Delphinium Books

Offering readers the best in quality literature

  • Home
  • About
  • Our Books
  • Blog
  • Submissions
  • Contact
  • Facebook
  • Twitter
  • Instagram

Archives for May 2021

I KNOW WHAT YOU DID: On Writing The Blackmailer’s Guide to Love by Marian Thurm

May 10, 2021

New York City, where I’ve lived for decades, has been, for me, an endless source of inspiration for my novels and short stories. The things I’ve seen and overheard—while in line at Whole Foods or while sitting in the waiting room in a doctor’s office or standing in a subway car next to a teenager watching a TV show on his phone—have often found their way into my fiction. The shoes my characters wear, the tattoos ornamenting their wrists or ankles, the frustration they unleash as they shout into their iPhones at friends or relatives who’ve disappointed or angered them—sometimes nearly every bit of it has been inspired by people sitting across from me on the Lexington Avenue bus. Or walking past me along 86th Street, phone in hand, as they reveal surprisingly intimate details of their lives in the loudest of voices. And my natural instincts as a fiction writer always lead me to pay close attention, to write down whatever I find poignant or hilarious or astonishing directly into a small notebook I keep with me whenever I leave my apartment. As the T-shirt given to me by a friend warns: .

The idea for my new novel, The Blackmailer’s Guide to Love, came to me in an instant one spring afternoon eight very long years ago, as I was heading homeward from the subway. I was less than a half-block from my apartment when I saw, for the first time in precisely forty years, a man I recognized immediately, a former college teacher of mine who looked rather as he had when I’d been his student, though he was now an elderly man, his hair thinning and white, his formerly bearded face now mostly clean-shaven. And in that moment I thought, I know what you did, Professor X. I KNOW what you did.

Then I stopped him on the street and introduced myself. I’d been his student decades earlier in the philosophy class he taught and, as I could have predicted, he had no idea who I was. But we chatted for a few minutes about our mutual time on campus, and talked about what a coincidence it was that, in fact, we now lived directly across the street from one another, our apartment buildings a mere fifty feet apart.

I know what you did, Professor X. I KNOW what you did.

What I knew was that forty years earlier, this geeky-looking married guy had been sleeping with a sophomore in my dorm, a serious-minded teenager who was a student in the small ethics class Professor X had taught in the Philosophy Department.

In the next moment, as we went our separate ways, the earliest seeds of my new novel were planted. What if my protagonist/narrator (a bereft, emotionally unstable middle-aged woman who’d once been the professor’s student) strolled into the lobby of the professor’s high-rise apartment building, talked her way past the concierge, went up to his apartment, and rang the bell? What if the professor’s wife—to whom he’d been married for over half a century and who knew absolutely nothing about her husband’s betrayal—answered the door, and the former student announced, “You don’t know me, but there’s something I have to tell you…” What would it do to this couple’s relationship, to the betrayed wife who had never doubted, for even a moment during their fifty-year marriage, her husband’s faithfulness? Or…what if, instead, the narrator confronted her former professor and threatened to tell his wife unless he immediately wrote her a check for five thousand dollars? And a few months later demanded ten thousand? And then twenty thousand? How far would he be willing to go to preserve his marriage?

Though I wasn’t at all sure where, exactly, these ideas would lead me, the one thing I knew with certainty that afternoon after running into Professor X was that somewhere in that briefest of encounters was a novel I was going to write. And I found myself thinking, as I do nearly every day, of my favorite quote from Mark Twain: “There was never yet an uninteresting life. Such a thing is an impossibility. Inside of the dullest exterior there is a drama, a comedy, and a tragedy.”

Filed Under: General

Recent Posts

  • Sleeping With Women [excerpt] from THE GRETA GARBO HOME FOR WAYWARD BOYS AND GIRLS by Steven Gaines August 20, 2024
  • EXCERPT: Animals of the Alpine Front—new historical fiction from Don Zancanella [August 20, 2024] August 5, 2024
  • On Writing ORIANA by Anastasia Rubis February 28, 2024
  • “First Loves” (excerpt) from MY LIFE AT THE WHEEL by Lynne Sharon Schwartz December 11, 2023
  • Started as a Text: The Writing Process by Bill Gaythwaite September 28, 2023
  • The Fact and the Truth of THE LIGHT OF SEVEN DAYS by River Adams August 8, 2023

Categories

  • Delphinium Authors
  • General
  • New Books
  • News

Tags

1954 acceptance speech artists Austria autobiographical Books Booz Allen Hamilton bottoming out celebrity demotic Dostoyevsky dysfunctional Edward Snowden fame fiction fiction-writing Fitgerald Fuhrer George Elliot Germany Hemingway Historical Fiction holocaust imagination James Frey Jewish Karen Silkwood literature Memoir memoirist Middlemarch Nabokov Nazi Nazis Nobel Prize novelist novelists NSA Reading redemption Sobibor style World War II writers writing

Archives

  • August 2024
  • February 2024
  • December 2023
  • September 2023
  • August 2023
  • June 2023
  • May 2023
  • December 2022
  • August 2022
  • April 2022
  • October 2021
  • August 2021
  • July 2021
  • May 2021
  • April 2021
  • February 2021
  • January 2021
  • December 2020
  • November 2020
  • October 2020
  • September 2020
  • August 2019
  • April 2019
  • February 2019
  • January 2019
  • December 2018
  • November 2018
  • October 2018
  • September 2018
  • August 2018
  • July 2018
  • June 2018
  • May 2018
  • April 2018
  • March 2018
  • February 2018
  • January 2018
  • December 2017
  • November 2017
  • October 2017
  • September 2017
  • August 2017
  • July 2017
  • June 2017
  • May 2017
  • April 2017
  • March 2017
  • August 2016
  • May 2016
  • April 2016
  • December 2015
  • November 2015
  • October 2015
  • April 2015
  • March 2015
  • February 2015
  • January 2015
  • October 2013

© 2025 · Delphinium Books. All rights reserved.