Giving Myself Permission to Write as if Nobody’s Watching
1969 was a momentous and magical year. There was birth at Woodstock and death at Altamonte, the cult of Charles Manson, the Apollo 11 moon mission, the invention of the internet, the Beatles performing together for the last time in public, and the “end” of the Vietnam War. The number one song that year was the bubblegum pop Sugar, Sugar by the Archies, and the highest-grossing film was the anti-western Butch Cassidy and The Sundance Kid.
In 1969, I was a painfully shy 13-year-old with braces. Everyone called me “Tinsel Teeth.” Each morning on the bus ride to school, I’d pay off bullies with spare change and candy. My older brother Michael with his classic good looks, Eric Clapton hair that trailed past his shoulders, and fringed leather jacket, treated me as though I had leprosy. We lived in a rural suburb of Long Island, New York, where going to the mall was the high point of the week, and buying McDonald’s was a rare treat.
But 1969 was also the year when Mom was offered a share in a summer rental in bucolic Southampton, a small, quiet village on the South Fork of Long Island. The price? It was a now unheard-of $500. We’d share the rental with several of Mom’s girlfriends who were all escaping melodrama in a hot and humid Manhattan.
Quite frankly, Michael and I really didn’t know that much about Southampton other than what Mom told us: The rental was near the beach and it would be a lot of fun. I was thrilled. This was a welcome break from my usual, dull, monotonous routine of reading paperbacks and watching soap operas with my maternal grandmother. And it was also a chance to spend time with Mom, whom we only saw on the weekends and the odd week here and there. But Michael wasn’t enthused because it meant being away from his steady girlfriend, whom Mom couldn’t stand. He made it clear that he was going under protest and promised to make everyone’s life miserable (namely, me).
Every Saturday morning, Mom took an early train out to Lake Ronkonkoma on the Long Island Railroad. After loading up on groceries, before noon we’d be on the road in a Plymouth with no air conditioning and sticky plastic seat coverings that burned our legs raw. The rental turned out to be a charming, vintage two-bedroom/one-bath cottage behind a huge manor close to Main Street. The rooms were small and cramped, the hot water ran out after one shower, and the television reception was lousy. I loved it.
Under the stars, Mom would grill a London Broil and corn on the cob while Michael and I played darts or baseball in the enormous backyard. After dinner, Mom cleaned up while Michael listened to Jimi Hendrix, Led Zeppelin, and Cream on a portable record player. I’d sit in a lounge chair fighting off mosquitos as I watched satellites go by and dreamed up over-the-top scenarios about the people who lived in the main house. Little did I know that decades later, that pivotal summer in Southampton would help spawn my gritty adult contemporary psych thriller A Good Man, forthcoming from Bloodhound Books this August.
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My debut adult novel is essentially a mash-up of two ideas that I’d been nursing for several years: a coming-of-age story about two young brothers who are determined to reunite their divorcing parents by conjuring up a “monster of the dunes” while on summer vacation, and a thriller about a troubled man haunted by the worst night of his life. I’d made a half-hearted stab at the first idea. I got sidetracked when Mom fell ill and I became her caregiver in her remaining years.
The second idea I tip-toed around like an elephant in pointe shoes. Even though I’d been long obsessed with explicit, unflinching crime/thriller/mystery books, movies, and TV shows, I found the idea of actually writing one intimidating and even laughable. I’d devoted true crime books like In Cold Blood and The Boston Strangler as an adolescent and had been so thoroughly spooked that I peeked under the bed and rummaged through my closet at bedtime for years. Worse, I had a severe case of imposter syndrome: how could I possibly delude myself into thinking that I wouldn’t embarrass myself?
By this time, Mom had passed. My brother too, from suicide, and it’s lingered over me, an open, festering wound that never heals. The only one stopping me was me. The more I thought about it, the more I decided to give it a go. I began writing what I nervously called The Thing on Labor Day 2021. I was so afraid that I’d peter out after a chapter or so I couldn’t bring myself to give it a title. The only things I knew for sure was that I wasn’t going to hold anything back—there’d be blood on every page—and I also gave myself permission to write as if no one would ever read it, much less buy it.
Secure in the knowledge that I was writing for myself alone, it gave me the freedom—and as the words gushed out of me like a geyser—the confidence to challenge myself creatively in ways I’d never imagined. I killed people with gleeful abandon. If my characters were going to do horrible things, then, by golly, it was really going to be absolutely horrible things. Rules? What rules?
Day after day, I wrote in a fevered rush on my laptop on my dining room table, terrified that if I stopped writing, the story would stop too. As the story progressed, my fears lessened. Maybe, just maybe—and partially egged on by my 13-year-old self who dared to dream big—I could pull it off. A scant two months later, and just a tad under 100,000 words, I typed The End on my opus. I breathed a sigh of cathartic relief. The Thing was finally A Thing. I’d even gone so far as to give it a title: A Good Man, which reflects a theme that’s at the core of my book: what truly constitutes being evil and good, and how much evil can one perpetuate under the guise of being good?
After that summer, we never returned to Southampton. Mom suddenly decided to leave New York which eventually led to uprooting the entire family. It was a decision that would have negative and bitter repercussions for decades. But that’s another story. For now, I’m the girl on the beach wearing a t-shirt over my sunburned shoulders, and Michael’s laughing in the ocean waves, his long hair flying in the breeze.
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