Newton author Tova Mirvis is prolific: As a memoirist, she wrote “The Book of Separation” about her Orthodox divorce; she’s also penned four novels: the new thriller “We Would Never,” plus “Visible City,” “The Outside World” and the best-selling “The Ladies Auxiliary.”
“We Would Never” is her latest book, based on the disturbing true story of Dan Markel’s 2014 murder. Markel, a Tallahassee law professor, was in the midst of a contentious divorce; his in-laws were later implicated in the killing. In her fictionalized retelling, the book touches on Jewish themes of redemption and forgiveness.
We talked about the creative process, how to break into the business and how Judaism influences her work.
I bet a lot of folks wonder: How do you even get a book published? Tell me a little bit about your background.
My first book, “The Ladies Auxiliary,” came out 25 years ago, which is just kind of wild to believe. It’s been that long. I had the dream of writing a novel but certainly never the expectation. I was in Columbia’s creative writing graduate program writing draft after draft of that novel. One summer, I got a job as an intern in a literary agent’s office. I read the mail and filed things, and really quickly learned what an agent does. When I finished the book, there was one agent there I loved, and I asked her to read it, and she loved the book. She sold it. It was like a wild, wild dream.
When it comes to writing: How did you actually carve out the time?
Basically, I’ve been writing for 30 years. With my first book, I wrote most of it before I had kids. I would have a rule that I had to sit myself down and write for four or five hours and keep myself in one place. My kids [are older] now. But for the bulk of my writing life, I wrote with kids at home and always was trying to juggle between being present for my kids and working on a book, which requires so much concentration and the ability to hold something in your head for such a long period of time. I just did it slowly. Every book is a four- to five- to 10-year project. I couldn’t make it go faster.
Why did you decide to write a memoir?
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I had written an essay right before my third novel came out, which took 10 years to write. It was a 10-year novel! Right before it came out, I had written an essay about my Orthodox divorce ceremony, the get ceremony. I wrote it really thinking it was primarily going to be for myself, toward my own way of understanding the experience. I worked on it for a long time, and I don’t know what came over me. I sent it to The New York Times “Private Lives” column, and they loved it and published it, and it was terrifying to put something so personal, painful and private out into the world.
But I got an enormous response to that essay. I got just hundreds and hundreds of emails from readers who had read it and wanted to share with me their own stories of separations of one kind or another, people from all religious backgrounds, all ages, people going through divorces, family changes, religious grapplings. I think it was really the most moving experience I’ve had as a writer, where I just felt willing to be vulnerable and put my own story out there, and invite other people to do the same thing. It was scary, but it made me feel like I could tell a true story about this experience, and that there were people who, I felt, were hungry to hear about separations of different kinds.
Your current novel is also based on a true story. Tell me about that.
After writing a memoir, I was very happy to return to fiction. I was ready to write a novel. And I guess about 10 years ago, I saw that someone with whom I had a very tangential connection was murdered. I saw it on Facebook. We were Facebook friends. It was horrifying, of course. And I was also really curious about what had happened, and I went down the rabbit hole of reading about it and saw that this man who was a law professor at Florida State University had been murdered. Some of the initial speculation was that maybe there was a student who was upset about a bad grade, or maybe a rival legal scholar who disagreed with his opinions on constitutional law.
The last line of one of these articles said that he had been in the middle of a contentious divorce, and it was soon after my own divorce had ended, and I felt pretty sure that that was the real heart of the story. It seemed to me much more likely that this was the real wound of the story. And so I followed it for many years.
We live in an old house in Newton that Timothy Leary lived in for a year. I was going to write a novel somehow based on Timothy Leary in the house, but I just couldn’t make myself focus on it. I just kept going back to this news story and just Googling: How does this happen to a nice Jewish family? What’s the human story? How does a divorce escalate so wildly out of control? And, maybe most of all, how does no one in this story have the capacity to forgive or to move on, or to realize this is not going to end well? People get divorced and they get angry, and then they move on.
What’s the response to the novel been so far?
Oh, it’s always so strange to have a book out in the world because you live with it; it is your private creation. I started right before the pandemic, and I spent the pandemic in my little office room off our bedroom, alone with the characters, and creating the world and really trying to turn it into a novel, and really trying to imagine my way into my characters’ heads, to really, really know them on a deep level.
There’s still the shock of seeing it in a store. But I’ve had a busy book event schedule. I feel like it’s been really interesting to talk to people who also have this curiosity about people; why do people do the things they do? What might we all do in situations that we cannot even imagine? I’m interested in how people come undone.
How does Judaism inform your writing?
I think Judaism informs all of my writing, whether I’m writing something that’s explicitly Jewish or not. It’s just an essential part of who I am and how I see the world. And in this story, the actual family was Jewish, and I think that made the story hit so much closer to home. For me, it wasn’t a story that took place far from me, in a context I couldn’t really understand. It felt really close.
I know so many people in South Florida, so many families. You know, it felt like a crime story that happened inside of my own world. And I think that’s probably one of the reasons I was so drawn to it and felt such a need to understand it, because I felt like these people were not far from me. They were not removed. They were part of the Jewish world. And that was so hard to understand. It made it so much more painful of a story for me.
I decided to keep the characters as Jewish in the novel. Their Jewishness is not really at the center of the story in any way, but one of the ways that the novel is specifically Jewish is: I came to feel that the essential question in the book was about forgiveness and an inability to forgive. Yom Kippur is the holiday that I am most moved by, and I decided to use Yom Kippur as a way to ask questions in the book about who will forgive and who won’t, and what are the consequences of not being willing to forgive someone? What happens not just to the person who’s unforgiven, but to yourself as well?
Tova Mirvis appears at Hummingbird Books in Chestnut Hill on May 6 at 7 p.m.
