About the Novel, Black Box

When I was starting my M.A. in creative writing and English Literature in the early 1990s, I was going through a harrowing, sex-related firing from a Wall Street job. Following Anita Hill’s example, I was emboldened to speak up about certain things. Long story short, I got whacked. I had already started night school in City College’s M.A. program, so who cared? That severance package funded my year and a half off for graduate school. This extraordinary world of work dominated my consciousness -- How Can People Not Know? My audition piece was the Wall Street-set novel that became The Black Box.

Over time I was peer-pressured in fiction workshops into abandoning my depiction of this world. Dysfunctional families and sexual abuse were the order of the day. I, too, produced a raft of “poor me” stories, some of which were rewarded with prizes and publication. They made the class feel good about me, and I vaguely ashamed of myself.

When my Wall Street severance money ran out, I went back to freelancing at business magazines, financial corporations and consulting firms. Despite academic prizes, creative writing awards, a prestigious grant and an academic book contract, due to the economics of my life then, the worlds of publishing and academia – the traditional supporting vocations of the creative writer – were closed. I took another full time job in finance, in the evenings trying to complete a “personal” story that had won me a New York Foundation for the Arts Fellowship. But I found I could no longer write the way I was conditioned to in the hot house of my grad school workshops. My life had got too fast, and the outer world too interesting for me to dwell exclusively in the inner life, the private sphere.

After a year, it collapsed of its own weight, and I returned to the Wall Street story I’d set aside in grad school. Eventually a darker, personal story worked itself into the real world of this one, where characters ran up credit card bills, had trouble with their in-laws, endured workplace crushes, sexual harassment and crazy bosses; enjoyed little pleasures like clothes and jokes and expense account drinks. Because nothing exists in a vacuum – the deep conflicts we all harbor dwell somewhere in the depths of our busy lives.

And I had to write this story, because unlike any number of trauma narratives, I still hadn’t read it anywhere – working women coping in a man’s world, what happens when men and women reverse breadwinner roles, what happens when your liberal values have no outlet in the real world. What happens when those values let you down.

Over the past decade, we've read many victim stories. My novel puts a fresh spin on the equation, asking to what extent victims have the right to revenge, and how long this right can continue. I explore how a crime can look radically different, framed by the shifting mores of a mere decade.

READ THE FULL SYNOPSIS (PASSWORD PROTECTED) More excerpts can be read on the Invitation Only section of the web site. Email me to get in.