Interviewed by Mimi Bhalla
Bonnie Kistler is the author of thriller novels such as Shell Games; Her, Too; The Cage; and House on Fire. Born and raised in Philadelphia, she graduated from Bryn Mawr College and then the University of Pennsylvania Law School. Before becoming a published author, Bonnie was a trial lawyer specializing in corporate litigation with major Philadelphia firms. She and her husband now live in southwest Florida and the mountains of western North Carolina. Her upcoming release, Shell Games, will come out on November 9th.
SM: Good morning! Thank you for agreeing to talk about your upcoming novel, Shell Games, set to be released in November. Can you give me a brief synopsis of the novel?
BK: Shell Games is a psychological thriller set on the gulf coast of Florida about an older woman, a fabulously wealthy real estate developer, who at the age of seventy is reunited with her long lost high school sweetheart and joyfully marries him.
But on her wedding night, he confesses to her, or so she claims, that he committed a horrible unsolved multiple murder many decades before. And she freaks out, she calls 911, she alerts the police, the FBI, who quickly establish that her husband, Charlie, could not have committed these crimes because he was a marine deployed to Lebanon at the time.
Her conclusion is that he must be gaslighting her as a way of getting control of her fortune and having her committed. Her family, notably her son-in-law, is certain that she’s losing her mind, that she’s got dementia and hallucinated the entire episode. Charlie, her loving husband, says no no she just had too much wedding champagne. She was drunk, she imagined it all.
The novel is really about her daughter, Julie, a young woman who has lived under the shadow of her powerful mother all her life. And who is now living under the shadow of her fairly domineering husband, who’s a very successful surgeon. It falls to her to try and decide, is her brilliant mother losing her mind? Or is her beloved new stepfather in fact a con man who’s trying to get control of the money?
And it turns out that a lot of people are gaslighting in a lot of different ways. All of this is set in Florida, an area of very rampant development and devastating climate change, which all comes together at the end.
SM: Shell Games is inspired by an unsolved mystery from the 1980s, the Chicago Tylenol Murders. You’ve stated that this inspiration for your novel came to you in a dream. Do you often write down your dreams and use them in your writing?
BK: Not at all. This was a real anomaly for me. I’m not a woo-woo kind of person, I don’t see auras or anything like that. Most of my books, all of my books until this point, have been what a lot of people consider ripped from the headlines, very much set in the real world, inspired by real life events or situations that are going on at the moment. To have something come to me in a dream was really just a bizarre experience.
I had this dream in which I was the bride, and my new husband tells me he committed the Tylenol murders. And I freaked out, and in my dream I’m running to the police station to report him, and he’s following behind and shaking his head sadly, saying to the police “She’s having another one of her episodes.” And I think, Oh my God, he’s gaslighting me. When I woke up, I had two reactions: One, I was glad that the groom in the dream was not my actual husband, who was sleeping soundly beside me. But my second reaction was, this would make a good story. So I made a lot of tweaks to the dream, and of course fleshed it out a good bit, but that was where the germ came from.
SM: Yeah, as someone who keeps a dream journal, I’ve never considered using it for my writing. But now, you’ve given me a few ideas.
BK: *Laughs* Good, good.
SM: In the novel, the theme of gaslighting and deception plays a major role in the plot development. And as the main character Julie questions whether she or her mother are being gaslit, the reader also questions who is gaslighting who. Do you consider Julie an unreliable narrator?
BK: Not deliberately. I mean, she’s not like Amy from Gone Girl who’s deliberately lying to everyone plus the reader. Julie’s unreliable only to the extent that she doesn’t understand herself. She’s very much enthralled to her husband, she’s got what you’d call a sexual addiction to her husband, and allows him to really run roughshod over her. Her mother also really runs roughshod over her, and that’s been a pattern her whole life. And so Julie grows up under this shadow and doesn’t emerge until her mother’s death, when she’s like a chrysalis coming out of the cocoon and turning into a butterfly in her own right. And she really needed, it’s sad to say, but she needed her mother’s death in order to come into her own.
SM: Yeah, it’s an unfortunate turn of events for her. What writing strategies do you use to keep the reader guessing throughout the novel? Because the gaslighting spins this whole complex, so how do you get that ball rolling?
BK: This goes back to your question earlier about an unreliable narrator, which if Julie isn’t one, I the author perhaps am one. *laughs* You have to be very economical, stingy, in terms of which details to divulge when and hold information back, not in a way to cheat the reader and not exactly mislead, but not give enough so that the pieces do not come together immediately in the reader’s mind. So there’s always a piece missing and they have to read on, and that’s what propels the suspense.
SM: Yeah, it was definitely a fast paced read. I was racing through it the whole night. So switching gears, let’s talk about some of the side plots. Shell Games is set in Florida,a state threatened by destruction from climate change. Why did you choose this setting and include this hotbed issue as a discussion alongside the main murder plot?
BK: I’ve lived half time in Florida for about twenty years, but it took me twenty years before I felt that I had enough knowledge to write about it in this way. Following a lot of the political developments in the state in recent years, it’s really changed complexion a good bit. There’s been a lot of conflicting forces coming to bear. I live in downtown Sarasota, which has just exploded. We called it “Crane City”, because of all of the building cranes erecting the high rise buildings all along the bay in downtown Sarasota. So development was very much on my mind.
And of course the hurricane threat is always there, and it’s gotten worse in recent years due to global warming, because the hurricanes need the warmth of the water in order to form, and as the water gets so much warmer, it’s just going to continue to happen earlier and sooner and worse than it is. So these thoughts were always on my mind.
And when I decided to make the mother a wealthy woman, I thought, well how was her wealth acquired? I didn’t want her to be an heiress, I wanted her to be self-made. I always like to feature strong, smart women in my books. So I thought, she’s a real estate developer! I don’t actually know any women who are real estate developers at this level, but I thought let’s create her. So between the idea of real estate development clashing with the whole issue of climate change, it kind of all just fell into place for me.
SM: It resonated with me a lot as I read, I was born in Florida, my parents met there, so we got back and visit a lot. You know, the last time we visited Miami, I remember seeing on the news one of the apartment complexes right near our hotel had actually collapsed because the ground can’t support it anymore.
BK: Yeah, these things are definitely happening.
SM: Even now living in Houston, along the gulf coast, we’ve had so many more hurricanes and tornadoes this summer that we usually don’t get until the fall.
BK: We can see it happening in real time.
SM: It’s good to bring awareness to that through novels.
BK: That’s what I was hoping. I didn’t want to write a polemic about climate change. My books are designed to entertain and to enthrall. But in each of my books I try to work in some amount of social issues, just to kind of subtly bring awareness to these things. So if any readers walk away having enjoyed the murder aspect of the book but also thinking, “Yeah the climate change is really something,” I will have felt as though I accomplished two things.
SM: Well it definitely still enthralls, the hurricane adds an element of drama to the plot.
BK: Although I have to tell you, I just saw the movie Twisters.
SM: Oh yeah, it’s on my list.
BK: *Laughs* Oh my goodness. I had several heart attacks.
SM: What did you think?
BK: It’s really edge of your seat. And how they did their computer magic to make these things, you know, be whipped into the air, was just astonishing. I tried to make the hurricane scene in my book harrowing, but it pales next to all those twisters.
SM: Did you watch the movie in those 4D motion seats?
BK: *Laughs* No, I wonder what that would have been like!
SM: While you’re watching it, it’s like moving and shaking you along with it.
BK: It must have been an incredible sensory experience.
SM: Another main theme of the novel is the strained mother-daughter relationship between Julie and Kate, which intensifies throughout the novel as Julie deals with her mother’s mental fragility and her own feelings of inferiority. What advice do you give writers on how to flesh out complicated characters and family dynamics in an authentic way?
BK: I think it’s all done through action and dialogue, and not exposition. I mean you can’t really have a few paragraphs about how they’ve had a troubled relationship. You show it. The classic old-fashioned line about show don’t tell. So just in their interaction, develop it. I would tell writers to try to visualize how a domineering mother who’s always used to getting her own way would behave towards a daughter who’s always used to obeying her and what the daughter’s reactions would be. Just try to visualize it like a movie. Like if I was casting this book into a movie, and these were the leads, how would I act as director, what would my stage directions be to them, and how would I tell them to move, and to talk, and to look? And I think if you visualize it like that, then you can find the words to describe it.
SM: Yeah, that’s good advice. What was the biggest challenge of writing Shell Games compared to your previous novels?
BK: You know, interestingly, it didn’t feel particularly challenging. This one went faster than a lot of my other novels, it certainly was faster than the one I’m currently struggling to write, which has been a bear.
SM: Oh I’ll touch on that later.
BK: In Shell Games, I think it was challenging with the many different interpersonal relationships because I wanted the reader to understand why Julie’s so in love with her husband, or believes she is. But also for the reader to see this is bad news, this is not a healthy marriage. And I also wanted to develop the relationship with the young environmental activist to show that she’s got another side, and the way she behaves with him is so different from the way she interacts with her husband. I think, or I hope, that the reader can say, here’s a healthier interaction. Here’s the way Julie could be her true self if she had somebody like this. There’s no romance, so to speak, with the environmental activist, but the hope of future entanglement is lying there, so you can see that there’s something for Julie out there.
SM: So when Kate dies in the novel, there’s all these conditions and legal traps in her will. How did your career as a trial lawyer influence your journey of becoming a writer? Are there any skills or knowledge from your law career that have helped you write novels?
BK: Yeah, I think it’s been a real benefit to me as a writer, in two respects. First, we deal with words all the time. With language. I used to always say, words are the my weapons of choice. And I used them as weapons as a trial lawyer. But they’re also the tools in my toolbox. Having a good ability to use language as a lawyer translates very easily over to being an author.
But a lot of people say, oh but legal writing is so dry, you know, whereas the party of the first part…I didn’t do that kind of law, I didn’t do transactional work, I didn’t do contracts. I did persuasive work, I tried cases for juries, before judges in bench trials, and I did appellate work writing briefs, and it was designed to persuade and to present a version of the facts, which can always be massaged in a way to make your side look better than the other side, short of falsifying anything.
But massaging the facts and presenting and packaging them in a way, that’s what I think you do as a novelist. You’re taking your made up facts, but you’re writing in a way to persuade the reader to come along this journey with you, to stick with the story, and I think the art of persuasion combined with the ability to use language aided me a lot. There’s so many other lawyer writers out there, I think they’ve all found the same thing to be true.
SM: Very well said. I read that you graduated with honors in English literature from Bryn Mawr College for undergrad. So did you always plan to be a novelist after practicing as a lawyer, was that in your dreams or was literature just a side passion?
BK: No, I always wanted to be a writer from the time I was a child, and that was all I did in college. I took the bare minimum of the other required classes, *laughs* and everything else was just novels. All I wanted to do was read novels. I think the best way to learn how to be a writer is to read. To read a lot, and to read well. That’s all I did in college, and I was definitely already starting to write, to toy with fiction at that stage.
But at the same time, I wanted to be able to earn a living. I wanted to be an independent woman, I didn’t want to have to get an MRS degree or any of that nonsense from the ‘50s. So I thought well let’s go to law school, and let’s see.
And for a while I did get completely absorbed into the whole legal career mindset. As a young lawyer in a big law firm, your time is not your own, and it’s a lot of toil and drudgery and everything. But still, even while working these eighty hour weeks, I had this urge to write. I wrote my first novel in longhand on a yellow legal pad on the train.
SM: Wow.
BK: To and from the office. So the desire was always there. I just waited until the moment was right, until I was able to see that in fact I would be able to successfully sell a novel, to leave my law firm and make it my full time vocation.
SM: That is really impressive. My hand would fully cramp up if I tried that.
BK: *Laughs* I couldn’t do it today, let me tell you.
SM: Finally, what do we have to look forward to from you next, are you working on any new projects?
BK: I am. I’m working on a novel now, but as I mentioned now, it’s a bit of a struggle. Usually, every time I’ve written a book, until this one, I’ve always had my starting premise, I know what the issues are, I know what the conflict is, I know who the main characters are, and I know where I want to end up. I don’t always know how I’m going to get there, but I always know where the finish line is. With this book, the finish line keeps moving. *Laughs* I don’t have a clear image so that’s why it’s been a struggle.
But just in a nutshell it’s a story inspired by the genealogy databases like ancestry.com and 23andme.com, and sending in saliva samples, getting the DNA profile and discovering things that you were not expecting to discover. In this case it’s a discovery about various little three-year-old children in various parts of the country who are being mysteriously kidnapped, and then just as mysteriously returned. The mystery as to who is kidnapping these children, what does it have to do with these DNA reports, and… I’ll leave it there.
SM: Well it sounds fascinating. It sounds like some kind of experiment is going on.
BK: It does, doesn’t it?
SM: Well I’m excited for it, I’m looking forward to reading it.
BK: Thank you so much.
SM: Thank you so much for taking the time to talk with us.
BK: It was a pleasure meeting you. Bye bye.
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