#1 New York Times bestselling author Laura Dave chats with Zibby about THE NIGHT WE LOST HIM, a soulful, evocative, page-turning suspense about the mysterious death of Liam Noone, who falls off a cliff near his home, and the three estranged children from different marriages who come together to uncover the truth behind his death, unraveling a 50-year family secret. Laura shares the inspiration behind the characters and setting, including her fascination with neuroarchitecture and boutique hotels. She also delves into her novel’s themes of secrets, unique family dynamics, and especially grief—and touches on how her own grief has influenced her writing.

Transcript:

Zibby: Welcome, Laura. Thanks for coming back on Mom's Don't Have Time To Read Books to discuss The Night We Lost Him. Congrats. 

Laura: Thank you so much. Thank you so much for having me. I always love seeing you. 

Zibby: Oh, you too. I was so excited to get this book. I was like, oh yes, Laura Davis.

Finally made time and read it. So good. And you're so good. And oh my gosh. Anyway. Tell listeners what it's about, please. 

Laura: Well, the book focuses on, um, the death of a family patriarch, Liam Noone, and he dies by, um, when he falls off the cliff near his carpentry home, and his children, he has three children from his three different marriages, two of whom are estranged, and they sort of join forces to try to figure out what actually happened to their father and uncover this family secret of about 50 years that sort of changes the dynamic of what they thought they knew about the man they loved.

Zibby: Amazing. So you have backstories on sort of all of the characters, which are really interesting, including one of the brothers and he had an old injury and his. baseball career is gone. So now, you know, he's sort of this like frustrated, you had a word for it in quotes. It was so funny, but I can't remember like that.

He went, I don't know, like a, you know, that he was seeking that he's seeking. I like that. Yeah. Okay. So he's like the seeking trying to find his place in the world. He's estranged from Tommy. And then you have your main character, who is this successful architect, but she's kind of like, I'm doing this on my own.

And so when you put them all in this conflict and she doesn't even want to know what's in the will, you find a way to, like, lure her back. Tell us, tell me how you get a character, like, a reader right into it. Because You're so good at that. 

Laura: You know, for me, all of my books, including The Night We Lost, can really start with a question.

And here the question was, what does it mean to be the witness to someone's life? And so I immediately know when I'm writing, I often don't know anything that's going to happen down the line or how I'm going to answer that question. But what always comes to me very strongly is that opening scene, that opening moment in which we're going to ask the narrative question of the book.

That's going to lead us to that emotional answer. And I just had this idea of these two estranged siblings and that she is so accomplished, as you said. And really she was, uh, the child from her father's first marriage before he sort of had the hotel empire success that his later children. That was their reality.

And so she was, she's very much as you said, self made. And I knew that I wanted her to have chosen to extricate herself. And I imagine the scene, this opening scene where the brother knows enough about her to know to lure her in on her terms. And that's exactly sort of what he does and they meet under the auspices of her work in a way, I won't ruin the opening scene, but uh, you know, that is sort of very surprising and gets her on her heels and immediately has her asking some of the questions that he wants to know the answers to as well.

Zibby: I would also like to know who the influencer is modeled after in the opening pages. Did you have a particular account in mind? 

Laura: I did not have a particular account in mind for her, but something that really actually influenced Liam Noon and that whole storyline was, I don't know, and if you remember when the Scholastic Succession.

Zibby: Yes, I do remember that. Yes, yes, I do. 

Laura: And I, just like with the last thing you told me when Enron sort of had like an inspiration, which is to say, it doesn't necessarily look or feel like that. But when I read that, And I read what was going on there. I started to have a concretized answer to what does it mean to be the witness to someone's life based on that.

So Liam was sort of the one that came out of real world events a bit. The influencer actually wasn't really based on anybody except something that was really funny was that I was trying to figure out how to name her and I had the name Morgan written down. And As a mom yourself, you know that sometimes these manuscript pages make it with you to tennis lessons or baseball practice or whatever.

And I was sitting in a sports practice for my son and there were a bunch of, um, moms and other caretakers around. And I was like, you know, what is a good name for an influencer? And Morgan was currently in the book as Morgan. You know, obviously there's a gazillion names in the world and one of my son's friend's caretakers actually said, what about the name Morgan?

It was the first name she said, and it was already in the book, but you know, it just felt like this very weird zeitgeisty moment of, I guess, Morgan, uh, I guess everyone knows an influencer named Morgan somehow. 

Zibby: I can think of an influencer, but yes. 

So that was going further into the book, we meet Cece who runs like a, a big chain of hotels versus the noons who have a small, you know, smaller thing. And she has these giant thing. Oh my God. I can't even make a sense. 

Laura: No, no. That's exactly correct. She's more like a Marriott or a Hilton, like these huge, huge hotels. And he's like a luxury boutique hotel page, uh, magnet.

Neither can I. 

Zibby: Love living in the world of hotel owners and how they build their competing brands and attempted merger acquisition, perhaps, question mark, question mark, or not. So tell me about how you learned about the hotel industry. My secret dream is to own my own hotel one day called the Sibbi Hotel and make it all full of books, but we'll see.

Anyway, tell me about everything you learned from Hotel World.

Laura: I literally, first of all, would be your first guest because that sounds dreamy. And you could also even do like how your wonderful bookstore has, you know, it's divided by themes. Like the different rooms could be different themes. Like you could stay in the romance room and all the books in your room are romantic.

Zibby: Oh, I hadn't thought about it like that. 

Laura: You know, and something that is, uh, anyway, uh, I very much like that hotel. So I did two sort of huge tranches of research for this book. One was around the luxury boutique hotel industry, which for me was lovely because I went to several of them to sort of get a feeling for how you individualize and specify on that level.

And something that I learned that was sort of interesting about hotel ownership that I hadn't known going in is quite often like what you think of as the four seasons. Is that's a management company and it's actually owned by somebody else and they sort of manage those hotels, which I never thought of it that way.

I just always imagined it was that four seasons was the owner, but there's so many different rules for how a small hotel is run and what. What, you know, how you make that both feel expansive across the brand, but also individualized. So I spent some time with different people in the hotel industry who were very helpful.

And then I took a lot of liberties to make it work for, for this character. And then I also spent a lot of time with Nora learning about neural architecture. Mhm. And I spoke with several Nora architects that that was something that I didn't know going into this book when when you were mentioning that Nora, the main character is an architect.

I like the idea and I had heard of this idea that there are some architects who Mhm. Um, lead not with like structural innovation, but lead with sort of emotional innovation. How is the room going to hold you? How is this place going to add to your life in some way or another? But I didn't know that that was a field of architecture until I was well into the writing of the book.

And then a good friend put a movie in front of me called a documentary in front of me called My Architect, which is this wonderful story about a son learning about his father through his father's buildings, a son that didn't really know. Father. 

Zibby: Ready to get down. Going to watch it. 

Laura: Oh, it is so incredible.

It is really wonderful. And through him, he, this is the architect who created the Salk Institute. And when the more I started learning about him, I learned that he was considered to be the forefounder of neuroarchitecture. And so I sort of. By accident, backed my way into, oh, this is exactly what I didn't know I wanted.

And so for me, writing is often rewriting. And so I sort of reimagined Nora within the field of Nora architecture specifically after I spoke with some of these experts. 

Zibby: Interesting. You do a really nice job also of, and I'm sorry, can you hear these lawnmowers or not really? Can you hear? No, no, I can't hear them at all.

Oh my God. There's literally like a guy. I'm Right there. Okay. I'm like literally three feet away. You did a really nice job too of tackling like complicated grief and what happens when you lose someone you love but your relationship obviously has its ups and downs Layers and how do you process that grief and unexpected grief and all of that.

Talk about writing through that because it very much felt like when I was reading it, like, is Laura grieving it? Like it felt very, very raw. 

Laura: So, um, I have had quite a journey and, you know, as we all have since, especially since COVID where I think, um, I know that you guys lost someone in your family as well.

Like, I think everyone's sort of grief, grief Came to the surface, I think in a very large way for me specifically, I lost my mom shortly before covid and then I lost my father nine months later. So the truth in the book is the loss of both parents whom whom I was incredibly close to and they are not like the parents in this book.

In this book, the mom is in that my parents were very happily married and you know, but the mom wasn't that like I spoke to her every day, but I think that with the parents in this book, I liked the idea of. Thinking about grief in a different way. I had heard this interview shortly, actually before I lost my mom.

And that really, it was almost like a gift. It was this idea of thinking about grief, not as something to be scared of, but it's a visiting. It's almost a reminder that you had this great love and that love does not end. And I thought, Just like I don't like to write into violence or into, you know, I like, I don't, I don't like to write.

I want to find the hope. And so I wanted to write about grief and think about grief in a way that there's hope. Within it. And so that's, that's sort of where I came to, how I came to it. 

Zibby: Interesting. But it's also true how when, sometimes when another loss happens, like compound grief, that you feel the, the, all the feelings again, and like more intensified than originally.

Laura: I think compound grief is, is a very real thing that, you know, that could use even more airspace than it gets because it's almost like you're reopening a primal wound, but you're doing it. You know, a girlfriend of mine talked about it, like imagine having two babies within a very short period, the impact on your body of those two babies.

And I think the impact of all that love and all that expression and everything else, and in a very similar way, it's weird to think about birth and death in that way, but Extreme feeling in close proximity really can do a number on you and you have to, you have to really rally up from that. 

Zibby: How did you cope with that?

What were, did you have any, any ways that really helped? 

Laura: I think my, my, Family and my son really more than anything was, and writing always for me is a huge source of inspiration. And I think you become your own counsel because you write your way through something. One of my favorite books is heartburn by Nora Ephron.

Oh yeah. I mean, I, I was going to see if I have it right behind me, but The best present that my husband probably ever gave me. Oh, there it is. I'll bring it over is a first edition of Harper and signed that he got me one year. I just love that book. But I always like that when she says at the beginning of that book.

If I, she made that book funny, so then you control the story. But I, and I think that the lesson there is in the writing, you can find funny, you can find relief, you can find joy, and you can figure out a way to honor what somebody brought. And in the case of Harper, which is a story of her divorce, how to let it go, which I think is really, really powerful to think about.

Zibby: It is interesting. So you have all these sort of real things that we're all grappling with. And yet the book is really, did someone, you know, how did this man die? Right? 

Laura: Yes. 

Zibby: The mystery and trying to figure that out and, you know, red herrings and, you know, where is this going? And, you know, I kind of had a different theory, but it's fine.

I'm like always wrong. 

Laura: Well, I'm glad you're wrong. I would have been more unhappy if you were right and you're like, I knew it from page one then I hadn't done my job. 

Zibby: That's true. Okay, good. All right. I feel better. Thank you. Thank you. Did you know all along what what the answer, so to speak, would be, or did you, how did you do it?

Laura: So, so within this story, as you're pointing to, there's like a 50 year love story, which is really the father's secret. And writing that love story is one of the most joyful experiences I've had writing in all of my books. I loved imagining this love story over 50 years. So The answer is yes and no. I always knew who the woman was, um, which is I, I purposely, I hope, buried who that woman was until you read it and you're like, Oh my God, I can't.

And then you get the joy, hopefully, of reading through again and being like, Oh, wait, there were the clues and I saw it, but I thought it was this other woman and, and in any event, so I, I knew it was her and I knew that she was linked to his death, but it was only through the writing that I figured out how she was linked.

There were many other iterations in which someone else in her life or someone else in their life was responsible for his death as a result of this love affair. So I, I like the idea also I think of I don't ever like there to be a villain in my stories, rather that everything is, you know, I love the word you just use with compounding because I think also there's compounding pain and compounding evil and compounding ways that we create injury when we're on the wrong path.

And I like the idea that there is no villain here, but the, the pain around the secret had reverberations, just like anytime we lie or keep secrets, it can have reverberations, which is why it's so freeing when we let that go. 

Zibby: I feel like that is the heart of every single story, is the secret behind it.

And like, the damage it does when you keep a secret yourself. 

Laura: Yes, exactly. 

Zibby: That covers most. 

Laura: I totally agree with you. And I think also, what's really interesting is the secrets we keep from ourselves. Because if we know someone else is keeping a secret from us, that is a different kind of pain. But very often it is about unearthing what you don't want yourself to know.

You know, like you hear people often say, I knew my relationship was over, or I knew that this career wasn't working for me, or, I knew I had to be brave enough to do X, but they don't know it until they know it, and then they look back and they're like, I knew it, but I didn't. I didn't have it in me to tell myself that yet.

And so I, I get, I I'm really fascinated about how we can help people, you know, the, the estranged siblings here really help each other tell themselves the secret. unearth the secret that they weren't willing to say out loud yet. 

Zibby: Yep. And I didn't even mention the chef and the restaurant owner. It's another great thing.

I'm like, this is awesome. She's taking me out to eat. I'm getting to go to nice hotels. I get to go to like this beautiful house and all the two, multiple houses in California. Like I'm in, this is great. What a ride. 

Laura: Well, I did have this feeling when I was, when I knew she was going to be an architect, I spent a lot of time at different houses in these places.

Um, like if it's, if it's her story and she's an architect, she would be looking at these houses and thinking about them in a way that I might not normally. And I wanted the reader to have a visceral feeling of being places that they don't normally go necessarily. But, and the other piece of that with.

with the chef. And that recipe is actually, I make that recipe every Sunday night at our house. We have strawberry pizza on Sunday nights and we have friends over. And I learned about that recipe from this wonderful chef, Jeremy Fox, who at that point was in Napa Valley. And my husband and I were just dating at that time.

And we went to Napa Valley for a weekend or, you know, Something and we ate at his restaurant there and the strawberry pizza was the best thing I ever had in my life. And so I spent years and years trying to recreate it And then he actually moved to santa monica the chef and opened several restaurants blocks from where we live So it felt like he owns rustic canyon here.

 He was the chef there and at birdie g's and um, he's wonderful So I credit him with that with that pizza that's brought so much joy around here You 

Zibby: Are you going to do events in those restaurants? You have to. 

Laura: I should. I mean, I should talk to him about that. 

Zibby: They should be for sale there.

So since I think since our last interview, it must have been before your last book came out. But anyway, it became this massive sensation. Three million copies. That's crazy. huge movie with Jennifer Garner. So how, if at all, did that change you being able to keep writing and not like getting that in your head?

And also just kind of how cool is that? 

Laura: Well, thank you for that. And I think that It wasn't my first book, so it made it easier. I think about that all the time. I think if it was my first book, I would hope that nothing would change and I would still sit down and write every day, but I don't know if I would have heard too many voices in my head or been too, too, I don't know what it would have done.

I always think about it that way. It had been my first book. Michael Chavin, who we were just talking about before we started, he wrote this amazing essay called Wrecked, um, which I highly recommend. Any writer and I can send it to you, Zebby, if you can't find it, uh, it's like, but he wrote this amazing essay called wrecked in which he talks about being the mysteries of Pittsburgh came out.

It was met with success and how hard it was to write a second book after that, because of that. And he spent years and years writing the wrong book until he pivoted. I think because the last thing he told me was actually so hard for me to write. I took 10 years to write it. I put it down Three different times.

I wrote two books in the interim. I threw out 70, 000 of the 90, 000 words I wrote. I realized that every book is just sort of a journey. It was almost like the last thing he told me was preparing me for the last thing he told me for what happened with it. And this book, it was really. It wasn't hard. It was not, it was no harder, I should say, than any of the others.

I'm actually writing a sequel of The Last Thing He Told Me Now as well, which will come out next year. And so it's sort of a weird, interesting thing to be revisiting those characters again. And it feels like a nice coming home because I spent so much time with them. But this one was really kind of, it was, a book I really, really wanted to write.

And so I, I just enjoyed the writing, you know, I mean, talk to me, we're in the middle of, we're in the middle of writing the movie for it. And, um, uh, for this one for Netflix and I'm writing it with my husband again, just like we did with the last thing he told me. And so maybe in six months, I'll tell you something different.

I'll be like, give me these characters. I don't know what I'm going to do. But right now, as of right now, the writing of the actual book was, you know, I mean, I know that, you know, with your writing too, like you probably have the same experience, like some things are easier than others, like some books, and this was a book, some books are labors of love, and this book was sort of, a love letter.

It was a letter I really wanted to write to my parents, really. 

Zibby: Yeah. That's like a nice way to say goodbye. 

Laura: Yes, yes, yes, yes, yes, yes. 

Zibby: Well, I'm so, I'm sorry about the loss of your parents. I'm sorry how close it was. I'm sorry for that pain and I can just imagine them sort of, I mean, you're such a warm, like loving person, just imagine how warm and loving they must have been to create you.

And so I feel that loss for you, but another fabulous book. That's so cool. It's going to be another Netflix. I mean, it's just amazing. Um, so I'm just so excited. It couldn't happen to a nicer person. 

Laura: Well, that is so nice. And I do feel like it's so funny because we haven't, we haven't gotten to see each other a lot, but every time I see you, I feel like I've seen you so much because I'm at Zippy's bookstore all the time.

Zibby: I know you are. Thank you. 

Laura: We literally. We took my, I don't know if I told you this, but your store is so wonderful, and we took my son's class, went on a class trip, because their school's not so far away, and your brother's children are at that school. 

Zibby: Yes, yes, yes. 

Laura: Yes, yes. And when we went, my book was up in the store, and my son whispered to me, do not saying that your book is here. And I was like, I will not say a word. So I didn't say anything. So, and your, and your, uh, booksellers knew me cause I had been there and they didn't like everyone. It was, I was just a mom, you know, doing the field trip. So, but it, uh, my son loves it. We all just love that store.

It's brought so much to the community. So I do feel like I get to see you all the time between that and Instagram, even though I don't get to see you all the time. So it's very lovely. 

Zibby: Well, I love following along your journey as well. And I, I showed my son your piles, I was like, this is what happens when you're a really successful author.

You have to sign all these tip in sheets before you even have the books come out. He's like, wow, how does she know it's going to sell? And I'm like, she knows. 

Laura: Oh gosh, I hope so. I'm like knocking on all sorts of things. I hope so. 

Zibby: Well, come to the store anytime. Sign the books. We'd love to have you back.

And yeah, I'll be, watching and cheering. 

Laura: Okay. Wonderful. 

Great to see you. 

Zibby: Great to see you too. Bye, Laura.