Life Sentences
Laura Lippman, 2009
HarperCollins
344 pp.
ISBN-13: 9780061944888
Summary
Author Cassandra Fallows has achieved remarkable success by baring her life on the page. Her two widely popular memoirs continue to sell briskly, acclaimed for their brutal, unexpurgated candor about friends, family, lovers—and herself. But now, after a singularly unsuccessful stab at fiction, Cassandra believes she may have found the story that will enable her triumphant return to nonfiction.
When Cassandra was a girl, growing up in a racially diverse middle-class neighborhood in Baltimore, her best friends were all black: elegant, privileged Donna; sharp, shrewd Tisha; wild and worldly Fatima. A fifth girl orbited their world—a shy, quiet, unobtrusive child named Calliope Jenkins—who, years later, would be accused of killing her infant son. Yet the boy's body was never found and Calliope's unrelenting silence on the subject forced a judge to jail her for contempt. For seven years, Calliope refused to speak and the court was finally forced to let her go. Cassandra believes this still unsolved real-life mystery, largely unknown outside Baltimore, could be her next bestseller.
But her homecoming and latest journey into the past will not be welcomed by everyone, especially by her former friends, who are unimpressed with Cassandra's success—and are insistent on their own version of their shared history. And by delving too deeply into Calliope's dark secrets, Cassandra may inadvertently unearth a few of her own—forcing her to reexamine the memories she holds most precious, as the stark light of truth illuminates a mother's pain, a father's betrayal...and what really transpired on a terrible day that changed not only a family but an entire country. (From the publisher.)
Author Bio• Birth—January 31, 1959
• Where—Atlanta, Georgia, USA
• Education—B.S., Northwestern University
• Awards—(see below)
• Currently—lives in Baltimore, Maryland
Lippman was born in Atlanta, Georgia, and raised in Baltimore, Maryland. She is the daughter of Theo Lippman Jr., a well known and respected writer at the Baltimore Sun, and Madeline Lippman, a retired school librarian for the Baltimore City Public School System. She attended high school in Columbia, Maryland, where she was the captain of the Wilde Lake High School It's Academic team.
Lippman is a former reporter for the (now defunct) San Antonio Light and the Baltimore Sun. She is best known for writing a series of novels set in Baltimore and featuring Tess Monaghan, a reporter (like Lippman herself) turned private investigator.
Lippman's works have won the Agatha, Anthony, Edgar, Nero, Gumshoe and Shamus awards. Her 2007 release, What the Dead Know, was the first of her books to make the New York Times bestseller list, and was shortlisted for the Crime Writer's Association Dagger Award. In addition to the Tess Monaghan novels, Lippman wrote 2003's Every Secret Thing, which has been optioned for the movies by Academy Award–winning actor Frances McDormand.
Lippman lives in the South Baltimore neighborhood of Federal Hill and frequently writes in the neighborhood coffee shop Spoons. In addition to writing, she teaches at Goucher College in Towson, Maryland, just outside of Baltimore. In January, 2007, she taught at the 3rd Annual Writers in Paradise at Eckerd College.
Lippman is married to David Simon, another former Baltimore Sun reporter, and creator and an executive producer of the HBO series The Wire. The character Bunk is shown to be reading one of her books in episode eight of the first season of The Wire. She appeared in a scene of the first episode of the last season of The Wire as a reporter working in the Baltimore Sun newsroom.
Awards
2015 Anthony Award-Best Novel (After I'm Gone)
2008 Anthony Award-Best Novel (What the Dead Know)
2008 Anthony Award-Best Short Story ("Hardly Knew Her")
2008 Barry Award-Best Novel (What the Dead Know)
2008 Macavity Award-Best Mystery (What the Dead Know)
2007 Anthony Award-Best Novel (No Good Deeds)
2007 Quill Award-Mystery (What the Dead Know)
2006 Gumshow Award-Best Novel (To the Power of the Three)
2004 Barry Award-Best Novel (Every Secret Thing)
2001 Nero Award (Sugar House)
2000 Anthony Award-Best Paperback Original (In Big Trouble)
2000 Shamus Award-Best Paperback Original (In Big Trouble)
1999 Anthony Award-Best Paperback Original (Butchers Hill)
1998 Agatha Award-Best Novel (Butchers Hill)
1998 Edgar Award-Best Paperback Original (Charm City)
1998 Shamus Award-Best Paperback Original (Charm City)
(Author bio adapted from Wikipedia.)
Book Reviews
Ms. Lippman makes good use of the way memoirists often choose sides in stories of divorce, and of how their idealizing and demonizing respective parents may be deeply wrong. But her greatest sleight of hand is the maneuvering that deftly compromises Cassandra as she reignites old emotions. Not until the end of Life Sentences…will the reader grasp how fully Ms. Lippman has shaped and controlled this narrative. Warts and all, Cassandra becomes a sufficiently sympathetic character to lure readers into making the same mistakes that she makes in excavating old truths.
Janet Maslin - New York Times
Theirs is a strong and vivid story, one that will intrigue many readers—especially, I suspect, women who find echoes of their own lives and friendships in this drama.
Washington Post
Succeeds brilliantly.... Lippman is in total command of her material, weaving strands about race, family myths and self-deception into a mystery so taut the reader is nearly afraid to keep going—and simultaneously powerless to stop.
People
(Starred review.) This stunning stand-alone from bestseller Lippman (Baltimore Blues) examines the extraordinary power and fragility of memories. Writer Cassandra Fallows achieved critical and commercial success with an account of her Baltimore childhood growing up in the 1960s and a follow-up dealing with her adult marriages and affairs. The merely modest success of her debut novel leads her back to nonfiction and the possibility of a book about grade school classmate Calliope Jenkins. Accused of murdering her infant son, Jenkins spent seven years in prison steadfastly declining to answer any questions about the disappearance and presumed death of her son. Fallows (white) tries to reconnect with three former classmate friends (black) to compare memories of Jenkins and research her story. In the process, she discovers the gulf (partially racial) that separates her memories of events from theirs. Fallows's pursuit of Jenkins's story becomes a rich, complex journey from self-deception to self-discovery.
Publishers Weekly
A writer discovers the power of silence in the latest stand-alone from Lippman (Hardly Knew Her, 2008, etc.). Author of two successful memoirs and a tepidly received novel, Cassandra Fallows is jolted by a reminder of her classmate, Calliope Jenkins, who served seven years in prison rather than reveal the whereabouts of her infant son. When a similar case in New Orleans returns Callie's name to the news, Cassandra leaves her Brooklyn brownstone for her home town of Baltimore, hoping to learn enough of Callie's story so that it will serve as an anchor for a fourth book. Coping with her parents, who split when Cassandra was ten (her classics-professor father fell in love with voluptuous young Annie Reynolds, an apparent victim of the race riots that engulfed Baltimore in the wake of the King assassination) is a challenge. And her efforts to find the absent Callie provoke present-day racial tensions of their own as she faces her former classmates, Tisha Barr and Donna Howard, who close ranks against her and stonewall her efforts. Even as her attraction for Callie's attorney, Reg Barr—Tisha's brother and Donna's husband—becomes an echo of her father's interracial relationship with Annie, Cassandra knows that she will never be part of their circle, any more than silent, wary Callie will ever become part of Cassandra's empire of words. Lippman's writing is powerful and her gaze unflinching as she invokes a world in which no one is either entirely guilty or truly innocent.
Kirkus Reviews
Discussion Questions
1. Life Sentences suggests that stories belong to whomever tells them. Is that fair, unfair? Under what circumstances, if any, does a story—a life—belong only to the person who lived it?
2. Is Cassandra a likable person, or at least an ethical one? Does it matter if she's likable?
3. Was Cassandra's memoir, Her Father's Daughter, "true"?
4. What do you think happened to Callie's son? Does she tell Cassandra the truth, or the truth as she needs to believe it? Is there a difference?
5. Life Sentences has many references to myths and folk tales—stories of the ancient Greeks, but also Br'er Rabbit. What myths do the characters need in order to go about their day-to-day lives? Does Tisha have a myth that sustains her? Gloria Bustamante?
6. Cassandra is white, most of her childhood friends were African-American (as was her stepmother) and Gloria Bustamanate is Latina. But is race that central to the story of Life Sentences? In what ways?
7. Why does Lenore allow her husband's version of events to stand uncontested?
8. Is Cedric Fallows self-aware? Does he have any sense of the way he has affected his daughter?
9. What has Cassandra learned beyond the facts of her own life and Callie's life? Does she change over the course of this book? In what ways? Would the Cassandra we meet in that opening chapter make the same choices that Cassandra makes at the book's end?
10. What point is Tisha trying to make when she shows Cassandra a small inaccuracy in Her Father's Daughter?
11. On the last page of the novel, Callie passes a sign that Cassandra has also noticed: If you lived here, you would be home by now. Cassandra had wondered if the sign was a tautology, or at least mildly redundant. But Callie responds to the sign very differently. What does this tell us about Cassandra and Callie? Where is Callie—in her life—at the book's end? Has she found a home in the world? Has she at last made all the lies true?
(Questions issued by publisher.)