What happens next?

August 03, 2018

  A week ago Drew and I were on vacation, careening through the treacherous switchbacks of the Southern Carpathians in a rented Ford. We came to Transylvania by way of Munich for Drew's 40th birthday trip, a celebratory mix of biergarten meals and vampire lore and medieval churches and beautiful castles surrounded by breathtaking views. Navigating my way through Romania, through a language and a country I know very little about, invigorates me. When I was almost 7, my family moved to what was then West Germany, and my brother and I enrolled in the local public school, learning German, and how to act German, very fast in order to keep up with our classmates. We got good at being the new kids. The secret is learning early on to never stop asking yourself, what happens next? When I can answer that question without thinking about it first is when I know I'm ready for the next challenge.   The book I'm working on is about my parents, which is to say it's about my mother before I was born, up through when I was very young. Which is to say it is a reporting job, and that is a new challenge for me, to report on my own family. Reporters have to ask a lot of questions. You get good at asking the same question in slightly different ways until you get what feels like a satisfying, which is to say a complete, or as close to it as possible, answer. This enterprise is twofold: I am constructing a timeline, which calls for the question "What happens next?" until we reach the end, and I am creating a character, the girl as she was then as opposed to the woman now, which requires the wonderful and dreadful "Why?" to be asked over and over, in different ways, until we arrive at the truth, which is not exactly synonymous with the facts. It's very strange to craft a character out of a person who is still very much alive. I think my mother is very brave for letting me do this.   Right now I'm reading Sarah Weinman's The Real Lolita (out Sept. 11) a deeply reported book reconstructing the true-crime story that informed Vladimir Nabokov's classic crime novel, the 1948 abduction of 11-year-old Sally Horner. Sally was moved across the country for two years by an older man posing to the outside world as her father, who raped her repeatedly throughout her captivity. Weinman moves Sally from a footnote in Nabokov lore to her rightful place in history — a real girl who suffered unimaginable horrors and whose story also helped give shape to one of the 20th century's most celebrated (and too often misunderstood) novels. The big question at the heart of this story is not "What kind of person does this?" (that answer, easy: an unforgivable man) but rather "How does a girl survive it?" The answers are heartbreaking, as they should be.   Other questions asked: