Emily and Roy are at odds over how to handle Tucker’s lingering dependency on them. In their situation, which side would you choose? Would you be inclined to give Tucker more latitude as Emily does, or do you think Roy’s “tough love” approach would be more effective?
As siblings, Lissa and Tucker seem close, although she doesn’t claim to know and understand her brother on every level. In fact, he mystifies her in certain ways. Do you share a bond with your sibling? Did the bond survive childhood or did you drift apart once you were grown and left home? Discuss the ways you might have kept this bond intact. Discuss the ways the bond may have been broken and the reasons for that.
Do you feel a mother can share as tight a bond with her grown son as she might with her grown daughter? How much do you feel gender is a factor in the context of creating tightly knit family relationships?
How do you feel about Roy’s gun collection? He kept it locked in a cabinet, but do you feel that was sufficiently safe gun practice? Would the tragedy at the story’s end have been avoided if guns hadn’t been in the Lebay home?
Emily does a lot of cooking, finding relief from stress in the occupation. Lissa paints. What do you do when you’re under pressure, when your heart is troubled, to find peace?
Emily shares a deep bond of friendship with Joe Merchant, a lover from her past, and while she doesn’t conceal her friendship with Joe from Roy, she doesn’t talk to him about it, either. Do you feel it’s a betrayal of Roy and their marriage vows? Does the nature of Emily and Joe’s relationship feel morally ambiguous to you or do you feel she has a right to have whomever she chooses as a friend, man or woman?
Lissa is deeply conflicted about her pregnancy, concerned her baby will be born with psychological and emotional issues, in essence that the baby might turn out to be troubled in the way Tucker is. Do you feel her concerns are valid? What are your thoughts about nature versus nurture?
Lissa and Emily are uncertain where to lay the blame for Tucker’s issues. Are they the result of the tremendous fear he experienced as a child when in the throes of an episode of post-traumatic stress? Or is Tucker’s troubled nature the result of faulty genes? Do you believe a person can simply be evil and there is no explanation?
The difficulty of forgiveness is a theme in this story. Could you forgive a family member who had committed a heinous crime?
Emily and Roy make tremendous sacrifices in order to keep Tucker safe. Discuss some of those sacrifices. How far would you go to protect your own child? Would you act as Roy does in the final scene?
Discuss the significance of the title.
A Conversation with the Author
Safe Keeping is about a family that is forced to confront the very real possibility that one of their own might have committed a horrible crime. What was the genesis for the idea and characters in the novel?
It grew out of a fascination with the I-45 serial killings that plagued Texas for a number of years. There was a lot of coverage over time of the parents of the young women who were murdered, and while my heart breaks for them, for some reason, I wondered about the person or persons who committed the crimes. I imagined a man and a troubled family history. I imagined what might happen if he were caught. At the time, a number of men were looked at as suspects, and even though they were later cleared of every shred of suspicion, they were shunned. One man who was questioned extensively committed suicide. So then I wondered: What if that were my son or my brother, charged with such a heinous crime or crimes? Suppose I believed with every ounce of my being he was incapable of such violence? How far would I, as a mother or a sister, go to prove his innocence? I also wondered about violence itself. Is the tendency a matter of genetics or does it lie in how we are parented? What science is beginning to uncover in regard to answering this question, the nature versus nurture debate, is fascinating. A gene, referred to in everyday parlance as the “warrior gene,” has been identified, and its presence can predict the tendency to aggressive behavior.
For those readers who are interested, there was a series conducted on NPR radio about neuroscientist Jim Fallon, who has made the study of the criminal brain his life’s work. When he learned from his mother of his family’s violent ancestry (Lizzie Borden among them), since he had all the tools, he conducted brain scans on a number of his relatives and found nothing out of the ordinary. Then he did a brain scan on himself and discovered that he does have the anomaly that his own scientific investigations have shown can predict whether someone is capable of violence and even murder. The intriguing fact is, though, that, according to his mom and the rest of his family, he’s never exhibited violence, or even the tendency. Turns out it requires a triggering event. To listen to the entire program, visit NPR, the special series, Inside the Criminal Brain.
Your previous novel, Evidence of Life, also features a woman whose seemingly perfect family life is unhinged. Is motherhood a common thread in all your writing? What is it about this theme that inspires you to write, and what is the message you’re hoping readers will take from your books?
Motherhood is indeed a theme in all my novels, mainly because, although I’ve had many jobs in my life, being a mom has been the most challenging, the most arduous and rewarding, of them. It’s a journey that isn’t over, although my sons are grown and we’re not sharing the same roof. There is still a bond that while invisible is no less invincible and compelling and even fascinating to me. I think the relationship to one’s children is probably as close as it might come to experiencing unconditional love on earth. If this is true, then it stands to reason that—and some of us do tell our children this—no matter what happens, we’ll always love them. Mistakes, bad choices and errors in judgment are inevitable in families. I think the source of my inspiration for writing my novels is rooted in this reality, and in themes of love and forgiveness, especially as they evolve through sibling and parental relationships when these relationships are under pressure. If there is anything I would want a reader to take away from the stories I write, it would be the idea that regardless of the nature or size of the mistake and its inevitable and often horrible fallout, love and forgiveness are possible, as sentimental or even mawkish as that may sound.
In the novel, the bodies of Miranda Quick and Jessica Sweet are found in an area you refer to as “the killing fields.” Is this a real place?
Unfortunately, it is. The actual “killing fields” refer to a section of Texas’s Interstate 45, roughly the fifty miles of highway that links the southern edge of Houston to the Galveston Bay area. Over a period of years, beginning in the 1970s, more than thirty (some claim the number is over forty) girls and young women have been found brutally murdered in mostly remote locations along that stretch of roadway. At one time, some years ago, when bodies began to be found along the same interstate north of Houston (the setting for my novel Safe Keeping), it was rumored that the serial killer responsible for the murders of the women found on the southern end of the highway had moved his base of operations north. I don’t think it was ever established that was actually the case. A movie was made a few years ago about the I-45 serial killings titled Texas Killing Fields, starring Sam Worthington. It was based on true events.
Evidence of Life and Safe Keeping are both set in Texas, and although you currently reside there, it’s not where you’re originally from. What about the state of Texas are you drawn to?
I actually grew up in the Midwest and was brought to Texas as a teenager by my mother, who took on the job of overseeing oil royalty interests in the state for my grandmother. I’ll never forget my first sight of a drilling rig or of the pump that’s set in place once the well is brought in. The fields in north Texas where I lived at the time were littered with this odd-looking equipment. But lest you think this is a rags to riches story à la The Beverly Hillbillies, it’s not! There was black gold in that flat land, but it didn’t exactly gush out of the ground. I
did like to go with my mom, though, when she talked to the drillers. It was such a wildcat business then, and the people involved in it were such characters. I loved hearing their stories, but I have to confess, I was very sick for my home up north. I wasn’t all that enamored of living in Texas, not until we took our children to visit the Texas Hill Country, west of Austin, where I set Evidence of Life. Some people—and I saw this a while back in the New York Times—compare the region to the Napa Valley or even Provence. All I know is that for me there is something very special there.
What was your greatest challenge in writing Safe Keeping? Your greatest pleasure? The biggest surprise?
The greatest challenge was in focusing the plot. I began with too many elements and so much had to be cut away to even find the real plot of the story. I thank both my agent and my editor for helping me with this. Looking back, it is as if I had this huge rock, and we just kept chipping away through draft after draft to find the essence of the gift the rock contained. But it was worth every ounce of effort and feeling that way, that level of satisfaction, when we finalized the last draft—that was the greatest pleasure. I think the biggest surprise was in how the elements finally did mesh, as beautifully as well-oiled gears. I despaired it would never happen!
How did you know you wanted to be a writer, and when did you actually start writing? What was the first thing you ever wrote?
My sister taught me to read before I ever started school and she and my mom both had a love of books and reading. My mother taught us respect for written words. She taught us to value them, to choose them wisely. She taught us to think about and discuss what we read, too. I loved all of that, but the exact moment when all of that love crystallized into the desire to write happened when, at age eleven, I was reading Wuthering Heights under the bedcovers with a flashlight. Some one scene in that story, I’ve forgotten which one, was so affecting that it caused me to poke my head up out of the covers and to say to myself that I wanted to do this. To write a story that would so reach inside of people they would forget everything else, forget even themselves. I considered writing while I was in high school, but the idea didn’t really take flight for many years, not until my youngest went off to school, then the old dream resurfaced. Before that, along with whatever I wrote in college, I kept a journal and wrote poetry and a handful of character sketches. I suppose the earliest story I ever created was when I taught ballet to some neighborhood kids. I think I was around twelve or thirteen, and I offered ballet lessons as a way to earn money. At the end of the summer, my students performed a ballet I choreographed. I think the story was something about a little lost girl, basically a favorite children’s book The Wizard of Oz as it might be rendered in a classical ballet. I don’t remember what music I used. I do remember choreographing a short ballet to the theme from Exodus, too.
Who are your favorite writers and why?
The Bronte sisters for sure. The Russian authors, Dostoyevsky and Tolstoy. W. Somerset Maugham, Edna Ferber, Samuel Butler, Edith Wharton, Edgar Allen Poe, William Faulkner, Daphne DuMaurier, Willa Cather, Rudyard Kipling, Oscar Wilde. There are so many. I loved them for similar reasons, the humanity of their stories, the virtual worlds they built that I could live in as long as the story lasted. The characters they wrote about so vividly that I was in their skin, experiencing their lives. That these authors could write and bring such color to life from a mere mix of black and white words simply fired my imagination. It still does. Today, I love Anita Shreve, John Burnham Schwartz, Andre Dubus, Annie Proulx, Elizabeth Berg and I just fell in love with Elizabeth Strout. Again, so many authors to love and the reason for loving them is mainly to do with character more than plot, I think. Marilyn Robinson is another who does beautiful characters. I wish I had more time to read!
Can you describe your writing process? Do you write scenes consecutively or jump around? Do you have a schedule or a routine? A lucky charm?
I begin every morning by revising yesterday’s work and then go on to write new material, usually working for four to five hours, then afternoons are spent on the commercial aspects of the business. When it comes to writing the story, I do work consecutively. For me, one detail hinges on another. The slightest change can unhinge everything that comes after, like a domino effect, so the story has to be right from the beginning, or as right as I can get it on that day, before I move on. As for a lucky charm, I think it’s my muse, whom I envision as an adorable but capricious child and often, when I get stuck, when I can’t find her or the inspiration and creative flow she brings me, I go out to the garden and find her there, waiting for me.
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ISBN-13: 9781460328620
SAFE KEEPING
Copyright © 2014 by Barbara Taylor Sissel
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