My Life as a Villainess

I read My Life As a Villainess, by Laura Lippman, after years of reading Lippman’s Tess Monaghan novels, most of them set in Baltimore. I used to keep a Monaghan mystery in my bedside table for a rainy day, but enough of them came along that I eventually finished the series.

After I finished Hush, Hush in March, the very last Tess Monaghan mystery, I started looking around for other books by Lippman. I love this author who writes murder mysteries but throws in a reference to another book while a character is describing a playroom: “While the rest of the house was her father’s design, this had been her mother’s creation, inspired by a book she had read as a child, a book she had planned to share with Alanna and Ruby when they were older. But by the time they were older, their mother was gone, so Alanna never did find out in what children’s book the kids played in something called the Office.”
The answer is left up to the reader. It left me wondering why Alanna didn’t read widely enough to discover the answer for herself–in a fairly well-known children’s book called The Four-Story Mistake.

Anyway, I decided to read Lippman’s book of essays, where I discovered that an essay I already knew and loved, “The Whole 60,” is first in the volume. My Life As a Villainess was published in 2020 so you may have missed the publicity for it, as I did (different places are trying to catch up on publicity in different ways; just this week I attended a reception for Kenyon authors who had a book published 2019-2021).

In her preface to the volume, Lippman writes a good defense of the personal essay: “I had thought my experiences were so bizarre that they would function as amusement for ‘normal’ people. Instead, I was reminded that the more specific one is about one’s life, the more universal it can seem.” I remember Jo Walton saying something like this after her semi-autobiographical novel Among Others came out.

The title comes from Lippman’s divorce from “the one person who had encouraged me to follow my dreams, to write that first book.” She says that “when I sat down to start my eighth novel, I knew something new about venality—my own. I realized that somewhere in Texas, where my ex had settled, a person woke up every day and cursed me as a villain. Well, probably not cursed and probably not every day. That’s a little self-aggrandizing. But, to the extent that he did think of me, it was in the shape of a most unflattering narrative. I loved her, I believed in her and then, just as she was on the verge of becoming successful, she left me. I had become the bad guy in someone else’s story.”

Maybe because Lippman is almost exactly my age, I like her reasoning about social media. She says “I am well aware of everything that’s wrong with Facebook and Twitter. I have seen my friends abused. I understand the misuse of our date, the extremities of cancel culture, the lack of nuance, the echo chambers we create within our online communities.” But she also says “it’s hard to do right by all the good people I know. There are so many people I love that I haven’t even spoken to in the past year, unless social media exchanges count as speaking. Isn’t that part of getting old, too? Amassing so many friends that you can’t keep up with them?”

I like that she occasionally crafts a sentence that strikes me as good material for an aphorism, like “Motherhood is a story where I don’t control the ending.”

I like that she argues against conventional thinking. Here’s my favorite part of my favorite essay by Lippman, “The Whole 60”: “Everyone knows old women are disgusting. I recently listened to an NPR show—NPR!—with a series of punch lines about granny panties, Angela Lansbury, and what was intended to be a gross-out image of an old woman in a crotchless thong. Every day, everywhere I go, the culture is keen to remind me how repulsive I am.
I thump the culture on the chest, push back, and say one of the most infuriating things a woman can ever say: Actually I like the way I look.”

Do you like the way you look? Have you ever read anything by Laura Lippman?