Best-selling author Lisa Unger has been nurturing her dark side since she was a writing major in college, working on the first of more than a dozen psychological thrillers.
For the past decade, she’s also been nurturing a daughter, Ocean, somehow finding time in her novel-a-year regimen to mommy-blog about her experiences including how to manage breast-feeding on a book tour, how to dissuade a 3-year-old from napping with a plastic bucket on her head, and how to write on a plane when you only have a crayon.
Ocean won’t be along when Unger makes an appearance Monday at the Vero Beach Book Center. She’ll be signing her just-released novel, “Ink and Bone,” while Ocean stays with a sitter at their home in Clearwater Beach. That’s probably just as well; the plot involves the disappearance of a little girl whose image keeps popping into the mind of a 20-year-old woman. Tormented by an urgency in the visions but unsure what to do, she goes to visit her psychic grandmother in upstate New York. There, the very town itself becomes a character – and how could it not, with a name like The Hollows?
Thick with the threads of human relationships, Unger’s novels use those connections as a safety net for her characters when her plots have led them to the brink.
“I wouldn’t even say they’re scary, they’re suspenseful,” says Melissa Wade, a longtime staffer at the Book Center who has read all 14 of Unger’s books, including “Ink and Bone.” “They keep you on the edge of your seat.”
Unger’s fans are all over the world. Her books have been translated into 26 languages, and several have earned mentions in national media as recommended reading. And her essays, largely about her family life, have been published in the New York Times and the Wall Street Journal, along with national magazines.
“A lot of people turn to writing mystery thrillers because it orders the chaos,” she says. “We have that dark imagination and it’s a way of metabolizing it onto the page. There’s a beginning, a middle and an end and some type of justice is served and understanding gleaned. Not so in the real world; there’s a lot of ugliness that can’t be resolved.”
As for her readers, they get scared for pleasure, yes, but only in a controlled environment, she says. “They want to be afraid in safe circumstances. They want to feel the relief of the closed book. Closed and containable.”
That control extends to her daughter Ocean’s media experiences.
“Her input is heavily curated,” Unger says. “She’s never even watched real television.”
Despite her mom’s best intentions, though, Ocean seems to have inherited a dark imagination, too. “She’s got these appetites,” Unger says. “She is drawn to the darker book.”
It’s not so hard to imagine the two cuddling up on the couch together reading the latest “Dead City” book, a tween-lit series about mother-daughter zombie hunters that is their current favorite.
And when they analyzed the new movie, “The Jungle Book,” they came away agreeing it was pretty intense. “It’s the darkest thing she’s seen,” says Unger the mom. “That was a mean tiger.”
Those conversations about movies and literature were typical of the ones Unger had with her own mother, a librarian, voracious reader and “lover of stories – I definitely got that from her,” Unger says.
Though her dad, an engineer, was “anti-movies,” says Unger, her mother adored them. “She used to take me with her, like, really young. She probably thought, ‘Ninety percent of this is going over her head.’ But maybe it wasn’t.”
And then there were her mother’s novels, a torrent of them, their access limited only by her reading skills.
“We had these giant bookshelves, and nothing was ever censored. If I could read it, it was mine. Nobody ever stopped me.”
Those books folded in with what Unger calls her “ferocious curiosity” that made her not only want to pursue “that noise in the basement,” but also human psychology.
“What makes us who we are? Is it nature or is it nurture, or some impossibly complex helix of both those things?” asks Unger. “What turns some of us into psychopaths and others into heroes?”
By high school, she was committed to becoming a writer. Unger started out at New York University, then, at the advice of her writing professor, transferred as a sophomore to the New School for Social Research. “Classes were tiny, which allowed me to be incredibly nimble” with what she studied, she says. Her professors were known poets and playwrights, and she was encouraged to engage with the community at large, teaching poetry to second-graders, and visiting homeless shelters on a research project.
“The experience was extremely dynamic and multilayered,” she recalls. “It really informed my writing and it allowed me to have a broad exposure to different forms of writing until I found my voice, which is the novel.”
After graduation, though, she didn’t just hole up in a loft and write. Instead, she followed her father’s advice and got “an actual job” working in the publicity department of a publishing house. She was successful, but as her responsibilities grew, her time for writing diminished. “I reached a point in my mid-20s where I wasn’t writing at all. The only thing I ever wanted for my life, I wasn’t doing,” she says. “I thought, You’re going to look back in five years, 10 years, and say you never even tried.’ I couldn’t live with that, the slow fade to nothing. So I wound up getting very serious. I dedicated myself to this thing.”
She wrote in every moment she could grab, “getting up early, staying up late, staying in on weekends, writing on the train. You don’t make excuses for why you didn’t write, you just sit down and you’re a writer.”
In a year and a half, the novel she started on a napkin at 19 was finished. Unger was 29. Now it was time to publish, and she wasn’t sure how to begin. So she took a trip to Key West to visit a friend, and it was there that she met her future husband, at the legendary Hemingway hangout, Sloppy Joe’s.
“It was this big moment, love at first sight, and he proposed six months later.”
The two sold their homes, quit their jobs and moved to Florida. “That was a huge, go-for-broke move. It was a very heavy moment: What am I if not this?”
With her husband Jeffrey as her office manager, she never had to answer that question. She’s been on the treadmill of writing, publishing and publicizing ever since. “I’m already working on the 2018 book. I have an idea that’s percolating and it’s finding its way out.”
“It’s harder not to write than write, it truly is. If there are a couple days that I’m not writing for whatever reason, I’m not right with the world.”
Lisa Unger appears at the Book Center Monday at 6 p.m.