Bestselling author Laura Dave will speak Thursday at Fort Vancouver Regional Library Foundation’s Authors & Illustrators Dinner and Silent Auction.
If you don’t have tickets already, you’re out of luck. But Dave spoke with The Columbian to offer a few words to her Southwest Washington fans who can’t make it to the event.
Dave said she wrote her first novel while in a graduate creative writing program at the University of Virginia. Her digital pages were lost when water spilled on her computer. She recovered the prologue and title for the lost novel, wrote new chapters and turned it into her first published book, “London is the Best City in America,” about a woman who fears getting asked about her life in Rhode Island when she heads home for her brother’s wedding. Dave wrote that novel while writing for magazines, waiting tables, tutoring private school kids and doing other odd jobs.
“I used to teach writing, and I always say to young writers, what I think makes you a good writer is as much what you are willing to throw out as what you keep,” Dave said. “And I think that was the universe stepping in and helping me throw out the first book that really needed more time and to be realized in a different way.”
Dave’s upcoming novel is a sequel to “The Last Thing He Told Me,” which was made into an Apple TV+ miniseries starring Jennifer Garner. The domestic mystery spent 82 weeks on The New York Times bestseller list. Apple, Amazon and Vogue all named it a best book of the year.
In September, Dave released her most recent book, “The Night We Lost Him,” about two estranged siblings uncovering a secret their father kept from them for more than 50 years. Dave and her husband are in the midst of writing the script for Netflix’s movie adaptation.
“For ‘The Night We Lost Him,’ I was really interested in two things: I was interested in this emotional question of, what does it mean to be the witness to someone’s life? And I also was reading about a succession battle at a children’s book publisher in New York,” Dave said.
She said her novels often pull from real-life experience. She recalled hearing Gloria Steinem in 2003 talk about the importance of watching women become the heroes of their own lives.
“And at the center of all of my books, I think it happens in different ways, sometimes in quieter ways, and in the last few books that are really domestic mysteries, it happens in louder ways,” Dave said.
Since her first book, Dave has published six more. She said she tends to steer away from the stereotypical mysteries and romances by bending genres.
“My domestic suspense mysteries aren’t thrillers in the traditional sense of you find out that there’s a case of revenge or your husband isn’t who you thought he was,” she said. “It’s really more a thriller or mystery rooted in hope and the idea that we’re right to trust ourselves and to get ourselves to a better place.”
