The Next Time You See Me (48 page)

I was in the home stretch of the novel—the last 75 or so pages—when I had the idea for the Thanksgiving epilogue, and I was so excited that I stopped working on the main part of the story and went ahead and wrote it in a feverish day or two. Then I went back and wrote the rest of the story, the one that ends with Susanna at Emily’s bedside. I think writing the Thanksgiving section unlocked the rest of the draft; it gave me something to strive toward. It’s one of my favorite parts of the novel.

Why is it set a year before the book’s action? I don’t know how much of this was conscious thought at the time, but there was a nice symmetry to beginning the book around Halloween and ending at Thanksgiving, even if I was going back a year in time to do so, and I wanted to be able to show Ronnie alive, full of life. Also, this is the only time in the book that the reader gets to see an actual scene play out between Susanna and Ronnie, and that relationship between them is so important to the novel. I thought it was also nice to build a scene around the photograph that Susanna ends up using for Ronnie’s MISSING posters—to know what was going through Ronnie’s head at the moment it was taken.

Does the story end for you where it does for us as readers? Or have you imagined the characters’ futures in your mind, beyond the pages of the book?

I don’t have a strong, specific sense of what happens to each of the characters, but in general, I think Susanna is OK—that the events of these weeks have given her the courage, the imperative, even, to seek out happiness. I doubt it will be easy for her, but I think she’s better off without Dale. And perhaps Dale is better off without her.

I hope Tony runs for sheriff and wins. And I hope Sarah finds contentment again.

Emily I don’t know about. She isn’t in a very good place at the end of the book.

Who are your writing influences? Any books you are currently reading that you would recommend to your readers?

Some writers who inspired this book in particular are William Faulkner—the Ronnie section in the middle of the book owes a debt to the Addie Bundren section in
As I Lay Dying
—and Margaret Atwood, whose
Cat’s Eye
and
The Blind Assassin
showed me some tricks about how to move a story between past and present. Dan Chaon’s
Await Your Reply
gave me a model for a contemporary book that straddles perfectly that line between a literary novel and a suspense novel. Claire Messud’s
The Emperor’s Children
helped me with conceiving a book as a series of alternating third-person perspectives, including the ways that a writer can get mileage out of the gaps—the stuff that happens between chapters, when one character hands the story off to another. But the book that most captures what I strive to do as a novelist is William Trevor’s
Felicia’s Journey
. I just love it so much. I realized this only in retrospect, but Wyatt certainly has some Mr. Hilditch in him.

The books I’ve read most recently—and I loved all of them—were Christopher Coake’s
You Came Back,
Chad Harbach’s
The Art of Fielding
, Gillian Flynn’s
Gone Girl,
and Jeffrey Eugenides’s
The Marriage Plot.
I went to grad school with Chris, and I looked up to him, and it’s just such a pleasure to read this novel, which is a page-turner but also heartbreaking and artful.
The Art of Fielding
was interesting to read after
The Next Time You See Me
was copyedited and out of my hands. I’m glad I didn’t read it sooner. The books aren’t obviously alike, outside of the fact that Tony is a baseball player, but the big cast of characters, and the approach to point of view, are similar.

What are you working on next?

I’ve been writing short stories again, which is fun, but I’m eager to dig into another novel project. I may have something, but it’s too early to talk about. I’ve got to get it past the first trimester.

Holly Goddard Jones
is the author of the short story collection
Girl Trouble.
Her work has appeared in
The Best American Mystery Stories, New Stories from the South, Tin House
magazine, and elsewhere. She was a 2013 recipient of The Fellowship of Southern Writers’ Hillsdale Award for Fiction and a 2007 recipient of a Rona Jaffe Foundation Writers’ Award. She teaches in the creative writing program at the University of North Carolina at Greensboro and lives in Greensboro with her husband, Brandon, and two rowdy dogs.

www.hollygoddardjones.com

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ALSO BY HOLLY GODDARD JONES

Girl Trouble: Stories

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This book is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents either are products of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual events or locales or persons, living or dead, is entirely coincidental.

Copyright © 2013 by Holly Goddard Jones

All rights reserved, including the right to reproduce this book or portions thereof in any form whatsoever. For information address Touchstone Subsidiary Rights Department, 1230 Avenue of the Americas, New York, NY 10020.

First Touchstone hardcover edition February 2013

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Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Jones, Holly Goddard.

The next time you see me: a novel / Holly Goddard Jones.

   p. cm.

1. Murder—Investigation—Fiction. 2. Kentucky—Fiction. I. Title.

PS3610.O6253N49   2012

813'.6—dc23   2012024217

ISBN: 978-1-4516-8336-3

ISBN: 978-1-4516-8338-7 (eBook)