Tova Mirvis based her dark family drama We Would Never (Avid Reader, Feb.) on a real-life murder that took place during a bitter divorce.
Tell me about the genesis of this book.
Ten years ago, I saw on Facebook that someone I had a very tangential connection to had been murdered. I went down a rabbit hole, reading everything I could. The initial speculation was that this man, who had been a professor at Florida State, might have been killed by a student who was unhappy with a bad grade, or a colleague who disagreed with a point of legal theory. The last line of this article mentioned that he had also been in the middle of a brutal divorce. Ten years ago, I had just come out of a very ugly divorce, and I thought, hmm.
Had you used a true story as the basis of a novel before?
Never like this. I told my friends as I was writing the book that there was a murder in it and they all said, “A murder, Tova! We didn’t think that was your kind of book!”
How did it compare to writing a fully invented work of fiction?
Well, at first there was this feeling of “Oh, I have a plot!” And plot was never my strong point. But eventually there came a moment of detaching from the true story. Now when I read about the real case, the two stories feel like cousins.
In the Florida case, the professor’s in-laws hired a hit man to kill him.
It was wild. They had a family connection to the hit man. There is a mother, father, brother dynamic in the real story. But while writing We Would Never, I was less interested in the mechanics of the crime than in the characters’ inner lives. Yes, there’s a murder, but the real drama lies in the family dynamics.
Let’s just say, without spoiling the plot, that your portrayal of the family is a bit of a cautionary tale about over-involved parents.
I wanted to look at the way that in families, love and too much love, and loyalty and too much loyalty, are sometimes right on top of each other.
Could you talk more about the intersection between truth and fiction? What does fiction offer that nonfiction cannot?
I’m really interested in who people are and why they do the things that they do. No matter how much I read in the news about the Florida case, I was never going to get that piece of the real people’s inner lives that only a novel can supply.
I love Joyce Carol Oates’s Black Water about the Ted Kennedy story, and The Perfect Nanny by Leïla Slimani. And there are so many true crime podcasts and blogs, but nothing I’ve read has ever given me a deep understanding of why people do such a thing as murder. How do people lose their moral compass? How does a divorce upend people so fully? How does it obliterate any sense of who you are?
