“Middle children always knew how to remain unseen. They knew how to slip below the notice of others … Middle children were tricksters.”
In Julie Doar’s The Gallagher Place, Marlowe Fisher, 36, is the middle child between two brothers, Nate and Henry, the three of them raised in a big house in the Hudson Valley, free to roam the woods at will. But the woods hold secrets.
One of them came about twenty years before, when Marlowe’s best friend Nora disappeared one night. The police never solved it, but they inferred that she might simply have run away. Marlowe always knew better, though: “If she had run away, she would have taken me with her.”
And now the woods have another secret. As Marlowe and her brothers take a walk together, they stumble upon a tent containing the body of a man, his head bashed in. Who is he? What connection does he have to the Fishers’ one-time neighbors, the Gallaghers and their tragic deaths? Why has no one mentioned to Marlowe the threatening messages that everyone in her family seems to have been getting recently, except her? Why is Ariel, the detective down from Poughkeepsie, so sure that the clues in this case will somehow lead them to the facts of Nora’s disappearance? Why does she keep questioning Marlowe, showing her old case notes, feeding her riddles, “like a troll under a bridge”?
The answers, when they come, will throw everything Marlowe thought she knew — about family, friendship, her memories and identity — up in the air. The secrets are both very old and brand-new and they keep exploding around her like firecrackers. And the biggest one is yet to come.
Because Marlowe has her secrets, too.
Author Insight
“I get a lot of ideas when I’m walking,” says the author, “so it’s fitting that the original idea was the walk that occurs in the first chapter. I was with my family in upstate New York and we were taking a walk and I just thought: What if we found a body? It’s funny, looking back, because so many other, more complex ideas came to me, but it did start with that simple premise, almost like how a game of Clue starts with a nameless body. I stuck with the vision because I loved this idea that the family sets out onto terrain they think they own and know — they think they can trust this property — and then are so dramatically shocked and betrayed by the land.
As I dug into the characters, I knew they were keeping secrets and the early writing process was about figuring out what those secrets were. I wanted to have the discovery of the body in the present timeline trigger the examination of a past mystery and as it evolved, that past disappearance almost began to eclipse the present-day mystery. I leaned into that because I liked how the past was haunting the present.”
The book takes place during two different timelines. Was it difficult keeping track of them?
“The plot twists were not, but the names and dates — that was another matter! I have so many pieces of scrap paper filled up with calculations of various characters’ ages at various points. I also sketched several (extremely sloppy) maps in my attempt to keep track of locations and distances to make sure walking distances and times felt realistic. I think I don’t struggle as much with keeping track of plot twists because when I’m writing, the characters do things that make sense to me. This character lies because that’s who they are, that’s who they’ve always been. There’s no random event coming out of left field.”
It’s also because some of the character elements are baked in: “When I’m writing a character, I often start with a truth about myself or someone I know. The character then grows from there and ends up being completely different, so no one can really say that any of my characters are carbon copies of real people, but there might be overlapping facets or traits. Marlowe definitely has my shyness. I was very quiet and meek as a teenager.
Nora is not like me at all, but she is inspired by the friends I had who pulled me out of my shyness and made me feel at ease. I studied their charisma and even tried to imitate it. I was so in awe of people who had that gift and I felt almost indebted to them, which makes for a very intense friendship. My brother sometimes says that I take my loyalty to extremes and it’s the only way I express love. I think I gave a bit of that to Marlowe and Glory [Marlowe’s mother] has that same kind of loyalty as well.”
Influences — From Local Legends to Ghostwriting
Doar’s influences are many. She happily names them, from Tana French and Gillian Flynn to Nancy Drew and Agatha Christie, as well as “a lot of local legends in upstate New York — from the classic folktales about Rip Van Winkle and Sleepy Hollow, to the escaped convicts hiding in the Adirondacks and the rumors about monsters in almost every lake.”
But she has another influence, as well — her own hidden secret:
“For several years, I was ghostwriting romance novels. There was not a lot of freedom or creativity, but it taught me how to be disciplined, even if I wasn’t inspired. It also made me a bit of a chameleon. So a client would want a historical enemies-to-lovers or a cowboy second-chance-at-love plot and I’d have to deliver on that with tight deadlines. My strategy was to read a novel that was emblematic of the style and then mimic it.
“That’s how I actually started to write when I was young. I used to read Jane Austen and then write letters imitating her style. Or I would read a fantasy novel and write extra chapters or spin-offs with the secondary characters. With my first novel, I felt so free to pursue my own instincts, but I did think a lot about the style I was envisioning and how I could adjust my voice to attain it.
“In some ways, there are a lot of similarities between the romance genre and the horror/thriller and mystery genres. Both types of novels feature tropes. With romance, it might be ‘there’s only one bed at the inn,’ and with thriller, it might be the car breaking down, or the unreliable narrator. I believe in tropes in moderation. They serve a purpose in setting the scene and orienting readers’ expectations. Of course, there’s real danger in overusing tropes – the greatest thriller (and romance) writers know how to work with and against tropes. I had a high school English teacher whose advice I always keep in mind: Create clichés, don’t use them.”
Did all that writing experience help when it came time to actually get her own novel published?
“There were lots of twists and turns and there were definitely moments where it seemed like nothing was ever going to happen. Writers experience a lot of rejection, so I had to toughen up in my early twenties. I realized pretty quickly that I wasn’t going to be ‘chosen’ by some powerful entity. I had to find time to write between working other jobs and at first, I wrote a lot of short stories and drafts of novels that simply weren’t good enough. I do remember when I finished the very first draft of The Gallagher Place, I felt I had something and I was willing to work on it and put it out there.
I queried a lot of agents and collected countless no’s, so I had to revise and make it better, then try another round of queries. I got lucky in that my agent, Steven Chudney, saw potential. He liked the premise, but asked me to revise it further and I think a younger version of myself wouldn’t have been able to do that. I was so grateful for the resilience I had built up by then. I also realized that every revision made the novel so much stronger. The more I wrote, the better I was. So as long as I kept writing, I was still in the game. When Zibby Publishing wanted it, I could tell they had the same vision I did for the book.
They saw it the way I had first envisioned it, so that was an easy yes. It had a different title at the time and I do remember on an early call, they asked if I was willing to change it and I started laughing because of course, I’d title it anything! From there, the editing and publication process has been a joy — and the current title is much better than the old one.
“Overall, I would say the biggest lesson I had to learn was to not compare myself to others and just put my head down and till my own field. I do remember thinking, Look, this might take ten, fifteen, twenty years, but I’ve come this far, and it’s what I want, so I might as well keep going. Accepting the journey, however long it took, was a turning point. I stopped panicking that I was a massive failure and I just kept going.”
What’s Next?
Next up: “I have a wedding-weekend-gone-wrong story. There’s something ominous about witnessing a toxic relationship that you’re not allowed to comment on, so I wanted to turn up the dial on that, almost like a Sally Rooney or Naoise Dolan novel, but throw in a dead body. While working on it, I’ve been drawn to gossip. I’ve attended quite a few weddings in recent years and I find the most interesting part of those events is the debrief among guests the next day. I wanted to focus on that kind of debrief – where guests pick apart every awkward moment or overheard rumor, trying to figure out if a crime took place and if so, who is guilty.
“There might be more stories lurking in the Hudson Valley, to be honest. I recently read The Virgin Suicides by Jeffrey Eugenides and I love the way he depicts how tragedy clings to a small town. While working on The Gallagher Place, I was thinking a lot about hauntings. Stephen King novels and shows like True Detective, or even Pretty Little Liars — they push the envelope and blur the line between reality and mystical elements. They make you think: Ok, a ghost couldn’t have killed this person … but did it? “
We’ll have to wait to find out!