You Deserve to Know
You Deserve to Know
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Aggie Blum Thompson on You Deserve to Know
In her own words: quotes and insights from the author.Why she wrote it
A gossip session that became a novelThe book began at a dinner table, not a desk. A passing story about two couples who had dissolved and reshuffled their marriages set Thompson imagining a novel she would call ‘Double Couple.’ Her editor vetoed the title on the spot, reading it as advertising for something other than a thriller, which forced a structural change that made the book what it is.
I was with some girlfriends, drinking and chatting, when someone mentioned that a couple that they knew from high school was getting a divorce. Apparently, they had been close with another couple and the husband from one marriage had fallen in love with the wife from the other. Other people started chiming in that they knew couples that had divorced and ‘switched’ partners like this. I imagined a book called ‘Double Couple’ about two couples that do everything together and ending up ‘switching’ mates. My editor thought ‘Double Couple’ sounded like a book about swingers — so we scratched that, and I added a third couple to the mix.
deborahkalbbooks.blogspot.com, “Book Q&As with Deborah Kalb: Q&A with Aggie Blum Thompson”The premise of intertwined couples raised a question that interested Thompson more than the infidelity plot itself. She had spent nearly a decade inside Bethesda’s social world, watching how school schedules and neighborhood proximity manufacture closeness without necessarily manufacturing affection.
Just through convenience, you end up socializing with people who have kids the same age as [yours]. So I thought, okay, [these characters] are really tight. They’re intimate with each other, they’ve been to each other’s houses. But do they like each other? How strong are those friendships, really?
A private grievance fed the book from underneath. Thompson does not name the person or the incident, but the essay she wrote for Terribleminds.com at the book’s publication makes clear that at least one character in the novel began as a vehicle for something her real life never delivered.
Someone did me dirty once. Maybe someone did you dirty once as well, and you, like me, wondered if there was going to be any cosmic comeuppance for this evil-doer, any karmic retribution or at least acknowledgement that they did a bad, bad thing. Maybe you too experienced a profound sense of unfairness when you realized that was not going to happen. But did you sit down and write a novel and, inspired by your tormentor, create a character so vile and twisted that you cackled with glee as you wrote? I did, and it felt great, and my therapist called it sublimation, which is a fancy word for using your pain productively for your art. And it’s cheaper than therapy, too.
How she wrote it
Characters found by writing, not by planningThompson’s structure keeps all three women’s perspectives in rotation while the husbands remain opaque, so the reader always holds more pieces than any one character does. That accumulation of partial knowledge is the engine she built the book around.
My goal of the book is that you want to keep reading. It gnaws at you like a mental puzzle, keeps you occupied, thinking, What is going on?
The murder victim at the book’s center arrived without a personality. He was a structural placeholder, listed in early drafts simply as ‘husband no. 3,’ and his complexity accumulated only as Thompson kept writing scenes that required him to be something specific. The layered backstory, including a dead mother whose prose he may have stolen, was not planned; it was uncovered.
Take my murder victim in YOU DESERVE TO KNOW. He got his start as ‘husband no. 3’ but after a few pages he emerged a writer, and not just any writer but a failed one, with great literary aspirations (yet little to back it up), and a dead mother who wrote beautiful prose that he may or may not have cribbed. The more I wrote about him, the more interesting and complicated he became, but it was only through writing about him that he was revealed to me.
Four books in, Thompson had accumulated enough evidence of her own process to recognize a pattern, even if recognizing it did not make it easier. The nausea at the start of each draft is not a sign that the book will fail; it is, apparently, the only way she begins.
After having written four books, you’d think I’d know that I always start each new book reluctantly, the words coming begrudgingly, accompanied by a vague sense of nausea and the feeling that I have no idea what I am doing.
Her husband had learned to read her face in the kitchen: ‘Let me guess, you have no idea if this novel is going to work.’ She confirms this happens every time.
Once writing is underway, Thompson moves off the screen. The skeletal draft printed on paper becomes the real workspace, marked up on a couch with colored pens rather than revised at a keyboard.
I write a skeletal rough draft on the computer and print it out, but then I do the real writing by hand. I curl up on the couch with coffee and colored pens and begin marking up my manuscript.
On what’s at stake
Suburbia’s image of perfection, and who keeps poking at itThompson grew up wanting to leave the suburbs and ended up writing her fourth thriller set in them. That biographical loop shapes how she sees the world she depicts: not as a comfortable backdrop but as a pressure system built around appearances.
There are many wonderful aspects to living in the burbs, but there’s an undercurrent of unease and dissatisfaction, which I like to explore in my books. It’s a focus on the image of perfection that begs to be pierced.
deborahkalbbooks.blogspot.com, “Book Q&As with Deborah Kalb: Q&A with Aggie Blum Thompson”When a reviewer coined the term ‘suburban noir’ for her earlier books, Thompson took it as the most accurate label her work had received. The Library of Congress filed the book under suspense fiction, which is accurate but misses the specific geography of her discomfort.
A reviewer once described my books as ‘suburban noir’ and I loved it. The dark side of suburbia. Of course, there is no officially sub-genre called suburban noir. The Library of Congress categorizes my book as suspense fiction. I’ll take it. I’ve learned to write what I want and let other people worry about labels.
The impulse to puncture suburban surfaces is not purely analytical. Thompson traces it to an earlier self, the one who grew up inside those surfaces and never fully made peace with them.
But there’s this teenager in me that just wants to poke holes in it.
What she wants us to sit with
The last chapter earns its long shadowThompson frames her ambitions for the reader’s experience without apology and without false modesty about what the book is built to do. She wants the final chapter to land as a retroactive reread of everything that came before it.
Absolutely nothing but a good time! I hope to give them a few hours away from their worries and their woes. I like to think this is a smart thriller, one that gives you both entertainment and a puzzle to chew on mentally. I hope that last chapter makes the reader think long and hard about everything they thought they understood about these women.
deborahkalbbooks.blogspot.com, “Book Q&As with Deborah Kalb: Q&A with Aggie Blum Thompson”