Once upon a time, decades ago, Anne Burt showed up at a reading New York Times bestselling author Christina Baker Kline was giving in Montclair, New Jersey, where they were both raising their families. Soon thereafter the two writers became fast friends. Not “friends” in the way we think of it now—this was before the false intimacy and parasocial weirdness of social media, like when your best friend, Taylor Swift, gets engaged, and you are thrilled for her—but the kind of friendship that grows out of shared struggles, shared dreams, and shared time together talking about books, movies, parenting, relationships, and all the other things in between.
Years later, once their kids were grown, both women decided to move back into New York City. There, in this new setting, Christina and Anne began collaborating on a few writing projects. They realized how well their shared sensibilities translated not only into productive output, but also into fun. A couple of years ago, the two had an idea for a thriller, which they decided to work on together. Each took turns writing then reading their chapters out loud to one another as the project progressed. Then they edited the other’s work until, as they put it, neither could figure out who’d written what. It was a “third voice” grown out of their joint sensibilities.
Here’s the part of this story where I want to tell you about how twisty-turny, spine-tingly, page-turny the resulting thriller is, but first I have to explain what it’s like to park a car in New York City, a form of weekly torture that would not, come to think of it, be out of place in a thriller:
On my block in Brooklyn, the street sweeper comes through twice a week between 8:00 and 8:30 am. Which means those of us who are too cheap and/or cash-strapped to pay for a garage that costs more than our one-bedroom rentals in the nineties must sit in our cars, on the appointed mornings, until we see the white street-sweeper truck, at which point everyone moves their cars from one side of the extremely narrow street, double parks on the other side of the street, then immediately moves back into the spot they abandoned lest some mean, hovering interloper steal your spot. Utter horn-honking, parallel-parking chaos, in other words.
So there I was, last Tuesday morning, drinking my coffee and reading the final third of Please Don’t Lie in my office before interviewing the two authors over zoom, when I glanced at my watch and realized, oops, it was time to go move the car. Only it wasn’t actually time to move the car. It was an hour earlier than I thought it was. I was so engrossed in the book’s plot, wondering what the hell was going to happen next, that my mind turned 7 am into 8 am. Where were all the other left side of the street parkers?, I briefly wondered, when I first hopped in the car. But never mind. I kept reading the fast-paced ending of Please Don’t Lie, worrying about what would happen to urbane Hayley, who is running for her life through the snow when we first meet her. What the hell was going on? What did her hunky, hunter husband Brandon know and when did he know it? What about their new best friends renting the small cottage on their property in the Adirondacks, sexy handyman Tyler and woo-woo, yoga-loving Megan? And what was the deal with Olivia, who seemed to know everything?
In other words, an entire hour passed with my head in this book, sussing out characters and motivations in the front set of my car, until I realized I’d misread my watch. And because I don’t want to reveal any more of the book’s plot, that’s what I can tell you about how good and tight the structure of Please Don’t Lie is: I literally lost track of time.
How, I wondered, could these two sunny, funny women come up with such a demonically evil plot? I think it’s also important to note that one of these authors, Christina, is so good at both creating and judging characters that when I came to her after nearly a decade of comically bad dating and one pathologically lying partner post-marriage, and I told her I was done with men and dating forever, she decided to called my bluff. She knew me well enough to know that not only would I never be done searching for love, but that I might enjoy meeting one of her old friends who was similarly self-deluded. She then set me up on a blind date that transformed my life forever from, well, a kind of sad, pathetic, and way-too-obvious red-flag thriller into the most beautiful and life-altering romcom I could have ever imagined.
Then again, I just realized while typing that last paragraph, the main plot twist of Christina’s set up was that it was based on the kind of lie of omission with which Please Don’t Lie is rife: I knew it was a blind date; my partner did not. Also, Christina and I originally met back in 2014 because, as she even admits in the interview above, she stalked me on social media and asked me out to lunch. Years later, she introduced me to Anne, without ever revealing the duo’s demonic plot to write a thriller in which lies of omission play a starring role.
Hmmm… [tense, scary music]… oh wow, um… [chyron reads, “To be continued…”]
I hope you enjoy listening to Anne and Christina talk about their writing process and the origins of Please Don’t Lie as much as I did speaking to them. And if one day I mysteriously end up dead with a crossbow arrow in my back, I think it’s pretty safe to assume they did it.
