by Paula McLain
Chris Pavone, Kristin Hannah, and Christina Baker Kline all came through for me in a big way during the drafting process, pointing out things I didn’t necessarily want to hear but absolutely needed to. This book is better by far because of their wise and responsive feedback. At the very least, I owe you guys more fancy cheese!
My amazing publishing team at Ballantine Books and Penguin Random House do their jobs brilliantly and have given me the best possible home these last ten years: Jennifer Hershey, Jennifer Garza, Allyson Lord, Quinne Rogers, Taylor Noel, Susan Corcoran, Kathryn Santora, Hayley Shear, and the incomparable Gina Centrello. Emily Hartley responded to a thousand emails cheerfully and efficiently. Art director and designer Elena Giavaldi created the completely stunning cover, and Dana Blanchette engineered the beautiful interior design elements. Thanks to Susan Bradanini Betz for her thorough and comprehensive copy editing of the manuscript, and to Steve Messina, who graciously and meticulously ushered these pages through a sometimes intense production process. I also need to thank senior VP and deputy general counsel Matthew Martin for his incredibly sensitive and responsive reading of this book.
Nicole Cunningham and the superb team at The Book Group have my back in every possible way and are the world’s savviest and most delightful women. Elisabeth Weed in particular offered feedback on the manuscript at a critical time, for which I’m so grateful. I owe a debt of gratitude as well to Jenny Meyer and Heidi Gall, who help with every aspect of foreign rights and sales; to my consummately charming U.K. agent, Caspian Dennis of Abner Stein; and to my incredibly smart and wonderful film agent, Michelle Weiner at CAA. Thanks to Kristin Cochrane, Amy Black, Lynn Henry, Valerie Gow, Sharon Klein, and their lovely colleagues at Penguin Random House Canada, and to Jenny Parrott at Point Blank/Oneworld in the U.K. for responding so enthusiastically to the potential in me and this story.
Diving into a new genre would no doubt have been a more staggering undertaking without the following books and resources as guideposts: The Body Keeps the Score, by Bessel van der Kolk; Waking the Tiger, by Peter A. Levine; The Unsayable, by Annie G. Rogers; I’ll Be Gone in the Dark, by Michelle McNamara; The Fact of a Body, by Alexandria Marzano-Lesnevich; No Visible Bruises, by Rachel Louise Snyder; In the Name of the Children, by Jeffrey L. Rinek and Marilee Strong; The Killer Across the Table, by John Douglas and Mark Olshaker; Criminal Minds, by Jeff Mariotte; Unsolved Child Murders, by Emily G. Thompson; the Polly Klaas Foundation (pollyklaas.org); the Petaluma Argus-Courier archives; “Polly’s Face,” by Noelle Oxenhandler, The New Yorker, November 22, 1993; Who Killed Polly? by Frank Spiering; Polly Klaas, by Barry Bortnick; the Los Angeles Times archives; Images of America: Early Mendocino Coast, by Katy M. Tahja; and History of Mendocino and Lake Counties, California, by Aurelius O. Carpenter; The Light Between Us, by Laura Lynn Jackson; Gathering Moss, by Robin Wall Kimmerer; and The Songs of Trees, by David George Haskell. I also very much need to thank the following authors whose work helped me understand what I wanted to accomplish in my own book: Tana French, Kate Atkinson, Louise Penny, Rene Denfeld, Peter Rock, and Gabriel Tallent. Thank you for your excellent mentorship, however unintended!
Brian Groh, Patti Callahan Henry, Beth Howard, Sarah McCoy, and Eleanor Brown are friends I’ve come to count on for solidarity and support when I most need it. You’re incredible humans as well as phenomenal storytellers. Thank you! Kat Berko, my magnificent assistant, has been a godsend to me; I’m never letting her go. Other friends and family members continue to be indispensable in more ways than I can name: Sharon Day, Pam and Doug O’Hara, Beth Hellerstein and Dan Jaffee, Boo Geisse, Brad Bedortha, and the entire D’Alessio clan; Terry Dubow, Toni Thayer, Sarah Willis, Karen Sandstrom, and the Eastside Writers; Heather Greene; the Kauai Gals, with a special shout-out to Cynthia Baker, Meg Wolitzer, Priya Parmar, Amanda Eyre Ward, and Michelle Tessler; and also David Kline and Jon Zeitler, who aren’t gals at all, but who welcomed me so warmly, and made every moment of Kauai feel like home.
Thanks to Karen Curtis and to Cricket (the real Cricket!) for love and inspiration, and to the expansive Cleveland crew who have helped keep me sane, fed, dressed, coiffed, and on track during the writing of this book: Quincy D’Alessio, Sam D’Alessio, Alena Sorensen, Karen Rosenberg, Nan Cohen, Aaron Kamut, Kath Lepole, Brian Schrieffer, Leigh Sanford, Penny Conover, Krista Gorzelanczyk, Lindsey Campana, Erika Scotese, Karen Miner, Olga Chwa, Dave Vincent, and Ron Block.
I’m grateful to Rita Hinken and Letti Ann Christoffersen, my two mothers; to my nieces and nephews, Margaret Bailey, Jacob Bailey, and Sam and Mitchell Reller, for always encouraging my work and me; and to my sisters, Teresa Reed and Penny Pennington, who are my true north.
Finally, thanks to my children for being the most crucial element of my home team and the fabric of my life: Connor and Jamilya, Beckett and Finn. And Piper too, of course! I love and appreciate you more than words can say.
(author’s note)
Ten years ago, when inspiration struck in the form of a real woman from history, Ernest Hemingway’s first wife, Hadley, the idea seemed to come from nowhere. I had never considered writing a historical novel, let alone one that featured an actual person. And yet once I plunged into the research and writing process, it struck me powerfully that I wasn’t just telling a story; I was honoring Hadley’s life and spirit, and giving her a voice.
Something eerily similar happened in the writing of When the Stars Go Dark—the idea for which came just as unexpectedly and mysteriously, and with an electrical inner yes I’ve learned to pay attention to. I pictured a missing persons expert obsessed with trying to save a missing girl and also struggling to make peace with her past. Almost immediately I knew the story had to be set in Mendocino—a small coastal town in Northern California where I spent time in my twenties—and that the time frame of the narrative had to be pre-DNA, pre-cellphone, before the Internet had exploded and CSI had laypeople thinking they could solve a murder with their laptop.
Choosing 1993 was instinctual—random—and yet when I dug into the research, I was startled to learn that a rash of real-life abductions of young girls had occurred in the same geographical area and time frame I was exploring, most notably the kidnapping of twelve-year-old Polly Klaas. Polly was taken at knifepoint on the night of October 1, 1993, from the bedroom of her home in Petaluma while her two friends watched. It was a horror story that triggered every parent’s deepest fears, and set in motion the largest manhunt in California’s history. The town of Petaluma came together to aid in the search for Polly. Thousands of volunteers helped search three thousand square miles, and kept her rescue center running twenty-four hours a day, until December 4, nine weeks after her abduction, when her remains were discovered near an abandoned mill off Highway 101, near Cloverdale, California.
FBI agents were led to the body by suspect Richard Allen Davis, age thirty-nine, a man who had an extensive criminal record, including two previous kidnappings, who had violated his parole numerous times, and who had evaded law enforcement officers twice in the weeks following Polly’s abduction, the first encounter being only an hour after he took her, when two patrol officers helped him get his battered Ford Pinto out of a muddy ditch, even though he was notably inebriated and disoriented, with dirt on his clothes and twigs in his hair. She may very well have still been alive, and nearby.
I confess I didn’t sleep well in the weeks and months I researched Polly’s case and others. The profound suffering of the victims and their families crept into my dreams—and onto the page. It began to feel imperative that I tell their stories as bluntly and factually as possible, as a way to honor their lives and dignify their deaths and disappearances. Saying their names became for me a sacred act. A kind of prayer.
Just a month after his daughter’s kidnapping, Marc Klaas started the Polly Klaas Foundation, a grassroots nonprofit organization that has since worked with thousands of families, law enforcement officers, and volunteer wor
kers to help find missing children. The foundation, as part of Polly’s legacy, has also helped alter the California legal system, which now mandates life imprisonment for repeat violent offenders, and put Amber Alert laws in place across all fifty states.
Polly’s parents have both repeatedly spoken of the way their community’s search for their daughter showed the very best of humanity, a steady light in the midst of unbearable darkness. I realized I wanted to write about that. About how a town can come together when the worst happens. About how if we’re ever going to truly heal, we need one another to get there.
Writing a novel is such an interesting mix of effort and surrender, of control and vulnerability. It wasn’t until late in the stages of drafting that it fully dawned on me just why I was so drawn to tell this particular story and not any other. My troubled detective, Anna Hart, is obsessed with trauma and healing, with intimate violence and the complex hidden connection between victims and predators, because I’m obsessed with those things, and long have been. I’ve given her other parts of me too—a version of my childhood spent in foster care, and my abiding love of the natural world as deep medicine. What Anna knows and thinks about the hidden scars of sexual abuse, I know as a sexual abuse survivor.
It’s a door we don’t want to open, a conversation we don’t want to have, and yet the facts remain: Every seventy-three seconds someone in America becomes the victim of a sexual assault. Every nine minutes one of those victims is a child. Eighty-two percent of victims under the age of eighteen are female. The effects of sexual violence can be long lasting and profound, triggering PTSD, thoughts of suicide, drug use and abuse, a sticky vortex of shame and powerlessness.
Sometimes I look up and down the street as I’m walking and wonder which of the girls and women walking the other way—masked and socially distant, now, in 2020—share my story. I believe that our sorrow connects us, yes, and that it can also be the source of our power as well as our empathy. Anna Hart’s pain has led her to her path, her destiny, and mine has led me precisely here. To these characters, real and imaginary, to the fern forest, dripping with fog, to the bluffs above the roaring Pacific, to the cabin in the deep dark woods, and into the very heart of this book, which is as personal as anything I’ve ever written.
Cricket exists, as does the krummholz grove with its tortured and twisted cypress trees. I’ve sat at the bar at Patterson’s, sipping whiskey just as Anna and Will do, and had coffee at the GoodLife. It’s there, on Lansing Street, across from the Masonic Hall, where the carving of Time and the Maiden stands stark and white on a plinth above the village just as it has for over a hundred years. You could meet me there and we could walk together toward the bluff, talking as the wind carries our voices further and further on.
BY PAULA MCLAIN
When the Stars Go Dark
Love and Ruin
Circling the Sun
The Paris Wife
A Ticket to Ride
Like Family: Growing Up in Other People’s Houses: A Memoir
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Paula McLain is the New York Times bestselling author of the novels Love and Ruin, Circling the Sun, The Paris Wife, and A Ticket to Ride; the memoir Like Family: Growing Up in Other People’s Houses; and two collections of poetry. Her writing has appeared in The New York Times, Good Housekeeping, O: The Oprah Magazine, Town & Country, The Guardian, The Huffington Post, and elsewhere. She lives in Ohio with her family.
paulamclain.com
Facebook.com/paulamclainauthor
Instagram: @paula_mclain
What’s next on
your reading list?
Discover your next
great read!
Get personalized book picks and up-to-date news about this author.
Sign up now.
