The Summer of Fall: Gravity is a bitch, but I'm still standing

By Laura Lippman

From the New York Times bestselling author of Lady in the Lake, Dream Girl, and many other noir favorites, a raw-funny personal tale of heartbreak and misfortune, and the surprisingly wonderful things they can lead to.

“Lucky! I’M LUCKY, GODDAMMIT!” So Laura Lippman keeps telling herself throughout the course of a year when she seems everything but. Her marriage crumbles; a beloved friend dies suddenly; her sister’s health fails. Everything and everyone is falling apart. The calamities reach a symbolic climax in the summer of 2022, when she and her mother both suffer bad falls. (Her mom is ninety-one; Lippman herself is merely “exceptionally clumsy.”) Still, she insists, she is lucky.

And in many ways, she is. She has a great kid and a career she loves, and she’s healthy and more or less happy. Yet even a resilient optimist like her can’t deny that life’s catastrophes are indiscriminate and seem always to hit at once.

In this wry and honest memoir of a truly lousy time, she gives an intimate look at her private life — perhaps less hair-raising than her award-winning crime thrillers, but no less engaging. And it’s relatable. Even the most fortunate experience heartache, loss, and physical breakdown of some kind. Lippman’s account of her own hard knocks reminds us that, eventually, adversity comes for everyone.

But she has a more important message: While misfortune might not be a choice, how we respond to it is. Lippman chooses to be a happy warrior. When her friend Terry Teachout, the renowned theater critic for The Wall Street Journal, dies without warning in January 2022, she finds solace in the fact that he’d recently found joy in a new romance. When two friends make the spontaneous decision to marry during a writer’s workshop in Italy, she throws herself into the role of officiant, despite the flatlining of her own marriage. When she ruins her shoulder in a fall, she refuses to swap her fun shoes for something more sensible. She won’t let sorrow and pain get the best of her. Blessings abound, godammit, and there’s still so much to celebrate.

In The Summer of Fall, one of America’s best-loved storytellers tells her own memorable story. Lippman fans will enjoy this rare sneak peek into her life, and new fans are sure to appreciate her humorous, authentic take on the universal themes of marriage, parenting, friendship, and work. As she shows us, hard times are a given, but it’s never too late for a next act.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Everand Originals
• Release date: May 2, 2023
• ISBN: 9781094455402

Laura Lippman

Since Laura Lippman’s debut, she has been recognized as a distinctive voice in mystery fiction and named one of the “essential” crime writers of the last 100 years. Stephen King called her “special, even extraordinary,” and Gillian Flynn wrote, “She is simply a brilliant novelist.” Her books have won most of the major awards in her field and been translated into more than twenty-five languages. She lives in Baltimore and New Orleans with her teenager.

Book preview

Introduction

I BEGIN MAKING JOKES even before the paramedics arrive. In my defense, my mom seems okay, except for the not-being-able-to-walk part. She has missed a step at the bottom of the staircase in the rowhouse I use as a combination office/guest quarters, sprawling forward on the hardwood floor, then managing to pull herself up and use her cellphone to summon me from my house around the corner.

When I get there, she is sitting on a small bench near the front door. She hasn’t hit her head, or lost consciousness. She isn’t bleeding. But while she can stand with my assistance, she can’t walk as far as the door, much less get down the front steps and into my car. I call 911 and request an ambulance.

How old is the patient? the 911 operator asks. She’s ninety-one, I say. And what was the reason for the fall? Um, she’s ninety-one?

If this were a Hallmark movie, I type in the group chat while waiting for the ambulance, there would be a handsome paramedic who would fall in love with me, right?

Yes, I am not only making jokes minutes after my mother has an accident, I am doing it on my phone in a group DM on Twitter while she sits placidly a few feet from me.

Forgive me. It has been a difficult summer, in a difficult year, smack dab on the heels of two previous difficult years, which followed several difficult years, although I have only recently come to admit to myself how troubled 2017 to 2019 were. I keep doing what multiple therapists – well, two – have beseeched me to avoid. I create a narrative out of everything that happens to me. Professional liability.

The ambulance arrives, I keep texting: Alas, Hallmark movies have lied to me. The paramedics are not handsome.

Don’t tell the paramedics they’re not handsome, Laura, one friend cautions.

They’re very nice. And one was gratifyingly shocked when I told him my age.

The paramedics also are shocked when I say I plan to follow them as soon as I tell my twelve-year-old kid what is going on. Most people don’t come to the hospital, according to the paramedics. Are you saying, I ask, that people put their loved ones in the back of ambulances and leave it at that? More often than you might think, they assure me. They just wave and say, ‘See ya.’ Given that my mother has been a not exactly low-maintenance houseguest for the last two weeks, the idea is tantalizing. Unfathomable, yet tantalizing.

Throughout the inevitably long day that ensues, I keep insisting to myself and others that my mother and I are lucky. My mom is sent to the nearest hospital, the one I would have chosen if I could have gotten her in my car. We are lucky. Because my mother is transported by ambulance, she is prioritized over the walk-ins, who are enduring five-hour wait times. We are lucky. My mother is X-rayed within two hours of arriving, then given an MRI after the X-ray shows two small fractures in her pelvis. She is admitted by 3:00 p.m. to a lovely private room with stunning downtown views. We are lucky. Later, I will sheepishly tell a doctor friend who knows Baltimore’s hospitals well: I can’t help feeling that we got the White Lady Special. My friend laughs, suggesting I am onto something.

We are lucky. My mother ultimately is billed less than $500 for the services she receives that weekend. Without Medicare, she would have owed $7,000.

It is a Saturday in August. Three weeks earlier, my mother was living a vibrant, independent life in a small Delaware beach town where she and my father retired more than twenty years ago. Alone since my father’s death in 2014, she walked or rode her adult tricycle almost daily, drove (quite well, which is more than I can say for myself — more on that later), gardened, volunteered

Reviews for The Summer of Fall

[Roxanne Coryell · Rating: 5 out of 5 stars]

I love, love, LOVE Laura Lippman, and got on Scribd just to read this essay--it is MARVELOUS!!!!!!! So many, many hilarious moments, and just as many hits to the heart. Everything she writes is a must-read, and I'm thrilled I got to read this!!!

[Julia Sullivan · Rating: 5 out of 5 stars]

Brash, charming, honest memoir of a complicated summer from one of the best novelists writing today.

[gmcglameryloyola.edu · Rating: 5 out of 5 stars]

If you find Laura Lippman amusing and interesting, you will want to read this.

[Jennifer Newbold · Rating: 5 out of 5 stars]

I always feel sort of inadequate, writing about a writer. As though I won't do it right.

Laura Lippmann writes about facing a season of challenges in "The Summer of Fall"-- usually head-on, sometimes obliquely. I admire her humor, honesty, and insight, and in this essay she is true-to-form. Although I'm a big believer in "I can do this thing," I frequently find myself staring at said thing and thinking, "how?" I could do a lot worse than remembering this tale. You do it, and then you do it again.

Thank you, Laura.

[jane · Rating: 5 out of 5 stars]

I have found Laura's essays to always be honest, relatable, funny, serious, beautifully written, thoughtful, and full. I always want to share them with my sisters and my friends who I know will also appreciate their depth mixed with cultural references and humor. I just love them. She is a hell of a writer.

[Nancy Derringer · Rating: 5 out of 5 stars]

I don't know what to say other than: Read. Read, especially if you're one of those women who thinks absolutely nothing interesting will happen to you ever again. It will, and you better be ready.