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Brigid Bergin: This is All Of It on WNYC. I'm Brigid Bergin, in for Alison Stewart. The latest thriller from novelist Laura Lippman is based on the true story of a teenage girl who is known as Prom Mom. In 1997, a New Jersey high school student delivered a baby in the bathroom of her high school prom. She then placed the infant in a trash can where it was later found dead. The student served about three years in prison after pleading guilty to aggravated manslaughter.

In Lippman's novel, she imagines Prom Mom as a young girl named Amber, who seemed to not really realize that she was pregnant until she gave birth at her Baltimore prom. She was too preoccupied with her crush, her prom date, and the baby's father, a handsome jock named Joe. Lippman picks up with Amber and Joe years after the incident. Joe is living in a mansion with his devoted wife, Meredith. Meredith is an accomplished plastic surgeon who loves her career and loves her husband, even though she knows all the details from his past.

Their marriage is challenged when Joe learns that Amber has moved back to Baltimore and opened an art gallery. He can't seem to stay away from the mysterious woman who gave birth to their child all those years ago and Amber seems eager to reconnect with Joe. As their secret relationship becomes more complicated, Joe starts to confide in Amber that he's in a bit of trouble and he might need her help to solve it. Kirkus calls the novel, "A character study of pedestrian evil in the Wegmans-and-Peloton class, fascinating in its heartlessness."

Prom Mom is out now and Laura Lippman joins me in studio. Laura, thanks so much for being here on All Of it.

Laura Lippman: Oh, thank you for having me.

Brigid Bergin: Let's talk first about this Prom Mom case. How did you get inspired to write a novel based on the Prom Mom case?

Laura Lippman: It's really funny because, in my head, I was not inspired by any particular case. I was inspired by a podcast called You're Wrong About that's hosted by Sarah Marshall. They did an episode back in 2020 that was about two different cases involving the birth of a child, I'll say, proximate to a dance. What inspired me is that Sarah who would unrelatedly and subsequently become a friend after this all happened, she just made an off-hand comment about, "Right, and teenage girls know their bodies so well." Being sarcastic. Talking about the possibility that you could not know. That's what grabbed my attention.

When I get that little germ of an idea, I don't research the real story because that's not what I'm inspired by. That's not what I want to do. I don't want to do a Law & Order, here's the real story behind the story. I want to take it where my imagination wants to go. I really wanted to write about this very particular kind of girl who's from an odd family, and she knows her family's odd. She's odd but smart and well-meaning. Very much like a grade-grubbing nerd, something I'm very familiar with. Not the odd family part, but definitely being under that nerdy girl in high school. Just the idea of what happens 20 years later when people who have this strange connection meet again.

Brigid Bergin: Let's talk a little bit about these characters that you invented. Let's start with teenage Amber. When she was a kid, Amber and Joe meet. When Amber becomes Joe's French tutor, they start hooking up very much in secret. What really bonded these kids together? Was it all about the physical connection, or was there something else going on there?

Laura Lippman: Joe really enjoys being adored. I think later in the book, there is even a line that says, "No one gets to be adored in adulthood, and especially not in marriage." Joe is hooked on that kind of just true adoration and admiration of someone looking at him as if he's almost God-like. This book plays a lot with the idea of people thinking that they're God-like. Meredith also has a bit of that complex. Meredith actually, literally identifies with the Madeline Miller book that her book club is reading because she feels that she's a goddess who's relinquished her powers in order to love a mortal man. This is floating in all of the characters' heads.

I think that's what it is for Joe. For Amber, Joe was symbolic of all the things that were out of reach for her. She's not from the wrong side of the tracks, but she's from the less nice part of their neighborhood. As I said, she knows her mom is odd. She has a stepfather who seems to love her, but he never talks, and he's considered odd because he decorates his front yard with all these ceramic geese and other things, changing it for every month of the year, whatever the holiday is. She wants that more golden child existence that Joe embodies.

Brigid Bergin: Then when we meet adult Amber, we know that teenage Amber had been given a pretty raw deal with the press, but you don't necessarily paint adult Amber as a very sympathetic character throughout the novel. Why not?

Laura Lippman: This is not a novel about likable people.

Brigid Bergin: Yes.

Laura Lippman: Initially, it was instinctive of me, and I had to write the book to understand what I was doing because I was like, "These are not nice people." It was a rough 14 to 16 months hanging out with these three characters, but as I thought about it, the initial impulse was to write the book almost like a true-crime documentary and have lots of ancillary people talking about what they knew about the main characters. I wrote reams and reams, and I threw it all out. I was like, "No. This is about these three people."

It's set against the backdrop of COVID. It's not about COVID, it's not about the pandemic, but that's what's going on while the book is going on. I think that COVID was for all of us a time of great interiority. We were really deep inside our own heads. Most of us are not nice people in our own heads. I don't think. I think we go day-to-day, we're polite, we say please, we say thank you, we're considerate, we do nice things for other people, but we all have that part of our mind that is harsh and judgmental. People became especially judgmental starting in 2020 and continuing to today.

I think that's actually a cultural change that I sense that people have so many thoughts now about how other people are living their lives. That's why these three characters who have agendas that are not very defensible. I was also interested in the idea that it seemed to me that the pandemic was the perfect backdrop for this James Cain journey towards the transgressive. The Cain novel, they're ready by Chapter 2 to start killing the spouse, but this is a novel that wants to chart the journey to "How do you go from being the nice guy who has a dark past to thinking about having a dark present? How do you get caught up in that?" What is going on in all of these characters' minds?

Brigid Bergin: I know the book is not necessarily about the criminal justice system, but we do know that Amber spends some time in jail and ends up dedicating her career just selling the art of formerly incarcerated people. How do you think the justice system failed Amber?

Laura Lippman: That is such a provocative question that I had to take a deep breath because I don't want to spoil my own book, but I think that the justice system failed Amber in not believing that she could have no memory of the events of that night because that is what she keeps telling people. She doesn't remember, she doesn't know what happened, she lost a lot of blood, she woke up, and there was a dead baby.

No one believes that. It is a credible story. It's true that she passed out, she lost consciousness. I'm really interested in juvenile justice as it's called sometimes. It's something that was a big part of my newspaper career. I definitely saw the culture move toward being much more interested in punishing young people and away from this idea that the whole reason we have a juvenile justice system is because we recognize that people before they're adults before their brains are fully formed can make mistakes and errors that with intervention they might not make it again.

Yet in these more sensational cases, there's this pressure now to try-- Amber is lucky, she's not tried as an adult, that she's allowed to go to a juvenile facility.

Brigid Bergin: Let's talk a little bit more about Joe. How does Joe feel about what happened when he was a teenager and how has it affected him as an adult?

Laura Lippman: Joe feels it was very unfair to him. He didn't know Amber was pregnant. Yes, maybe he was a bit of the Cad Dad as he's dubbed in the tabloid press because he was off chasing his ex-girlfriend while his prom date was going through this harrowing experience. He didn't know it was going on. He never knew that Amber was pregnant. Amber was a very willing, consensual sexual partner to him, so Joe thinks he should be blameless. Joe always thinks he should be blameless. Joe never wants to be held accountable for anything.

There's a scene in the book, and it might seem like it's tossed off, but to me, it's really important, and it's Joe on Election Day 2020. He doesn't actually know for whom to vote. He is stymied by the fact that he doesn't think he should vote for Trump again. We find out in the secrecy of Joe's mind that he voted for Trump in 2016 because he just couldn't stand that woman. He's not sure that Biden is going to be best for the economy. He's nervous about-- He is like, "What do I do?" He votes for the Libertarian candidate because then whatever happens, Joe will be blameless because Joe must be blameless in his own mind.

Brigid Bergin: Wow. You've described all the ways that Joe thinks about himself, but what is it about him, about Joe that makes so many women not just attracted to him, but really devoted to him?

Laura Lippman: I think that the women who are devoted to Joe and who are drawn to him are women who are by their nature enablers. I hate that word. It sounds like a cliche when we say it, but there are definitely people among us who can't break the habit of taking care of other people. It's like something they do. It's just so instinctive. Unless one addresses oneself to stopping, you're going to keep doing it.

There was Amber who was hired to help Joe save his grades. There she is 20 years later and Joe needs her again. There's Meredith who upon meeting Joe as a college student and hearing the story about what happened to him, believes that she can make him good. I think both in the case of Meredith and Amber, there is this feeling of, "He's a good guy, but I can make him even better. I can take care of him."

They just see him as being charmed. I was really influenced by John Updike's Rabbit books, and more importantly, by an essay that Mary Gordon wrote about those books called Good Boys and Dead Girls. She traces the history in Dreiser, Faulkner, and Updike of female death juxtapose with male liberation. Harry Angstrom is that character too, where women just seem drawn to him and it's hard to fathom it from the outside, but yet there it is.

Brigid Bergin: You talked about how these are not necessarily characters that you are rooting for as you were reading this book. In fact, some of them, they're pretty terrible. Meredith maybe is the least terrible of them, though she's pretty cold except to Joe. We learn that Meredith is a survivor of childhood cancer. How has that experience shaped her as an adult?

Laura Lippman: Again, very tricky because there are so many layers to Meredith. It's made Meredith extremely intolerant of weakness, but it's also made her extremely protective of her marriage because it is her off-stated contention that her illness destroyed her parent's marriage. She really has bought into this idea of hostages to fortune, that you can have a great marriage or you can have a great family, but maybe not both, and that she's decided, "No, I don't want children. I want to be devoted to my marriage. I want a passionate, healthy marriage that grows and never becomes dull or uninspired." It's like that's her religion.

Brigid Bergin: Wow.

Laura Lippman: That is a consequence of her having been ill as a child and coming to believe that that must be the reason that her parents were unhappy and they drank, that she just sapped everything out of them.

Brigid Bergin: I guess that probably helps us understand why Meredith, who is this progressive MSNBC viewer, and Joe, who voted for Trump, voted for a Libertarian, don't really talk about politics very much. Is that part of her way of safeguarding her marriage to just not engage in that conflict?

Laura Lippman: Right. She just blatantly ignores anything about Joe that doesn't align with the Joe that she needs. He's well-behaved. He doesn't talk about politics with anyone, really. Even with his best friend, they're a little guarded talking about the election and who are they going to vote for, just saying, "Well, we've got to vote for who's best for business because we're businessmen. It's about the economy and we have to safeguard that." Yes, she sees the Joe that she wants to see. Again, Joe doesn't quite have that adoration that he would like to have. It's hard to have that 20 years into a relationship, but Meredith comes pretty close to almost providing it.

Brigid Bergin: Wow. Let's talk a little bit about the setting of this novel, wealthy Baltimore. You're a Baltimore resident. This book calls Baltimores Smalltimore. What is it about Baltimore that gives it a small-town feel in a big city?

Laura Lippman: I don't think I've ever heard anyone come up with a great answer for why it feels like such a small town. It's based almost on anecdotal experience. Everybody knows that as you move around in Baltimore, it feels like there may be two degrees of separation. I had a really hard summer last summer. My mom fell, my sister was in a nursing home. I had a bad shoulder injury. It was just hard. I had one week to get my mom out of the hospital into a place where she could live with around-the-clock medical. She bounced back great, for what it's worth.

I was in Target doing back-to-school shopping with my kid and I just began crying outside the dressing room. I couldn't hold it anymore. One of my best friends walked in, [chuckles] and we're both really far from home, I'm like, "Sujata, what are doing in our Target in Timonium?" She's like, "Well, I'm buying bathing suits for this conference. I happen to be out here." She's like, "What's going on?" That's just something no one can explain it, but we all know it to be true.

Brigid Bergin: Right. Ugh. I'm glad to hear things are doing better.

Laura Lippman: Thank you.

Brigid Bergin: Was there something about the lives of upper-middle-class people in Baltimore that you really wanted to explore through the story that you thought was interesting to you about setting these complicated characters within this world?

Laura Lippman: I've been writing for a long time and I've always told people that if my books are set in the suburbs, you know they're going to be very dark. I personally live in the city. I live in a very urban neighborhood of row houses. I don't even have a driveway or a parking pad. I'm fascinated. To me, on the one hand, I should be one of them. I think demographically by income and a lot of things, I am one of them, but I don't--

To me, I feel like Margaret Mead. I feel like I'm an anthropological study of the wealthy Baltimorean, and they just fascinate me because I can't imagine living in one of those big, big, big, big houses in my little three-story house that's maybe 14 feet wide. I am drawn to them as a case study.

Brigid Bergin: One of the things that is curious is Amber, given everything that happens to her, decides to move back to Baltimore. Why does she decide to do that? Why does she want to put herself in that position?

Laura Lippman: Amber is curious about Joe. Joe is an unfinished story in her mind. I think there's part of her that believes-- As a teenager, it was like, "If I could just make this boy love me, that will prove myself worth and solve everything." I think she's still haunted by those feelings 20 years later. Actually, she even feels some guilt toward Joe, because of her actions, he was-- He may have behaved badly chasing after his ex-girlfriend at the prom, but she sees that she dragged him into this without his knowledge. He had no idea what was going on. There's a real sense of unfinished business. Again, "If I could make him love me, that will solve everything."

Brigid Bergin: They do reconnect, but do you think Amber has really forgiven Joe for everything that went on on that prom night?

Laura Lippman: I think she thinks she has. I also think that Amber is incredibly smart and she recognizes pretty quickly that the relationship they have will not survive the end of the pandemic. She sees it as being something that could only happen during this suspended, frozen in Amber time where everything is so different and you can have a kind of privacy and secrecy. It's not going to withstand the return to normal. She sees that pretty early on, and she's like, "Maybe this is enough and maybe this will sustain me."

Brigid Bergin: Without giving too much away, we really don't learn too much about the plot that Joe has cooked up until pretty far into the book. How do you make decisions about pacing and when to reveal certain things to the reader?

Laura Lippman: I like a slow burn. I like to take it really slow because I think violent crimes are huge transgressions when they're planned and plotted and I want to see how someone who's a lot like me crosses that threshold. Most of us are just never going to do that. Most of us can understand an impulsive crime. Most of us can understand doing something extreme to save the life of our own child in the heat of a moment, but the idea of coming up with this calculated Double Indemnity kind of plot.

Again, I love Cain so much. His characters go right to it, but you get a sense with Cain's characters, they've been sitting around for a long time thinking about, maybe they're smarter than everyone else and there are things they could get away with. My characters have not been thinking that way. To me, it's a big transition. I just wanted to follow it and just let it build and build and build and build until I hope in the last 30 pages, things get pretty frenetic.

Brigid Bergin: As we've said, the book mostly alternates between the three points of view, Amber, Joe, and Meredith. Did one of the voices come easier for you last minute?

Laura Lippman: Meredith. Meredith was the easiest one for me to write because Meredith and I agree on most things. I think at one point when Meredith talks about her caustic inner voice-- I have a caustic outer voice sometimes. My own 13-year-old daughter has said to me, "You could do with being a teeny bit less judgmental, mom." I own that part of myself. Especially when Meredith is sitting there thinking critical thoughts of every single woman in her book club, yes, that's me.

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I'm not in a book club though, so I can't.

Brigid Bergin: Just really quickly, I know that there is a Lady in the Lake adaptation coming out on Apple TV+ soon starring Natalie Portman and Moses Ingram. Did you do any writing for that series?

Laura Lippman: No. Because I was married to someone who made a lot of television, I know a lot about television and mainly I don't want to write for it.

Brigid Bergin: We will have to leave it there. Laura Lippman is the author of Prom Mom, which is out now. Laura, thanks for joining me on All Of It.

Laura Lippman: Thank you so much for having me. This is a fun conversation.

Brigid Bergin: The Women's World Cup wrapped up the group stage early this morning. We're going to be joined by NBC's Soccer anchor Rebecca Lowe to recap the games and look to the rest of the knockout rounds. That's coming up on All Of It on WNYC.

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