This interview has been edited for clarity and concision. <\/p>\n
How did you decide to make Mrs. Blossom the protagonist of this book?<\/b><\/p>\n
After the last two novels I wrote, I wanted to spend time with someone nice. <\/p>\n
And I had also come to believe that I had been unfair to Muriel Blossom. During the pandemic, I started to educate myself in anti-fatness. I became a fan of podcasters Aubrey Gordon and Virginia Sole-Smith. <\/p>\n
I wanted to bring Mrs. Blossom back so I could do better by her. I\u2019m her age now. She is an amalgam of three Lippman women: my mom, my sister and me. She\u2019s a lot like my sister, a very modest, shy person who also happened to have very avant-garde taste in music when we were teenagers. Mrs. Blossom, I believe, is incredibly sexy. She has this indefinable quality. Men are very drawn to her. <\/p>\n
\u201cMurder Takes a Vacation\u201d is your 30th book, but the first \u201ccozy mystery\u201d that you have written. What was it like switching genres? <\/b><\/p>\n
Over 30 years of writing mysteries, I\u2019m always trying to do something different. I never want to feel comfortable. <\/p>\n
This was the hardest book I\u2019ve ever written. Dying is easy. Comedy is hard. There are really strong expectations within a cozy. You\u2019re writing about a real world, where there are real stakes and someone has died and people are at risk. It has to make sense for your character to get involved. You need a big cast. The whodunit part is a big part of a cozy.<\/p>\n
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The cover of Laura Lippman\u2019s \u201cMurder Takes a Vacation.\u201d (William Morrow)<\/p>\n
Cozies get a bad rap, not by everybody, but there are some really contemptuous voices in the mystery writing world, but I\u2019ve always read and loved cozy mysteries. <\/p>\n
How do you write novels? Does the plot come to you fully formed, or do you figure it out as you write?<\/b><\/p>\n
There are people who outline and people who are pantsers, that is we write by the seat of our pants. I\u2019m more or less a pantser. I know the big secret, but my characters don\u2019t. I think of it as the distant shoreline school of plotting. You may think you can see what\u2019s on the other side, but you don\u2019t know for sure. It\u2019s really about the journey of getting there and what you learn along the way. <\/p>\n
I picked up the book thinking it would be the ultimate beach read, a fluffy tale of murder on a cruise, but soon discovered it was also a meditation on romantic love, friendship and aging. <\/b><\/p>\n
Mrs. Blossom is undergoing a major life change. She\u2019s alone and she has this big secret. She\u2019s never found anyone that she felt she could entrust with this secret. <\/p>\n
I don\u2019t feel my age. Ageism and anti-fat attitudes have a lot in common. You\u2019re walking around in your body and you feel perfectly comfortable in it. It\u2019s almost a clich\u00e9 to say how women disappear when you reach a certain age. <\/p>\n
We\u2019ve commodified everything in our culture so that even people are treated as objects. By cultural standards, I\u2019m not a trophy. I\u2019m not a prize. I wouldn\u2019t be value added for most men. I wanted to write about what it\u2019s like to be a woman in your 60s. <\/p>\n