Megan Miranda’s fifth novel for adults, Such a Quiet Place, is hazy and buoyant with suspicion and explores intimate, female friendship. This quiet place, which of course isn’t quiet at all, is Hollow’s Edge, an insular, preplanned community by a lake. A year and a half after the unsolved murder by carbon monoxide poisoning of Brandon and Fiona Truett, Ruby Fletcher, the prime suspect and their dog sitter, returns to the neighborhood after 14 months away and an overturned conviction.
Megan Miranda picks up the phone, explaining that I’m catching her at the beginning of allergy season, also known as Spring, and we chat about her path from working in biotech to teaching high school science to returning her dream: writing. She grew up in New Jersey, graduated from MIT, and migrated to a small town in North Carolina where she lives with her family. The author of five novels for adults and several books for young adults, Miranda’s methodical plots often balance on the knife edge of science and law, while her atmospheric writing carries with it always a bedroom intimacy. In her latest and most eerie novel, Such a Quiet Place, which of course isn’t quiet at all, Miranda continues to write through the layers of a mystery, creating a prism of suspense, through the themes and characters that steadily return to her.
Picture the suburbs. Perhaps it’s wide streets that flatten out the light. Perhaps it’s the tight-knit, loving and irritated family in a huge, yet cozy house: the McCallisters in Home Alone or the Griswolds in Christmas Vacation. Perhaps it’s Carolyn Burnham’s pruning shears matching her gardening clogs in desperate unhappiness in American Beauty. Or perhaps it’s your childhood, your adulthood, your home.
Ongoingness: The End of a Diary by Sarah Manguso Graywolf Press; 104 p. Sometimes queen of heavy darkness, sometimes of blinding light, Sarah Manguso, author of two poetry collections, a short story collection, and two memoirs (Two Kinds of Decay and The Guardians: An Elegy for a Friend), presents her third memoir Ongoingness: The End of a Diary, the story of her compulsive journaling, which ended with the birth of her son. Her starring, dazzlingly complex subjects are time, mortality, […]