Every author has a story beyond the one that they put down on paper. The Barnes & Noble Podcast goes between the lines with today’s most interesting writers, exploring what inspires them, what confounds them, and what they were thinking when they wrote the books we’re talking about.

With his bestselling novel The Woman in the Window, author A.J. Finn proved that our appetite for twisty works of psychological suspense is boundless. This week on the podcast, he joins Miwa Messer to talk about the joy he took writing a work which begins with just “four walls and this woman” — and about the day his main character walked into his imagination.

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For readers of Gillian Flynn and Tana French comes one of the decade’s most anticipated debuts, to be published in thirty-six languages around the world and already in development as a major film from Fox: a twisty, powerful Hitchcockian thriller about an agoraphobic woman who believes she witnessed a crime in a neighboring house.

It isn’t paranoia if it’s really happening . . .

Anna Fox lives alone—a recluse in her New York City home, unable to venture outside. She spends her day drinking wine (maybe too much), watching old movies, recalling happier times . . . and spying on her neighbors.

Then the Russells move into the house across the way: a father, a mother, their teenage son. The perfect family. But when Anna, gazing out her window one night, sees something she shouldn’t, her world begins to crumble—and its shocking secrets are laid bare.

What is real? What is imagined? Who is in danger? Who is in control? In this diabolically gripping thriller, no one—and nothing—is what it seems.

Like this podcast? Subscribe on iTunes or Stitcher to discover intriguing new conversations every week.

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I once attended a screening of The Lost Weekend, the film version of Charles Jackson’s 1944 novel about an alcoholic, where the audience fell captive to a college campus projectionist. Around two-thirds of the way through, it became clear that something was off with the movie — the protagonist was about to take a stumble, but didn’t he fall down a stairwell a few minutes ago? The film stopped, the house lights came on, and the projectionist apologized for mixing up the reels. We all carried on like it didn’t matter, because it didn’t: Until the film’s pat, upbeat redemption arc at the very end, the film was all drunken despair anyway.

In her superb new book on alcoholism, The Recovering, Leslie Jamison deliberately shuffles the reels of the familiar recovery narrative, even while acknowledging the futility of doing so. An alcoholic in recovery herself, she opens her story announcing that she’s “wary of the tedious architecture and tawdry self-congratulation of a redemption story.” Every good writer instinctually wants to explode clichés and familiar tropes, and there’s much about The Recovering that’s inventive: its careful braiding of memoir and literary criticism, its close observation of addiction and creativity, its comprehensive grasp of the way alcoholism provokes scapegoating, solipsism, fear, shame, and solitude. And yet the redemption story won’t be blown up, behaving as if it were encased in twenty feet of concrete. Familiar as it may be, the redemption story is what helps save her. There may be nothing new to say about the AA meeting in the church basement — indeed, its central virtue is its familiarity. But the power of the book is in Jamison’s openness about how conflicted the redemption story makes her anyway, enchanted and skeptical and back again.

The struggle is worth pursuing, because while there may be one redemption story, it’s one that shifts often at its margins. The day after the second time she went sober, Jamison crashes a friend’s car. “If I was going to stop drinking, I was supposed to discover a spectacular new version of myself, or at least recover the presence of mind not to accelerate into a concrete wall,” she writes. “But sobriety didn’t work like that. It works like this: You go to work. You call your friend. You say, I’m sorry I crashed your car into a wall. You say you’ll fix it. Then you do.” Those sentences are among the simplest in the book, and the simplicity is hard fought for, because she’s invested in the notion that words and stories are relevant to recovery. Interpolated into her own story are the stories of other artists who struggled with drinking, and how it shaped their art. In poet John Berryman she sees “the sweet boozy whiff of tangle and rupture.” In Jean Rhys she sees a writer who wasn’t allowed to see herself “as a rogue genius, like the drunk male writers of her generation. She was always forced to understand herself as a failed mother instead.” Even a rather straightforward work like The Lost Weekend offers something telling in what it doesn’t do: Jackson “refused the idea of drinking as metaphysical portal. In the novel, alcoholism isn’t particularly meaningful, it just is.”

And so on, including David Foster Wallace, George Cain, Malcolm Lowry, and Raymond Carver. Jamison seeks a common thread between these writers, their drinking, their recovery, and their creativity. (The book began as a dissertation on the topic.) But such threads prove elusive. A sober Charles Jackson wrote an unpublished second novel of impenetrable doggerel. Carver’s literary career had an infamously redemptive second act after he quit drinking, but he also used cocaine during his “sober” years. So what kind of sobriety are we thinking of, exactly? “My dissertation was reckoning with a question I hoped might bridge these worlds, examining authors who’d tried to get sober and exploring how recovery had become part of their creative lives,” she writes. “It wasn’t criticism as autobiography, exactly, so much as speculative autobiography — trying to find a map for what my own sober creativity might look like.” Ultimately, though, what she finds isn’t a model so much as an accrual of usable evidence to consider. Many writers had tried sobriety. Some had succeeded. She could try and succeed too.

Jamison is an adherent of Alcoholics Anonymous, which she acknowledges isn’t the sole proven path to sobriety. (Though that acknowledgment may be too brief to please some readers.) She’s less focused, though, on the Higher Power than with the we in Step One, those who find themselves helpless over alcohol. For Jamison, the communal aspect of meetings, the sharing of “drunkalogs,” is what helps. The urge for sharing makes sense, since so many of the agonizing anecdotes she shares about herself involve moments when she is isolated and unprotected: walking home drunk one night and getting punched in the face; another night when she was raped; many other nights drinking alone or going to parties and chasing isolation. “I got so drunk I had to lock myself in our bedroom and slap myself — hard, across the cheek — to get myself undrunk again. It didn’t work.” Her boyfriend throughout the period is a poet whose flirtatious personality stokes her jealousy, but without any actual infidelity to point to, her jealousy is a projection of an unresolved loneliness.

Is it too easy to connect those fears to her drinking? Is it too simplistic to call the fellowship she finds in church basements a balm to those fears? The book’s very bulk answers the question: The Recovering is nearly 500 pages and has such as intense and clarified energy, such a bone-deep compulsion to work out recovery’s paradoxes, that you feel she could go on for twice as long. (And I would happily read that book.) And yet, in the same way that all those literary writers’ experiences matter, the drunkalogs she hears in meetings matter, because they become part of a more basic story. “The paradox of recovery stories, I was learning, was that you were supposed to relinquish your ego by authoring a story in which you also starred,” she says.

She’s the star of The Recovering, but her experience is rooted in those of countless others. They make meaning not because they’re unique, but because they’re shared; they live in their telling.

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In his new memoir, Andrew Lloyd Webber tells a lovely, mildly self-deprecating anecdote about an encounter with Lorin Maazel. Maazel was rehearsing a performance of Lloyd Webber’s classical Requiem, and during a break the composer asked the conductor to explain the minimalist music of Philip Glass.

Maazel tried. Here’s Lloyd Webber on what happened next: “Abruptly he stopped and looked me in my glazed over face. ‘Andrew, there’s no point in my explaining this. You are a maximalist.’ ”

In a single pithy word, Maazel nails Lloyd Webber’s preference for the grand musical gesture — the soaring, emotional melodies that have captivated Broadway and West End audiences but often earned him critical disdain. There are many such pointed, intimate moments in Unmasked, whose title is ripped from the climax of Lloyd Webber’s mega-hit The Phantom of the Opera. (In a reconsideration of the composer in the March 12th issue of The New Yorker, Adam Gopnik calls Phantom, still running in New York and London after three decades, “both absolutely terrible and sort of great.”)

From a literary standpoint, Lloyd Webber’s memoir, published in connection with his seventieth birthday, is something of a mess. It is sprawling and overlong, formally inelegant, at once needlessly detailed and riddled with lacunae. More surprising, Unmasked covers only the opening portion of the composer’s career, through Phantom‘s creation and 1986 West End premiere. Lloyd Webber sums up his often rocky subsequent decades in an epilogue titled “Playout Music,” in which he suggests that his financial and personal challenges have taught him “toe-curling truths about so-called friends and colleagues.” Addressing why a single volume hadn’t sufficed to chronicle his life to date, Lloyd Webber concedes that “my verbosity got in the way.”

Unmasked mostly compensates for its self-indulgence with a sprightly tone, a high gossip quotient, and, best of all, a sense of authenticity. Readers gain entrée to Lloyd Webber’s sensibility — neuroses, obsessions, vanity, and all — and to a turbulent backstage world in which his perfectionism about sound quality sometimes collides with the practicalities of making theater. He frets endlessly over royalties, reviews, and especially casting and learns from his idol Richard Rodgers that “critics were afraid of sentiment,” a prescient warning indeed.

The young Lloyd Webber was, as one might expect, a musical prodigy, eager for accomplishment and acclaim — though also a passionate aficionado of art and architecture. The son of a composer and music professor (his father) and an “ace piano teacher” (his mother), he dropped out of Oxford University to work with the lyricist Tim Rice on a series of “through-sung” musicals. Joseph and the Amazing Technicolor Dreamcoat, a pop cantata, began as a short concert for schools and was subsequently expanded. Jesus Christ Superstar launched as a rock album before becoming the duo’s Broadway debut. The critically reviled, Tony Award−winning Evita, based on the life of Argentinian political leader Eva Perón, turned out to be their swan song.

For Cats, Lloyd Webber drew on the verses of T. S. Eliot; for Phantom, based on the novel by Gaston Leroux, he enlisted Charles Hart, as well as Richard Stilgoe. The great lyricist Alan Jay Lerner had originally signed on to work with Stilgoe, but lung cancer forced his withdrawal. Lerner’s touching letter to Lloyd Webber bemoans missing out on “the wonderful opportunity it would have been to write with you.”

He also missed out on Lloyd Webber’s sometimes brutal frankness. The composer worries, for instance, about Patti Lupone’s diction in the title role of Evita, for which she eventually won a Tony Award. (In a letter prior to the 1979 Broadway opening, he admonishes her to concentrate on her musical performance.) In the memoir, he lambastes director Tom O’Horgan (of Hair fame) for a Broadway production of Jesus Christ Superstar with “the vision and subtlety of Caesars Palace.” He refers to Perry Como, who sings his theme for the film The Odessa File, as “Perry Comatose.”

His early partner Rice provokes both admiration and irritation. He paints the lyricist as a dexterous rhymer and a “blond bombshell of an adonis” who regularly bedded ingénues and was easygoing to a fault. We learn that Rice nevertheless threatened legal action over the unauthorized inclusion of his lyrics in a hybrid early version of “Memory,” the anthem from Cats. The breach has since been sufficiently repaired for Rice to permit his correspondence to be quoted.

Lloyd Webber makes clear that he himself was no saint. But he offers little emotional insight into the dynamics of his two failed marriages, both with women named Sarah. His first, at age twenty-three to eighteen-year-old Sarah Hugill, began with a head-over-heels infatuation, produced two children, and survived Hugill’s near-fatal, misdiagnosed bout with diabetes-related blood poisoning. (A doctor had insisted she was suffering only from stress.)

That marriage famously fell victim to Lloyd Webber’s romance with the soprano Sarah Brightman, whom he would eventually cast as Christine in Phantom. At once “devastated yet resigned,” Hugill, to avoid divorce, was willing to allow him to lead a double life, Lloyd Webber says — a heartbreaking detail. He declines but later buys her a country house.

The composer’s union with Brightman turns out to be precarious, too. It fractures, he writes, after the singer has an affair with a keyboard player and he becomes involved with another woman, leaving Brightman “shattered.” Her voice, he adds consolingly, “will always be very special to me.” Because of the memoir’s timeline, Lloyd Webber’s third wife, Madeleine Gurdon, a retired equestrian to whom he has been married twenty-seven years, makes only a cameo appearance.

In more recent years, Lloyd Webber has struggled with prostate cancer, alcohol, and a series of musical near-misses and flops. (Ever heard of Stephen Ward, about one of the central figures in Britain’s 1963 Profumo scandal? Lloyd Webber hopes to revamp it someday.) He rebounded in 2015 with School of Rock, still playing both Broadway and the West End. This idiosyncratic memoir will delight his many fans, provide invaluable grist for theater historians — and perhaps inspire an even grittier and more revealing sequel.

Julia M. Klein, a cultural reporter and critic in Philadelphia, reviews theater for the Philadelphia Inquirer. Follow her on Twitter @JuliaMKlein.

 

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