Tripp’s latest: familiar terrain, gripping story
If you haven’t yet discovered the homegrown talent that is Westport’s Dawn Tripp, do yourself a favor and read “Game of Secrets,” released this week by Random House.
Tripp is not only a fabulous storyteller, but “Secrets” takes place in our backyards.
SouthCoasters will feel as if they’re in this book:
The story opens up in Lees Supermarket in Westport, and takes Route 88, through Westport and little Compton, R.I.
Characters walk along the Westport River, drive up Route 6 to the Outback Steakhouse, miss the old Manchester’s Restaurant in Adamsville. they bike down Main Road in Westport; they do errands in “the city,” aka Fall River; and talk about houses on “the Point.”
The setting is very real; the plot is a gripping work of fiction.
In 1957, 11-year-old Jane Weld’s father disappeared. no one in Westport knew for sure what happened until four years later, when a skull rolled out of a gravel bank by the Westport River, a bullet hole in his temple. Rumor had it he was murdered by the husband of his mistress, Ada Varick.
Now, half a century later, middle-aged Jane is still searching for the truth of her dad’s death — a mystery made more urgent by the fact that her daughter has struck up a romance with one of Ada’s sons.
As the young couple’s love affair intensifies, Jane and Ada come together for weekly Scrabble games. The games soon transform into cat-and-mouse games of words long left unspoken. As the two women play out their dark stories across the game board, it becomes clear that — more than their past — it’s the families’ futures that are at stake.
Believe me, once you start this book, you won’t be able to put it down. Tripp’s voice is pitch-perfect, and her story is gripping.
If you’re a Scrabble-lover, like me, Tripp describes the beauty of the game as if it’s a poetic chess match, which of course, in a way, it is:
“A Scrabble board is like the dark space between stars “¦ You look up into that space and think it’s nothing, you think it’s got no use because there’s nothing in it you can touch or see or smell. But it’s wild, that space, not empty at all, it’s full of dark stars, black holes, heat, and storms that bend and squeeze the light that you can see.”
Tripp — the award-winning author of “Moontide” and “The Season of Open Water” — will talk and sign books at Partners Village Store in Westport on July 7, and at Baker Books in Dartmouth July 19. I had a chance to interview her recently via e-mail:
Lauren: What gave you the idea for “Game of Secrets”?
Dawn: I had three images in my head: a 14-year-old boy driving fast down an unfinished highway — Route 88 — in a stolen car; two women playing Scrabble; and two lovers, a man and a woman, meeting in an old cranberry barn. “¦ I had already filled a notebook when an older man I knew from Westport told me a story of a skull that surfaced back in the ’60s out of a truckload of fill, a neat bullet hole in the temple. The moment the story was out of his mouth, I knew that skull had everything to do with those three images.
Lauren: I love Scrabble. What gave you the idea to use the board game to tell the story?
Dawn: Several years ago, I was at a clambake and met an older woman who had read my first two books. She told me she loved words, and asked if I played Scrabble. “¦ from that time on, the idea grew in my mind”¦The game became the perfect lens for a story about two families bound together and divided by unspeakable secrets—a brutal past, a murder, a love story. because what are words if not a bridge?
Lauren: I loved that you used the Westport/Little Compton area for the setting. What made you decide to do that?
Dawn: a town like Westport — like any unique small town — is marked by its stories. There is a certain consequent, luminous force that infuses a place as a result of the lives that have been played out there “¦ The heart of “Game of Secrets,” like the heart of a small town, revolves around stories — those that are told and retold, that enter the common lore “¦
Lauren: You live in Westport. are you a Westport native?
Dawn: I love Westport. I love it beyond reason. It is and has always been, to me, the most beautiful point of Earth. But I am not from here. (I was born in Newton, and) grew up coming to Westport as a summer person, and though I live here year-round now, I will always see it through the lens of someone from away.
Lauren: You tell the story from different characters’ perspectives and through different points in time. with which character did you identify with most?
Dawn: There is never one character I identify with more than another — what I love about writing fiction is that there are so many places to hide.
Sometimes what is most autobiographically true, I will give to a character that on the surface appears the least like me. I strip-mine things, that way, from my own life, torque the details and let that emotion or exchange assume a different life on the page.
I often feel that in my fiction, I am driven by what I cannot say. every book I have written has started with some dark secret I can’t quite bring myself to tell, and so I tell it on the slant, through the story.
Lauren Daley challenges you to a Scrabble game. Anytime, anywhere. Contact her at ldaley33@gmail.com. Follow her on Twitter @laurendaley1.
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