A couple of weeks ago I asked subscribers to send me the questions they’ve been mentally accumulating since Tangled Darkness came out. I got a lot. Several were about psychiatry. Several were about specific characters. One was about my coffee setup. (I’ll get to it.)
Here are three of the ones I keep coming back to.
1. “Are any of Leslie’s co-characters based on real people?”
No, and also a complicated no.
Every patient I have ever seen is protected by confidentiality that does not lapse, including after death, including after the patient gives me permission, including after the patient has lost touch with the relevant memory. I will not break that. I have not broken that. None of the characters in The Portland Murders are people I have met.
What I do borrow, and what I will defend, is texture. The way a person folds and unfolds their hands. The pause before a hard sentence. The phrase that doesn’t quite belong to the moment they’re describing. Those textures are everywhere. I have collected them on the bus, in airports, at my grandmother’s funeral, and yes, sometimes in my office. They don’t belong to any one person. They belong to the species.
2. “Why won’t you give any of your characters a clean diagnosis?”
Because I don’t want to.
Diagnoses are useful tools when you’re sitting across from a person whose insurance is going to need a code on the form. They are terrible tools for explaining who a character is. The minute I tell you Aaron Davis has X, you stop watching him and start watching the diagnosis. You think you know what’s coming. You think you know how he ends. You don’t.
The most useful thing fiction can do, I think, is hold a character lightly enough that the reader still has to work to understand them. A diagnosis collapses that work into a single label, which is the opposite of the experience I am trying to build.
So no, you will not get a clinical formulation from me about any character in The Portland Murders. Not Leslie. Not Aaron. Not Cecil (Aaron’s brother. You’ll meet him soon). Not anyone in the books I haven’t finished yet. I love them too much for that.
3. “Could a real psychiatrist actually solve a murder?”
Probably not. But maybe. And also: depends on the murder.
A real psychiatrist is trained to pay attention to small, structural inconsistencies in a person’s story, the kind you can’t fake even if you’re trying very hard. We watch tense changes. We watch which details get repeated and which get smoothed over. We watch what a person can’t quite make eye contact with. None of this is detective work, exactly. But all of it is useful when somebody is lying to you.
Could that solve a homicide? On its own, no. The crime would still need evidence, a witness, perhaps a confession. What clinical attention can do is keep a psychiatrist from being convinced by the wrong person. Which, conveniently, is exactly what Leslie keeps not being convinced by. And exactly what gets her into trouble.
* * *
Coffee, since I promised:
Chemex. Stumptown beans. Reusable filter. Nothing fancy. I make a pot every morning, drink it all by ten, resist making a second pot until the next day.
That’s not a metaphor for anything. I just like the bean.
xo,
Mary
