines. He had a plastic accordion folder for coupons, he knew every two-for-one night in Austin, and he was happy to buy three cans of a Campbell’s soup flavor he didn’t especially like (broccoli cheese, for example) because the fourth can came for free. Tea bags in his wallet, a favorite free parking place downtown that required me to walk twenty minutes every time we went to hear a band, a house filled with crap from Freecycle. Yes, my beloved was cheap.
“I am going to be Mr. Cheapskate,” said Gerry. “I’ve already bought the domain name.”
“So you’re going to write about . . . about saving money?”
“Oh, hon,” said Gerry, “that’s just the beginning.” As I drank coffee and nibbled a stale scone, Gerry talked about blog ad revenue, webcasts, social networks, and later, T-shirt sales and personal appearances. He outlined his plans for the dilapidated shed, which was to become the center of the cheapskate empire. He was never going to work for “the man” again. In fact, he was working against the man!
Reading Group Guide
1. How did you feel about the relationship between Sylvia and Victoria? Did you feel like they both took advantage of each other equally?
2. Were you surprised to find out how Lauren’s mother was killed? At different stages of the novel did you think of different scenarios?
3. The Innocence Project estimates that as little as 1 percent or as many as 7 percent of inmates in jail are actually in -
nocent. How do you feel about this number? Do you think there are things we should be doing as a society to prevent this or is it a hazard of our system?
4. Race and class were two subtle but important themes that appeared in the novel. In what ways were they handled and what do you think the author was trying to say about them?
5. Why do you think it was important that Alex goes to Iraq for most of the novel? Do you think it was crucial to
Lauren developing an identity of her own? Was his possible death also important in shaping who Lauren became?
6. How do you feel about the fact that Lauren believed her father did it? Do you think he forgave her too easily for believing the worst in him?
7. If Close Your Eyes was made into a movie, who could you see playing each character and why?
8. On the surface, Sylvia, Lauren, and Victoria are very different people from different backgrounds, but were you able to see some similarities? Was there something else besides the murder that tied them together?
9. How did you feel about Lauren’s father’s relationship with Pauline? Did it make you change your perspective of him?
10. So much of the novel deals with ambiguity: Lauren’s dreamlike recollections from the night of her mother’s murder, Victoria’s rash deed enacted in a drunken trance; even the title, Close Your Eyes, hints at the tendency for characters to perceive things through varying levels of consciousness. Explore the element of uncertainty that runs throughout the narrative. How might some characters use this as a means of shielding themselves from the truth, or as an excuse for their actions? In addition to Lauren and Victoria, can you think of others who use the foggy details of their lives to concoct their own version of reality? Is this part of human nature?
A Conversation Between Amanda Eyre Ward and J. Courtney Sullivan
J. Courtney Sullivan is the author of Commencement and Maine.
Her website is jcourtneysullivan.com.
J. Courtney Sullivan: Lauren and Alex have such a special bond. While reading, I was struck by the thought that we don’t often see extremely close brother-sister relationships in literature. What made you want to write about one?
Amanda Eyre Ward: Often, my novels begin with an image,and in the case of Close Your Eyes, one of the first images I saw was a young brother and sister, alone in a tree house, about to discover something that will change their world. When I was sixteen, there was a murder in a quiet town near my suburban home. A husband and wife were brutally stabbed to death on New Year’s Eve. For years, the murder was unsolved,
and it’s always haunted me. I’m not sure why I honed in on the perspective of two children left behind. (The children of the real-life couple were also a brother and sister—both grown and married at the time of the murder.) But from the very start, Close Your Eyes began on the night of Jordan’s death. In writing Lauren and Alex’s story, I believe I was trying to make sense of a crime that so unsettled me.
I think Close Your Eyes would be a different story entirely if Lauren had had a sister, or if she’d been an only child. I have two sisters, and I’m extremely close to both of them. But I’ve always imagined that having a brother would be different: you could lean on a brother, and he would protect you. Perhaps Lauren takes this too far, even relying on Alex as a father figure.
Over the course of the novel, Lauren learns to look to other people (and herself) for security.
I now have two sons (and I just had a baby daughter) and am always amazed by the ways they interact. There’s so much richness in the relationships we share with our siblings. I love exploring that terrain. That said, I never really made a conscious decision for Lauren to have a brother—he was always just there, next to her.
JCS: In the stories of Lauren, Sylvia, and Victoria, you perfectly capture the ways in which childhood trauma follows us into adulthood. Can you speak to this?
AEW: We all want to create a life that is free of past hurts, but I have found that our childhood experiences can return to us in unexpected ways. As a novelist, I’m interested in the year (or week, or day) when a person’s smooth life becomes choppy and confused. For the characters in Close Your Eyes, it is past events that throw them into a tailspin: unresolved questions, unexplored friendships, unacknowledged loves.
Each of the characters in Close Your Eyes needs to confront the past to move on. In Lauren’s case, she needs to open herself to the possibility that her father is innocent, and in doing so, acknowledge that true love is possible . . . even for her. Sylvia,
who carries so many burdens from her past, is able to see beyond her own pain and give the truth of the worst night of her life to someone who desperately needs her story: Lauren. My French editor wanted me to write more about Victoria,
who never finds peace. She’s fascinating to me—she is the character I most identify with. I’d love to revisit her story someday,
if only to give Mae a happier ending. [Visit Amanda’s website at amandaward.com/Close_Your_Eyes.php to read “Victoria in Rehab,” an earlier draft depicting Victoria’s struggles.]
JCS: Why do you think Lauren and Alex come to such different conclusions about their father’s guilt?
AEW: It’s almost as if they both hold onto what they need from that night. Alex needs to believe in his father’s innocence,
while Lauren needs to believe that she’s not crazy: that what happened was awful but unalterable. We tend to seek ways of telling our stories that bring us comfort, and I think this is what Alex and Lauren both do.
JCS: What is it about secrets that make for such great reading (and writing)?
AEW: One of my favorite writers is Alice Munro. In her stories, characters often hold secrets not only from each other but from the reader. In one of my favorite Munro stories, “Carried Away,” we are introduced to the dreams of the town librarian, and then told that they will be dashed . . . but she doesn’t know it yet. This astonishes me—the way that Munro can let the reader in on a secret that her own characters are not privy to. I tried to emulate this in Close Your Eyes. I wanted the reader to have the experience of putting the story together, even as the characters might not see the whole picture. Each of the characters in Close Your Eyes holds a piece of the story of the night on Ocean Avenue, the night Lauren’s mother was killed.
In early drafts of the novel, I had many more characters with insight into the murder: a woman who wrote to Izaan in prison; friends and family members whose points of view proved too distracting. In one version of the novel, Victoria even had a brother who married Sylvia! But those characters are gone now, joining many more in my “Character Graveyard.”
[Visit amandaward.com/Close_Your_Eyes.php to read “Desiree’s Fantasy,” which introduces Izaan’s pen pal.]
JCS: Even before her father is imprisoned for her mother’s murder, Lauren feels like an outsider because of her Egyptian background. As an adult, living in an age of anxiety about terrorism, she feels judged for her ethnicity even more acutely.
What made you build this into her character?
AEW: It’s hard not to think about stereotypes these days, the way we judge each other. In 1995, the year after I graduated from college, I was living and teaching in Athens, Greece, and visited Egypt for the first time. The country made a strong impression on me; I’ve always wanted to write about it. My friends and I took a train from Cairo downriver to Aswan, and we were warned to be very careful—anti-American sentiment was high, especially in some of the more rural areas of Egypt.
We were staying in Aswan, trying to hire a dhow (sailboat) to float up the Nile, when we heard there had been a bombing in the United States, in Oklahoma City. We were confused and scared, unsure who had bombed the Alfred P. Murrah
Building. I remember being afraid to leave the boardinghouse in Aswan.
As we know now, it was an American—Timothy McVeigh—who had bombed the building. In my many visits to Egypt,
I’ve never been hurt or even insulted (though I don’t speak Arabic, so who knows!); I’ve always felt pretty safe (if often disoriented).
Izaan is such a complicated character. In many ways, he is a devoted family man, and he also acts (toward Pauline) in ways that are unforgivable. Perhaps his upbringing has something to do with his machismo, but I wanted to explore how easily we can see people of other ethnicities as completely different from us, capable of acts we don’t understand. Izaan didn’t fit in in suburban New York, and his outward looks most certainly affected the outcome of his trial. Lauren, who just wants to disappear, wrestles with her looks and her heritage. To me, it all plays into the story.
JCS: Early in the book, Alex leaves home to join Doctors Without Borders in Iraq. Why was his absence so essential to the story?
AEW: If he had stuck around, Lauren would never have fallen apart in a way that would force her to look at her mother’s murder. I needed Lauren to be unbalanced, to seek out the truth. Without Alex, she is broken.
JCS: Close Your Eyes manages to be both a literary novel and a whodunit. How were you able to build suspense, and create such a truly surprising conclusion? (I gasped so loud, I woke my dog up from a very deep sleep!)
AEW: Courtney, I love the vision of you gasping and waking your dog!
My brilliant editor, Jennifer Hershey, sent me a card when I was in the thick of rewrites (and despair). “There are three rules for writing the novel,” it read. “Unfortunately, no one knows what they are.” (This is a quote from W. Somerset
Maugham.)
I realized why so few writers attempt character-driven mystery novels. Often, revealing the mystery of Jordan’s murderer seemed to pull against how the characters were evolving. For example, Lauren had to go to New York to look at the case files of her mother’s murder. But I also had to make sure a trip to New York was in line with her character development—she wasn’t just going to go where I needed her to! I was often torn between character and plot, and the book took a very long time and many drafts to come together.
JCS: One of the most painful aspects of the book is Alex’s disappearance. Why did you choose to end that plotline as you did? Did you ever think of having it turn out differently?
AEW: Yes—in early drafts of the book, Alex died in Iraq. It seemed to make sense to me that Lauren would be alone in the world, but when my husband read the book he asked whether it was really necessary for Alex to die. The book seemed too unrelenting, he said, too grim. I thought about this for a while, and realized that the focus of the book didn’t have anything to do with Lauren losing Alex—the book is much more about how she opens herself up to love and trust.
While I was considering the possibility of bringing Alex home, I found out I was pregnant. The happy news inspired me to resurrect Alex. [Visit amandaward.com/Close_Your_Eyes.php to read “Alex’s Body,” which explains how things might have turned out very differently for Alex.]
JCS: I know how much you love living in Austin. One thing I loved about Close Your Eyes is the way in which the city itself is almost a character. We get such a great sense of the place. Was that an intentional decision?
AEW: I don’t think it was intentional; I do love my city, and it continues to fascinate me. I’ve lived in Austin for almost fifteen years now, on and off, but I try to see it with the eyes of a visitor when I’m writing. I ask myself what a tourist might notice:
what food, what expressions, what details? Every time I leave my house, something (or someone) surprises me. Yesterday, a
Spanish-language radio station was sponsoring a party at the 7-Eleven a few blocks from my house. While I filled up the car with gas, my sons rolled giant foam dice and won plastic cups with Mexican wrestlers on them. Everyone cheered. My fouryear-
old clutched his Slurpee cup and said, “This is the best day of my life.”
JCS: Tell me a bit about your writing process. Do you make yourself stick to a set schedule each day?
AEW: I write best in the morning, still in pajamas, with plenty of coffee. I used to write whenever I wanted (even if it was in the middle of the night), but now I am a mom, and have to budget my time more wisely.
When my first son was born, I remember thinking, “I’ll just write when the baby naps!” This was so impossible; it makes me shake my head now at my former naïveté. Both writing and motherhood seem to require such complete concentration that I almost have to divide myself—choosing times that I am wholly a mother, and times that I write without distraction.
Whenever I try to do both at the same time (or even in the same hour), it’s awful.
I now write three days a week, and two days a week I try to put the work aside and be with my children. It’s hard, especially when I’m in the middle of a difficult scene or rewrite.
In the course of writing Close Your Eyes, there was a point where I knew the book was off-course, but I simply couldn’t get to the heart of the problem in the time I had for writing. I tried, but it wasn’t working. I ended up staying home alone while my husband visited his family over Thanksgiving, and I lay on my living room rug next to my dog for a few days and just thought, fitting all the pieces together in my imagination (and ordering Chinese). If I had an idea at two in the morning, I went and wrote for a few hours, to see where the idea would lead. Finally, by being able to hold the entire book—and nothing else—in my mind, I saw that Sylvia needed to bring Lauren the truth of her mother’s murder.
At this point, Sylvia was a fairly stable person. She worked at a Manhattan prep school. There was no reason she would be driven to find Lauren. So I had to completely reimagine Sylvia’s character. I’m not sure why I didn’t change her name.
When Sylvia became a desperate woman, pregnant and on the run from her boyfriend and her past mistakes, frantic to start anew, the book came together. And that wouldn’t have happened if I hadn’t had sustained time to reenvision the book and then scrap Sylvia’s former self and create a new character.
In my dream life, I would have my home and family; a motel room nearby to work; and a way to bend time and write for five days straight, then pick up my kids after school. [Visitamandaward.com/Close_Your_Eyes.php to read “The Woman
Formerly Known as Sylvia,” which introduces an earlier draft of the character.]
JCS: What’s next for you?
AEW: I am working on a new novel about ten years in a marriage and a mysterious fire.
Interviews
A letter from Amanda Eyre Ward
I grew up in Rye, New York, a small town outside of New York City. In 1988, I was sixteen years old. I smoked cigarettes in my room, thinking Trident gum would mask the scent. I made a fake ID and laminated it at the library, then used the ID to visit bars in nearby towns: Bumper’s, Streets, Tammany Hall.
On January 1, 1989, my friends and I woke up, heads pounding, in the living room of a stranger’s apartment in Manhattan. We walked to Grand Central and rode the Stamford local back to Rye. By mid-day, we heard that during the midnight hours of New Year’s Eve, there had been a murder in Larchmont, a neighboring town.
An Indian couple, both doctors, had been stabbed to death in their bedroom, throats slashed, their bodies mutilated. It seemed impossible that something like this could happen in the suburbs. Fear travelled silently along the Boston Post Road, past Baskin Robbins and the Smoke Shop, to Dogwood Lane, where I lived with my family in a stunningly beautiful home. To me, the message was clear: danger was everywhere.
The murder was not solved. Four-and-a-half years went by. My parents split up, and I went to college. I thought about the murder from time to time, trying to understand how a stranger had broken the spell of Rye, smashed through the safety we had all thought money could buy.
In 1993, we found out that the murderer was one of us, a teenage boy, a local. The son of a bank president. He had been blind drunk, he told a room full of people at an AA meeting. He was afraid he may have broken a door pane, entered his childhood home, where his family no longer lived, taken a knife from a kitchen drawer, and savagely attacked the strangers sleeping in his parents’ bedroom. He later said he didn’t remember anything about it. He had been in an alcoholic blackout, but now he had nightmares.
At his trial, a psychiatrist said, "Probably the most typical behavior during a blackout is finding the way home....It's almost as if he were going back in time and eliminating the people that he sought to blame for all his problems back when he was seven years old."
He is now in jail.
The story of the New Year’s Eve murder has always stayed with me, and eventually evolved into CLOSE YOUR EYES. I think, in writing the book, I wanted not only to understand what happened to a boy who was one of us, what made him into a murderer, but also to create a world where this wrong was righted, and a broken town was sewn back together. I wanted to imagine a town that was loving and safe, a place that might never have existed in real life.
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