the death of a young mother in a tiny Hudson Valley town leads to secrets and unsettling truths it's both a gripping mystery and a portrait of a family struggling through tragedy trying to put the pieces back together this is I Dreamed of Falling welcome to Between the Covers I'm Anne Bocock Julia Dahl is the author of five novels including The Missing Hours Conviction Run You Down and The Edgar Award finalist Invisible City she's a former reporter for CBS News and the New York Post she currently teaches journalism at NYU her new book is equal parts family drama and gripping mystery story the title I dreamed of falling julia thank you so much for being here thank you for having me this book is a family story it's a mystery the the way I I I interpret it it's a mystery to solve inside of a family story we don't spoil anything in here but so give us a peek into the story as much or as little as you are comfortable with right well thank you for having me yeah so I dreamed of falling a story of Roman Grady who is a the only reporter in a tiny Hudson Valley town and his girlfriend the longtime girlfriend the mother of his son is found dead on a hillside the police immediately think it's an overdose she's had some drug problems drugs are a problem in the area and he though thinks that's not what happened so as he starts to investigate how she died he also learns a that she was keeping a lot of secrets and that pretty much everybody in his tiny little town is also keeping a lot of secrets so this book is the story of him and his family dealing with her death but also trying to figure out what actually happened to her there's nothing like small town and secrets for a mystery novel yeah yeah it's perfect exactly and it's it's it really in some ways what inspired this book is my moving from the big city New York City to this tiny town um I live in a little town called Cornwall and Hudson it's 3,000 people and I grew up I grew up in Fresno California which is you know it's nor New York City but there's half a million people there and my high school had 3,000 people so all of a sudden I'm in this tiny little town and I don't know people but I start you know walking around and I'm always inspired as a writer by where I am you know just in New York City it was so easy there's a story on every corner right but in the small town the vibe is just so different and I start walking around and meeting people and one of the things that I realize about a small town is that first of all so many people living there now their generations had lived there and there was this sense that I felt that you can't really outrun who you were who your parents were who your grandparents i mean if your grandpa like got a DUI in 1958 and crashed into the general store people are still talking about it you know 50 80 years later and so there was this sense of like you know I've always had the the opportunity because I've moved a lot and to sort of reinvent myself and when you live in a small town you're just burdened by whatever is past good and bad and so I started thinking about a family that had lived in this town for multiple generations and had some ugliness in their past and the way that that really pulled them down and even when they tried to escape it they sort of couldn't as someone who grew up in a small town I I I relate totally to this the first page of the book is in Ashley's voice she is is the mother who you've already said is she's found dead the first chapter yeah you know I think this is a good starting point if if you would indulge us and read that first page to us yes the book is mostly told from the point of view of Ashley is the one who dies the book is mostly told from the point of view of her the father of her children her partner and his mother but this but there are a few chapters in Ashley's point of view so this is how the book starts chapter one i hadn't planned to go anywhere that night tara made mac and cheese on the stove and I watched Octinox with Mason until she called us in for dinner it was just the three of us me my son and his grandma mason's dad Roman was in the city and Tara's fianceé John was working late we finished eating and I washed the dishes while Mason and Tara built Lego spaceships in the living room i opened a beer and scrolled through my phone when I heard Tara say "Time for bed," I met them at the bottom of the stairs "i'll do bedtime," I offered "i want Gertie to do bedtime," said Mason touching Tara's leg mommy can do it tonight Tara said no i wasn't going to make him say more i knelt and opened my arms can I get a good night mason gave me a big hug both arms good night Mommy he said he kissed me on the cheek sweet dreams baby i love you i love you too i watched them walk up the stairs his rejection scratching at my heart in the kitchen I finished my beer and was about to open another when the text came in what else did I have to do it was 8:00 on a summer Friday night why not distract myself from the fact that my child loved his grandmother more than he loved me i wouldn't always be like this I told myself as I put on my new sandals the ones I bought because I knew Roman thought ankle straps were sexy soon everything would be different soon everything would be different that's an understatement it's an understatement there the family dynamics in this book are really interesting and really complex there's Roman and Ashley the the parents of Mason there's Roman and Tara tara is his mother there's Ashley and Tara and guess what every one of these characters is flawed very and I like that i really do how do you approach creating such complex relationships really this book started with I actually heard you guys have all heard of Sally Rooney i I listened to a a podcast with her recently on it and she said this and I was like I do that too she said that a lot of her books start with a relationship and this book really started with a relationship between um a mother Ashley in this case who has a child young she's financially insecure it was an unplanned pregnancy and she gave birth um the backstory in the book is that she gave birth during the COVID lockdown so she was alone in the hospital she had a traumatic birth nobody was there with her and the legacy of that for her was severe dep postpartum depression so when she comes home she doesn't really she really kind of can't take care of her child so her mother-in-law steps in and says "Let me do it."

Because her mother-in-law also had had a child young and was a terrible mother um and so this book is about the mother-in-law taking she wanted to take over as with the grandson and kind of make up for her mistakes as a mother and Ashley because she's again kind of young and let's be honest any any of us with children know taking care of an newborn and an infant and a toddler is really hard and it's exhausting and it's often really boring and it's just not you know there a lot of people are not built for that and Ashley has the opportunity to sort of say all right you take care of him I'll go back to my regular life and I'll not do this really hard thing so Tara takes over and immediately you know They're living in the same house it's the the a and friction begins who's the who's the real mom who does Mason go to and as you see in this chapter now after four years Mason goes to grandma because Ashley has sort of relinquished control but she's starting to feel like wait a minute I want that back i messed up i want to be mom again but it that's not easy and there's a lot to read about that i mean I'm glad you pointed out they all live in the same house that really changes the dynamic and you see that a lot there's a lot of families that live especially and this family lives in a small town which is changing a lot so and that happened a lot in the Hudson Valley certainly during COVID right so people from New York City who had money were like we're getting out of the city we're going to come up here and the housing prices went way up and all these houses that maybe were kind of falling apart now are these beautiful million-dollar mansions and Ashley or Ashley and her partner Roman they all live in this kind of falling down house um because it just works for them right none of them have they don't have a ton of money the the child care is all together and the friction is evident right and and I you know and one of the things that that I was really thinking about as I was writing this book was the legacy not COVID that couple years but the legacy of COVID and the way that it affects has affected so many families because so many families dealt with it so differently you know you had people who were like I'm not going to wear a mask I'm going I'm going to the bar and other people who were like you will not come with near me without an immunization and sometimes they lived in the same house and the friction there i think we will still be living with for a long time i want to talk about Tara because she is I mean and we're not mincing words you already said it she was a terrible mother now she's 45 and a grandmother i mean she you know she's at the same age where people are having you know I have a nine-year-old and I'm about that age yeah her entire world now is Mason it's like she's making up for all of for of her for for being such a horrible mother to her own son exactly i mean that and mothering is hard it's so hard and it's and and and yet some people and I think Tara Exactly when she had the child herself at she had she had Roman when she was 18 not prepared not a real partner and she just couldn't handle it but now she recognizes as a lot of us do as we get older really family is everything and g being given the gift of getting to raise another child in a time when she's now mature in herself she's a you know she's no longer a teenager to her it's like the greatest gift that's any anyone's ever given it and she is not going to screw it up for a second she is going to you know she's the mom or the grandma that is on the floor playing trains i mean how many of us have like how bor you know like on the floor with the 2-year-old let's play trains and like that's not for a lot of us fun but for her she just loves it and every you know there's no we don't watch TV when grandma's around we're going on a hike we're going to draw we're going to read together and so she is an amazing caretaker to this little boy and that's one of the things that we sort of talk about in the book is that Mason really is who he is because he has this amazing grandma his parents are kind of screwed up they They are now his his father Roman he's the local news reporter this is not exactly a glamorous job that he has i mean he you know he's covering the opening of of a store or I mean it it's a it's a job it's not the job he wanted exactly exactly so Roman is in his early 20s he went to college to be a journalist and won a fellowship to go out to Los Angeles and work at the LA Times and then his girlfriend got pregnant he decided "Okay we're going to He loved her they They love each other we're going to have this baby."

And so he took a job as the only reporter in this little town and yeah I mean he does things like go take pictures at the bench dedication right and he has to go to the fun run and the you know the school board and the and interview the local guy who's turning 80 and who you know I mean like that kind of stuff which is not what he wanted to do and it's not what his friends from school are doing they're out in hospitals covering CO they're overseas covering war and he's like super depressed he's stuck he is stuck yeah you worked at CBS you worked uh at the New York Post you were a reporter i'm looking at Roman's job i Yes it is journalism so did you draw on your experience be to develop him even though it they're totally different worlds yeah I mean in a way like so all really almost all my books have some element of journalism in them because I was a journalist i teach journalism i am so passionate about journalism i call myself a journalism evangelist because I think it is the fourth it is the fourth pillar of democracy everything falls apart if we don't know what's going on right and yet and that's journalism but the media that now sort of employs all journalists is really falling apart in so many different ways and it has been for a generation um and so like the the media I came into in 1999 doesn't exist anymore um and the jobs are hard to come by and they're badly paid and they're insecure um but the thing that's really devastating I think to our society to our democracy is that local news like the local paper right there were tens of thousands of those and in you know in the last 25 years like 70% of them have just gone so so if you live in a small town or even a medium-sized town there's no local paper you know maybe there's a stringer from the Miami Herald that that works your area but they're not attending every school board meeting and every planning board meeting and every zoning board meeting and they're not keeping the mayor honest right there's just nobody to do that well that begs the question in addition to being an author you're teaching students you're teaching journalism and like you said things have changed from when you were Things have really changed from when I started what do you see ahead for your students well I do see that the skills of learning how to be a journalist right learning how to how to get information take it in and then spit it out in a way that is without jargon you know get in difficult you know scientific information and translate it into something that is useful and factual that everybody can read learning how to do research learning how to interview people learning how to write succinctly and clearly those are skills that you can use in a million different places and many of my students really want to be they want to work for ProPublica and the New York Times and NPR and PBS and you know speak truth to power and shine light in the darkness and that's why they're doing what they're doing but they also know and we talk about this now a lot in school is that those jobs are hard to come by and when you get them they pay very badly and you know usually you're free you know you're full-time freelance right like for years I was at CBS and I was a full-time freelancer i mean I was there every day but that's just sort of how it is and for a lot of people that's okay because they go into it like a nurse goes into her work or a teacher or a social worker or even a like a minister or a rabbi you go into it because it's your calling you feel like this is what I am born to do this is this is the thing that for me is like the moral choice i'm good at this but you know maybe it's choosy up and spits you out i know i mean so many of the people I've worked with over the last 25 years are now in communications public relations marketing advocacy i mean pol politics there's a lot you can do with those skills so I try to teach the students the skills but also talk frankly about all right well if you can't get a job here maybe you get a job there what's interesting is that you teach most likely 20somes and this book is full of 20somes and your characters are really authentic and I said the same thing with the last book in the missing hours that there was this age yeah uh person right my take is that you are unfolding this backstory we're seeing their quirks and their flaws and maybe because you do teach this age you you like have an end yeah i mean I think some of it is just and I you know humans are humans right we we all have a mom we all have to get up every day and make money we all you know I mean it like in some when we're all struggling with cell phone addiction and and you know global warming and all that you know all this sort of just stuff family drama all the stuff but it's true that I love teaching because I'm now in my late 40s right and I I I but I don't want to get old right i always want to know what's going on because the new generation is different just as I was different from my parents and their them from their parents and it's so invigorating and important for me to be in touch with that and learn from them and I really you know a lot of people say "Oh this new generation they're so lazy they're this and that."

I totally disagree i mean of course every there's bad apples and everywhere but I feel like these the students I meet and again you know they're self- selecting for wanting to be journalists so they're already sort of just people who are curious and excited about the world but they have so much interesting perspective on the world they have so many stories they want to tell they are so much more worldly and broad-minded than I was at their age and I love very encouraging it really I I feel you know what when I left the newsroom I was kind of depressed it it was I think 2018 and I had covered crime and justice right so I mean my every day my life was you know was all crime and shootings and the worst in the world and just but just being in a newsroom had started to wear on me and I started teaching and my worldview changed it made me a a happier person and it made me think okay it's not all just bad news there are young people that want to change the world and they are in some ways smarter than we are they know so much julia can we talk about my favorite character in the book and that would be Mason he's four years old was your son close to that age when you started writing i mean he's he's you've got him nailed down i know i do i So Mason is right so Mason's four years old i My son was a little older when I started writ he's nine now i was He was probably five or six when I started writing this but yeah I mean I was But I don't think I could have written Mason if had I not had a little boy that I knew so well and I do I love him too and I you know being an older an old slightly older mom they call when I was pregnant they called it a geriatric pregnancy it is what it is um but seeing him listen you know listening to his voice and the questions he asks and the things that he's scared of and things that he's not scared of is again it's like you just see the world and through a whole new lens and so I allowed myself to he wasn't as big a part in some of the first drafts i mean he was there because he's the child of the the the the main characters but I I quickly came to realize that and this is true for everybody right like that your children teach you so much and that you know because they they don't have the filter of all the years of experience and in some ways ugliness but also beauty they say it like it is you you know it's very hard for at least most of the children I know to lie like they're going to tell you how they feel and the family he's in Tara and Ma and Roman are lying to themselves and each other a lot and Ro and Mason comes in and he is he's like the truth teller and he's like "This is terrible guy."

You know they he is forces them to deal with the situation and the emotions at hand and that became a really fun thing for me to write about i love Mason i really did in the book there are themes of regret and there's this possibility of forgiveness that really do drive the the plot is that something and this is more of a crafting question I guess is that something that evolves as you are writing or do you go in there with that mindset i go in with there were some themes I wanted to go in you know I always write sort of mystery thrillers and I always know like in this one I knew who died and I knew who did it and I nominally knew why but I had no real idea how I was going to get there and in some ways that makes it makes writing the book a longer a little a longer process i have a lot of I have a folder of outtakes i never delete anything so I'll write and write and write and then you know this book is like 75 80,000 words and I think I have 60,000 words of outtakes right because you have to just write through things and go that's not right but I just learned something so I'll pull that there so the themes I was thinking about with this book definitely were regret and can you make up for past wrongs against people and can you forgive people for really wronging you and what does that forgiveness look like and if there's not forgiveness can you still move forward even if that pain is always there so those were things I definitely was thinking about because I knew the the rough contours of this family but how exactly it would play out came in the writing i know you don't sit down and go from page one to page 300 and and that's it right but how do you start right oh that's such a good question i always I do start knowing you know somebody's going to die and here's who did it and why but I I have a lot of false starts this book actually did start with Ashley um I knew I wanted a moment of her sort of having a moment where you know her son rejects her and she feels the sting of that um because that was going to be sort of the primary motivating factor in her life and the thing that kind of comes out in part of their family um but I think in the writing I have tried to outline you know I've tried to sit down and be like "Okay this chapter is going to be this."

And I just get so bored you know i'm like I just want to write i want to be in these people's head i want to write i recently heard a author uh Chris Whitaker who wrote a book you should all read called All the Colors of the Dark um it was I think it was a Jenna pick this year it was a just a beautiful book and I heard him talk about his writing process and he said that his first draft is always just dialogue and I haven't done that but I'm writing a new book now and I'm thinking about that a lot because really writing scenes between people is how you move things forward how people interact with each other and who says what and what the tone is and what's not said are how for me how I figure out how these people how they tick and what makes them do what they do that's a very interesting way of looking at it i don't think I've ever heard that me neither as the author you already know who the victim is and and who who did it but there is this challenge in writing mysteries of connecting the dots without giving it away does that take time yes yes the first book I wrote Invisible City was in some ways easier because I wrote it I didn't have a contract i had no idea if anybody would ever read it and I was kind of just playing um but each book I write afterwards is a different challenge because I'm always sort of trying to write a whole different kind of book i don't I I did have a series of three books but they're each very different because frankly I just got bored one of the things that's a real privilege about being a published author is that you have I have an agent who is brilliant and I have an editor that I've been working with for 10 years who's also brilliant so I can go to them and say give them drafts have problems and say "Can you help me with this?"

And my second novel I sent to my agent and she said "Here's you've got a big problem here the problem is that your reader knows plot points that your characters don't."

And that's very frustrating and I I hadn't I mean the minute you say it out loud you're like "Oh yeah of course."

Right like if you're reading and you know that something happened but the character hasn't found it out you're like "Gh can we just keep going?"

So that was something I learned that you have to make sure that your characters are caught up with your reader right so that the reader doesn't get bored and one of the things I've started thinking about with a mystery novel is something that I call the arc of suspicion right so as you're reading a mystery novel you sort of know okay well I'm going to find out who did it first oh I think it's this person oh wait now I think it's this person oh I think it's this person and so thinking about it in a visual way has helped me a little bit think okay well as I'm writing okay by 75 I want it the arc of suspicion to have changed and then at page 200 I want it to be here and it's not till you know 285 that we get to the main character and that kind of those tricks come after you know I've been doing this for getting on 15 years but and each time I learn more and more how do you know when you're done and and not and other than a publisher has said you know you have a deadline We we need the manuscript but how do you know cuz you could keep rewriting forever yeah absolutely and that is actually one of the reasons that I tend to write murder mysteries because at some level there's a built-in at the beginning you somebody dies at the end you figure out who did it right and you know yeah you could go on and on forever and actually my my fourth book The Missing Hours is my only book it's a thriller but it's not a murder mystery and ending that was an absolute nightmare i was like I have no idea where this book ends because you need to find something that's satisfying but but of course these characters' lives go on they could go on forever they could go on for 10,000 pages right but you want so you want to find an end that feels like a whole and it comes from theme you know the theme of for this one it was can you forgive and can you get over regret and I felt like the final scene in that there's a sense of like there's going to be a moving on so often it comes back to theme and all my books I actually have thought about this recently because I was looking back at them all of my books have ended on a line of dialogue i again I like that because I like the idea of going out with someone speaking that the conversation continues potentially the new book by Julia Dah is I Dreamed of Falling julia this has been such a pleasure thank you so much the pleasure is all mine thank you i'm Anne Bok please join me on the next Between the Covers heat heat