There is always pressure on writers to come up with a tagline for their books. For the fourth book in the Endings series, Insensible Loss which comes out today, it took me a really long time. I mean, I came up with stuff (because they made me!) and the books I called out weren’t off-base, but the penultimate one? That didn’t get to me until a few weeks ago.
What came to me — finally — were the two titles that,
together, both represent the book and that were, in some ways, the genesis of it.
From my first reading when I was a child, The Secret Garden both enchanted and frightened me. Frightened is possibly the wrong word: it’s a book for kids, after all. But there are chilling elements in Frances Hodgson Burnett’s masterful 1911 novel, and the themes of redemption and renewal are everywhere.
Patricia Highsmith’s Ripley Underground (1970) was the book that somewhat inspired the driving narrative in Insensible Loss, even if I didn’t realize it when I sat down to write. When I read a description of Ripley Underground I had not yet read the book. By the time I read it a few weeks later, I was well into crafting my story, one that is entirely different from Highsmith’s novel.
If you’d like to read a garden-based excerpt of the Insensible Loss, you can do so here.