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Where did the idea for Game of Secrets come from?
I had three images in my head: a 14 year old boy driving fast down an unfinished highway in a borrowed car; two women playing Scrabble; and two lovers, a man and a woman, meeting in an old cranberry barn. The images weren't based on anything in my experience or anyone I know, but I began to write them. I had already filled a notebook when an older man I knew from town told me a story of a skull that surfaced back in the '60s out of a truckload of gravel fill, a neat bullet hole in the temple. The moment the story was out of his mouth, I knew that skull had everything to do with the two friends playing Scrabble, the lovers in the cranberry barn, and with that boy driving fast down an unfinished highway in a stolen car.
Why did you choose to use a Scrabble game?
I love Scrabble. Growing up, I played all the time with my grandmother. She played for the words, as many women in her generation did. I always played for the numbers. How we play Scrabble can reveal so much about how we tick, how we live, who we are. Some play to keep the board open, some play to shut it down. Some play with an eye to the sum of the total scores of all players; some play, simply, to maximize their own score. Most players will look at the board and see the words that fill it. But a really good player, a canny player, will also see opportunity in the skinny spaces still left open in between. The game for me became the perfect lens for a story about two families bound together and divided by unspeakable secrets—a brutal past, a murder, a love story. Because what are words if not a bridge? Between one person and another. Thought and reality. Past and present, present and future. Words bridge silence. Words, and the stories they comprise, bridge time.
A dead man and the mystery surrounding his murder play a central role in the novel. Yet, in many ways, Marne is the protagonist of the story. Why? What makes Marne so compelling?
Marne was not in my original vision of the novel—which centered on the Scrabble game and the unsolved crime. Marne crept in as a satellite character—Jane's daughter—but at first only at the hem of things, and from her mother's point of view. I wasn't sure I liked her at first: she was too judgmental, too cynical. But she was funny—self-deprecating and wry—she made me laugh, and I could feel how alive she was, how on the verge—because she felt so much, and at the same time was resolutely unwilling to let herself feel. It made me curious: I knew that someone with such insistent hard-and-fast convictions would have to collide head-on into the thing she swore she never would.
Game of Secrets is a 'mosaic' narrative, told from the perspectives of several different characters. The story also moves back and forth in time. Why did you choose this kind of structure for Game? Why not tell a linear story?
In part because I believe that while narrative can be linear, life is not. A mosaic narrative, fractured in point of view and time, feels to me more intrinsically true to the way we apprehend our lives. In Game of Secrets, this structure also mirrored the playing of the Scrabble game, where disparate pieces, letters, are arranged into words, which in turn are arranged into a grid that, like a novel, has an intrinsic cogent order of meaning and weight.
Several of your characters are deeply flawed—why did you make this choice?
Because for me, a character's flaw is often the most intriguing aspect of them; it impacts their fate; it is the point where what is paradoxical, seemingly irreconcilable—what is weakest and most violent and most beautiful about them—can intersect. Luce's greatest flaw, the reason he fails his daughter Jane is not because he does not love her enough, but because he loves her so much, yet cannot step out of his own shadows to say so. Jane in turn nearly visits the same fate on her own daughter. To me, though, the most deeply flawed character in the novel is Huck. Before I knew anything else about him, I knew Huck only as that 14 year old boy driving fast down an unfinished highway, heat in his hands on the wheel, thinking of a girl. I knew that long before I realized what he might have done and who he would become—how he would grow up to be a man whose views and past stood for things that are easy to dislike or disdain. But you can't quite lock him up that way, because of the raw and simple desire he felt once, not just for that girl, but for the freedom of a dream she stood for. I love this about him. I love how there is this relentlessly living aspect of him, underneath all else, that is almost redemptive. I will always try to find that core place in every character—particularly the ones who appear at first so conclusively one-sided—I will go and dig into them to find that other side, that dark and soft, more vulnerable, inescapably human side that renders them in a completely different light, if only momentarily.
How much does Jane know and when does she know it?
This question to me is inextricably linked with a larger thematic question at the heart of the novel: how well can we ever really know another person? I lived in that question—ate, slept, and dreamt it—as I was writing this story. There are moments where it seems like Jane has slipped off the edge a bit, is unable to absorb the weight of what she has lost, and as a result averts her eyes and appears to disassociate from her everyday world. Marne alludes to this, and judges her mother for it. Yet there are other moments where Jane's perception of reality, of life and intimacy and time, seems to approach a deeper, more existential vision of what truth is. So what does Jane know and when? Jane is capable of great feeling, great compassion. And more than any other character, she seems to recognize that our lives are not as bound or conclusive, as easily wrapped up as we imagine them to be, and sometimes what we feel and what we believe can be more necessary to who we are than what we think we 'know.'
Who is the engineer? And why does that photograph of Jane that he took matter so much to Marne?
I love the town where I live on the coast of Massachusetts. I love it beyond reason. It is and has always been, to me, the most beautiful point of earth. But I am not from here. I grew up coming as a summer person, and though I live here year around now, I will always see the place through the lens of someone from away. I recognize that when you are from a place, really from it, your perception of it, your experience of it is more complex. In Game of Secrets, the engineer is that person from away. He comes into town for the job on the bridge, brushes the outer lives of the others, snaps his photo of Jane and leaves it behind (it means nothing to him), and he goes. It felt imperative to me to have that photograph of Jane, as a young girl on the bridge, taken by someone who did not, who could not really, enter the life of the town and yet was able to capture it, inadvertently, to grasp in that simple random photograph, something essential to who Jane was: "that nameless, changeless aspect" of her that Huck falls in love with, that Ada is drawn to, that Marne struggles to come to understand.
For Marne, that photograph of the girl on the bridge represents what she loves most and what she shuns, what she cannot penetrate about her mother and about the place where she is from. For Jane and Ada, the photograph represents that certain consequent, almost luminous force that infuses a small town as a result of the lives that are played out there. The heart of a small town, like the heart of the novel, revolves around its stories—those that are told and retold, that enter the common lore, and those other stories that are not told. Every small town has them: stories that are known but only spoken of behind closed doors, if at all; often stories that cannot be told, because they are too tangled, too tragic and raw, at times so wild and unlikely they could never be cast into fiction because no one would believe they were true. Marne remarks on this. And at first she envies the engineer, for how he was able to wash in and out, to snap that photograph and not care. She envies him that lightness of being.
What are you saying about friendship and women through Ada and Jane?
When I first began to write Jane and Ada, I did not see the bond between them as one of simple friendship. Fifty years ago, Jane's father was Ada's lover and was killed as a result. So while Jane and Ada are bound by their shared past, as well by their children, there is this man they both loved and his unsolved death, which is a distinct rift between them. However, women can often turn fluid around what appears impervious, and begin to reconcile what feels stunningly disparate, even unresolvable. In the course of the game, as Ada and Jane lay down their words, they begin to move into what is unspeakable between them and within themselves, to own what they have hid and loved and lost and grieved, what they have feared, ached for, dreamed. Their friendship has a startling resilience that I believe is common to friendships between women, characterized by a willingness to set aside what has been, in favor of what can be, what will be.
What writers and books do you admire and why? What books have influenced you (as a person and as a writer)?
Virginia Woolf: To The Lighthouse and Mrs. Dalloway; William Faulkner: As I Lay Dying and Sound and the Fury; David Malouf: An Imaginary Life; Michael Ondaatje: The English Patient; Edna O'Brien: Wild Decembers and The Light of Evening; Marguerite Duras: The Ravishing of Lol Stein and The Lover
I admire these writers and books for a million reasons, but I also get impatient with straightforward linear narratives, where a rigid adherence to form can stamp out the life of a work. The novels I list above are highly structured—but not in a traditional linear way. And the structure that they do have, whether fractured or mosaic, is always subservient to the voice of the narrative. As a result, there a certain dreamlike immediacy, a certain life of the work that takes precedence, a nuanced undercurrent of thought and feeling that runs through the narrative, transcends the intellect and is absorbed by the reader in a more visceral, intuitive way. That quality is what inspires me in the works of others; and that is what I strive for in my own.