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Before I was an author, I was a lawyer toiling away in big law firms in high-rise buildings. If it’s true that we all spend a third of our lives in bed, I often felt that I spent at least another third riding up and down in elevators. Because my firms occupied multiple floors of their buildings, I not only took the elevator morning and night, but also many times throughout the day as my work took me from conference room to library to other lawyers’ offices and back again.

To me, the elevator was fraught with peril.

Many people have a primal fear of elevators, but I’m not claustrophobic, or enochlophobic (afraid of crowds), or xenophobic (afraid of strangers), or even basophobic (afraid of falling). (But note: it can’t be an accident that the word elevator connotes only rising up and never crashing down; Mr. Otis knew what he was doing when he hit upon that descriptor).

None of these fears is unfounded. Incidents involving elevators and escalators kill about 30 and seriously injure about 17,000 people each year in the United States.* (For a thrilling account of the more inventive ways an elevator can kill you, go read Linwood Barclay’s Elevator Pitch).

The most common fear is of being stuck in a malfunctioning elevator. Some people trapped in this situation imagine that they’re running out of oxygen. They become anxious, and start to experience cold sweats, a racing heartbeat, hyperventilation, shaking, nausea, disorientation – all the classic symptoms of a panic attack.

My fear was a bit different. Yes, I was afraid of being stuck in a broken-down elevator, but only if I were stuck with someone else. I wasn’t afraid of elevators per se. I was afraid of my fellow passengers, or at least of a potential conflict with my fellow passengers. See, I have a fear of confrontation – an unfortunate trait for a trial lawyer, you might say, but it really only surfaced when I found myself trapped in a small space with opposing counsel or some other man with whom I might have exchanged heated words. My lurid imagination would kick in. I’d imagine that the elevator broke down, that I was trapped with this nemesis for endless hours. I’d imagine shouting matches that turned to scuffles and escalated (see what I did there?) to murder, mayhem, and sexual assault. Sometimes I’d even imagine that he was hurting me.

Joking aside, it was this fear that inspired my new novel, THE CAGE. In the opening scene, two women working late on a Sunday night step onto an elevator going down. The car stalls.

Why do they call them cars? one of the women wonders. Elevators weren’t cars. In a car you were in control. You could stop, pull over, get out, walk free. They should call them what they were. Cages.

By the time rescue finally arrives, one of the women is dead of a gunshot to the head. Was it suicide brought on by a panic attack as the survivor claims? Or was it murder?

That’s the launchpad for THE CAGE, and the answer doesn’t touch down, the doors don’t open, until the final page.

*According to data provided by the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics and the Consumer Product Safety Commission.

When I left my office job, I also parted ways with my adored cleaning lady. (I really did adore her. Whenever my husband complained about the intrusion on his privacy, I always replied: “Don’t make me choose between you.”) But I couldn’t justify the indulgence anymore after I no longer had the excuse of being in the office all day or on the road all week. So I told myself I could handle it myself.

I couldn’t. I never developed good habits. What I did instead was a panicked flurry of cleaning whenever guests were expected. Since we usually entertained a few times a month, this seemed like a workable routine. The house usually looked pretty good.

Then came the pandemic and the lockdown. We haven’t entertained for four months, and––you guessed it––I haven’t really cleaned for four months either. Dust has gathered in the corners of our rooms much like a metaphor for what’s been happening in the corners of my mind. But did it matter? Like the proverbial tree falling in the forest, if dirt accumulates in a house and no one comes over to see it, is it really dirty?

This week our kitchen faucet broke, necessitating a service call for the first time in months. As long as the plumber was coming, we figured we might as well upgrade a few showerheads, too. In pre-pandemic times, it sometimes took weeks to get the plumber out, but this time he had availability––today!

Because I can’t bear for anyone to form a bad opinion of me, even someone I may never see again, I lit into a panicked flurry of housecleaning. The kitchen, the baths, and every room he’d have to traverse. Then I had to clean up myself, too, and put on makeup, and finally a mask that obscured most of the makeup.

“You have a beautiful home,” the plumber said as he left, and I did a big mental Whew!

But here’s the irony: after he left, I had to do another deep-clean to remove any possibility of the virus.

So now I’m in a state of exhaustion, and our country is in a state of emergency, and it’s hard to avoid the moral of this story: with some thoughtful planning and preventive action, we could have avoided both.

In my new novel HOUSE ON FIRE, a happily blended family falls apart when the wife’s daughter dies after a road accident and the husband’s son is charged with vehicular homicide. Leigh, the wife, is devastated and grieving; Pete, the husband, is devastated and desperate to protect his son. Before long, the fault lines in their perfectly blended family open up, and Pete takes his son and moves out. Leigh can’t help but imagine the accusing whispers among their friends and neighbors: wicked stepmother.

The term is familiar to everyone from nursery to nursing home, but even as I wrote the words, I had to wonder where the notion came from. Of all the players on the family stage, why is the stepmother so often cast as the villain?

The question is more than academic. According to the Census Bureau, half of all women in the United States will play a stepmother role at some point in their lives. The wicked label seems particularly unfair considering that there’s no male counterpart. No one ever says wicked stepfather, even though statistically a child is more likely to be abused by a stepfather than a stepmother. So why the archetype of the wicked stepmother? What psychological underpinnings give it so much traction?

The answer would be easy if the term was of recent origin, when stepfamilies are usually hatched out of divorce: children naturally feel loyal to their still living mother. But the wicked stepmother trope isn’t at all recent; it dates back centuries, to the days when death was the only real route to remarriage. The notion took root in countless folklore tales, and after the Brothers Grimm collected and popularized those stories in the 1800s, the trope of the wicked stepmother became part of the preschool canon. Think Cinderella, Snow White, Hansel and Gretel.

These classic fairy tales have enjoyed an enduring hold on the minds of small children. One explanation is that the Grimm (and grim!) fairy tales with all their dark themes and brutal violence help children face their worst fears––the metaphorical monster under the bed. Thus, the common origin theory of the wicked stepmother trope is that the stepmother poses a threat to the child’s inheritance and property rights.

This seems unlikely to me: how many small children have estate planning on their preschool minds? And a stepfather would pose the same threat to inheritance, yet, as noted, there’s no corresponding male archetype.

No, what seems more likely is that a small child fears the father’s shifting affection to his new wife. Or more to the point, his sexual thrall. The wicked stepmother has used her sexuality to enslave the father and drive away all concern for his children.

Consider the role of the father is the classic fairy tales. Cinderella’s father marries a woman who installs her own daughters as the favored children while banishing Cinderella to the kitchen to work as a household slave. Her father is apparently content with this new world order; at any rate, he says not a word. In Hansel and Gretel, the stepmother contrives to strand the children in the woods to fend for themselves, and their father meekly submits to his wife’s scheme. And in Snow White, the king takes a beautiful, narcissistic new wife who is so threatened by her stepdaughter that she orders the huntsman to take the girl into the woods and kill her. Meanwhile, the king lives on in the castle and never seems to wonder what became of his daughter and why she no longer graces at his banquet hall of an evening.

Where was the father? one might ask (a nice subversion of the more typical finger-pointing at the mother). Oh, he’s there, but he’s so weak or besotted or indifferent to his children’s fate that he does nothing to shield them from harm. So the children must either find surrogates (the Seven Dwarves or the fairy godmother, for example) or step up and save themselves (ala Hansel and Gretel).

Traditionally the one person charged with the duty to protect the family was the father. The child’s darkest fear is that he can’t or won’t. These fairy tales teach him how to face that fear.

The archetypal wicked stepmother is simply a stand-in, a convenient scapegoat for any danger that might threaten the family. For centuries, she’s been taking the rap for the real monster under the bed: the neglectful father.

I once represented a company whose staff attorney was being cross-examined by my opposing counsel. As he asked her a long series of questions about the company’s “legal department,” she grew more and more irritated. “Sir,” she finally snapped. “All of our departments are legal. I work for the law department.”

(Incidentally, the reason we don’t call such lawyers “in-house counsel”? Because that makes the rest of us “outhouse counsel.”)

I’m reminded of this testimony every time people ask me about making the switch from legal writing to novels. All my writing is legal! But I see their point. Legal writing has a reputation for being dry and impenetrable, while fiction should be just the opposite.

But I was an English major before law school, and I brought all that baggage to my law career. First, I was a stickler for the rules of good writing. I became known around the office as Madame Grammarian, and I may have been the last lawyer on earth to insist upon using the subjunctive mood. Second, I approached every case that came my way as a new novel to read, with a cast of characters to get to know, a plot to watch unfold, and sometimes even a Big Reveal. But eventually it wasn’t enough to read those novels. They were never satisfying enough. I had to write my own.

Of course I’m hardly the first lawyer to make the transition to novelist. Law school is a well-traveled on-ramp to a writing career. But not many lawyer-authors spent as much time in the trenches as I did. Most of the big names found their true calling after putting in only a couple years at the bar. I wasn’t that smart. And to compound my sins, not only was I a long-time legal writing practitioner, I was a long-time legal writing instructor. Little wonder people might be wary.

Case in point. When I was seeking a literary agent for my first novel, I did as all the guidebooks recommended and included in my query a biographical sketch that highlighted my work as a lawyer. A prominent agent wrote back expressing an interest but only if I could assure her that I had moved beyond legal writing, because “You know what? There’s a huge stylistic difference between legal writing and fiction writing.”

But you know what? There isn’t. At least not with the kind of legal writing I did. I didn’t write contracts or wills. I didn’t dabble in parties of the first part and parties of the second part, or litter my prose with Whereas and Heretofore. I was a litigator, and my writing was aimed at an audience of one, sometimes three, and on special occasions nine. Its sole purpose was to persuade.

Richard Russo in his essay “The Gravestone and the Commode” (part of his terrific collection, The Destiny Thief), described the writer’s problem as getting other people to see things as you do. That was my challenge as a litigator: to get judges to see things my way. In order to persuade them, I needed to engage them. And yes, sometimes even entertain them. So I peppered my briefs with colorful language, pithy sentences, strong action verbs. I didn’t shy away from literary allusions or even pop-culture references.

So for me at least, the transition from legal writing to illegal was an easy one. The only real difference between how I wrote as a lawyer and how I write today? My legal writing was necessarily constrained by the actual facts of the case. As a novelist, I now have the supreme luxury of making them up.

Disorder in the Court: Classic Fictional Trials That Subverted the Truth

5 Must-Read Novels About Blended Families

I met my closest friend when we were college freshmen. She was from the Boston area and had three sisters, a wise and wonderful mother, and a clergyman father who did wartime service as an Army chaplain. The parallels between her life and a certain classic American novel were uncanny. She even had a sister named Meg.

In those days, it wasn’t the fashion for the young women of Bryn Mawr to admire Little Women. It was treacly, moralistic and far too celebratory of domestic life. But my friend was never one to bow to peer pressure, and she unabashedly loved the novel. She saw her own family in the Marches, but time-traveled to an earlier century when life seemed more exciting and every woe and joy more poignant. And she easily could see herself in the lead character. Although she was the youngest of the sisters, she was no Amy. She was Jo — brilliant, stubborn, deeply curious and honest to a fault.

One day in December of our freshmen year, I happened upon a used book sale on campus. Boxes of dusty old books were regularly donated by alumnae cleaning out their attics, or more often, their heirs cleaning out their houses. While sifting through stacks of battered volumes, I came upon an ancient edition of Little Women. I flipped through the pages to check for mold or mites — it looked okay — then paused on the flyleaf. There was a handwritten inscription with a slight backward slant: L. M. Alcott.

I didn’t know if Louisa May ever went on tour or signed stock in bookstores or did any Costco-type events, but I felt certain that an autographed copy of her most famous work was a rare find. I bought it on the spot for a dollar.

Now I had a decision to make. What to do with my prize? It probably had some pecuniary value that I, a poor scholarship student, could have enjoyed. And even if I couldn’t resell it, ownership of it was worth bragging rights for an English major and future novelist like myself. My friend came from a wealthy family and majored in sociology; neither the money nor the cachet would mean as much to her. But I knew what the contents of that book meant to her, and how much it would mean for her to know that Alcott had put her name to that very copy. So I wrapped it up and gave it to my friend for Christmas.

In the years since, I’ve come to realize that I was the true beneficiary of that gifting experience. I learned a lesson — not that it’s better to give than to receive (I hope I already knew that one), but rather that there’s a difference between marketplace value and the real value of an object. In this season of Black Friday and Cyber Monday and, soon enough, post-holiday clearance sales, that’s a lesson I try to remember.

I especially try to remember it when it comes to books. The value of a book can’t be found in its sales figures, or the size of the author’s advance, or even the number of prestigious awards it snags. The value of a book lies in its ability to speak to a reader across miles and years and to win a special place in her heart. And you can’t put a price tag on that.

(But Deb, if you’re reading this, an autographed copy of Little Women recently sold at auction for $8,900. Just so you know.)

This essay originally appeared on Bookreporter.com, as one of their 2018 Holiday Blogs.

“Listen to this,” my husband yelled from the next room. “A man in England took his pet to the veterinarian and paid $485 to get it un-constipated. It was a goldfish.”

I was drinking a glass of water at the time, and I did a spit-take right out of The Three Stooges. Unfortunately I was at my computer, and I spewed a mouthful of water all over the keyboard. Instantly the screen went staticky like the HBO intro, then it went blank, then the whole computer lapsed into a coma.

It’s now being air-lifted to the nearest Apple Trauma Center. I await word of its prognosis and applicable insurance coverage.

Meanwhile, I’ve lost a day’s work because I don’t back up often enough.

Unlike the goldfish.

https://www.bbc.com/news/uk-england-norfolk-30655444