Episode 12: Tova Mirvis
On Community, Belonging, and Forgiveness
Tova Mirvis’ Five Books:
All-of-a-Kind Family by Sidney Taylor
My Name is Asher Lev by Chaim Potok
The Postcard by Anne Berest
Songs For the Brokenhearted by Ayelet Tsabari
We Would Never by Tova Mirvis
Interview quoted in this episode
The Five Books has the advisory and promotional support of the Jewish Book Council. Jewish Book Council is a nonprofit dedicated to amplifying and celebrating Jewish literature and supporting authors and readers. Stay up to date on the latest in Jewish literature! https://www.jewishbookcouncil.org/events/celebrate
The Five Books is fiscally sponsored by FJC, a 501c3 public charity.
Hosted by Tali Rosenblatt Cohen
Produced by Odelia Rubin
Artwork by Dena Friedman
Music by Dov Rosenblatt and Blue Dot Sessions.
We Would Never is a riveting literary page-turner that maps the extremes to which a family will go in order to protect their own.
No one appears more surprised than Hailey Gelman when she comes under suspicion for the murder of her soon-to-be ex-husband Jonah. Hailey—nicknamed Sunshine by her mother for her bright outlook and ever-present smile—has always tried to do what is expected of her and is regarded as the family peacemaker. But is anyone, including Hailey, who she has always seemed to be?
Inspired by a true story, We Would Never is a gripping mystery, an intimate family drama, and a provocative exploration of loyalty, betrayal, and the blurred line between protecting and forsaking the ones we love most.
Tova Mirvis is the author of the memoir The Book of Separation as well as four novels, We Would Never, Visible City, The Outside World, and The Ladies Auxiliary, which was a national bestseller. Her essays have appeared in The New York Times, The Washington Post, The Boston Globe Magazine and Real Simple, and her fiction has been broadcast on NPR. She lives in Newton, Massachusetts with her family.
Our conversation explores the fine line between what it means to be an insider vs an outsider, the way the past retains a pull on the present, and the stretchiness of moral boundaries. Throughout, Tova reflects on the ways in which venturing beyond our comfort zones can be both enriching and destabilizing.
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The Five Books: Tova Mirvis on Community, Belonging, and Forgiveness
Tali Rosenblatt Cohen:
Welcome to The Five Books, where each week we talk with a Jewish author about five books that are near and dear to them. My name is Tali Rosenblatt Cohen. Every week I ask Jewish authors about five books in five categories.We'll hear about two Jewish books that have impacted the author's Jewish identity. We'll hear about one book, not necessarily Jewish, that they think everyone should read, a book that changed their worldview. We'll get a peek into what book the author is reading now, and we'll get to hear about the new book they've just published and how it came about.
Today, we'll be talking with Tova Mirvis about her new novel, We Would Never. You may notice I'm a bit under the weather as I record this intro, but happily, when I was speaking to Tova, all was well. Tova's riveting literary page-turner maps the extremes to which a family will go in order to protect their own.
No one appears more surprised than Hailey Gelman when she comes under suspicion for the murder of her soon-to-be-ex-husband, Jonah. Hailey, nicknamed Sunshine by her mother for her bright outlook and ever-present smile, has always tried to do what is expected of her and is regarded as the family peacemaker. But is anyone, including Hailey, who she has always seemed to be?
Inspired by a true story, We Would Never is a gripping mystery, an intimate family drama, and a provocative exploration of loyalty, betrayal, and the blurred line between protecting and forsaking the ones we love most. Tova Mirvis is the author of the memoir The Book of Separation, as well as four novels, We Would Never, Visible City, The Outside World, and The Ladies Auxiliary, which was a national bestseller. Her essays have appeared in The New York Times, The Washington Post, The Boston Globe Magazine, and Real Simple, and her fiction has been broadcast on NPR. She lives in Newton, Massachusetts with her family.
Tova discusses what initially connected her to this story.
Tova Mirvis:
I really wanted to know how, you know, how does a divorce escalate so terribly? How do people do things that I'm sure they would have never imagined themselves capable of? You know, how do people lose their moral compass so, so completely, so tragically?She goes deep into what the book All of a Kind Family by Sidney Taylor meant to her.
I do think there was an undertone to the books. They are still living as immigrant children in the Lower East Side in 1915. The feeling that they, their Jewishness is comfortable, but not quite. There is a sense that they live inside of a very complicated world, even though the stories are very sweet.
And we'll talk about Tova's Jewish identity in the context of her own books and the book My Name is Asher Lev by Chaim Potok.
What is so, I think, moving about this novel is that it's not black and white. It's not all or nothing. And I think so many of us occupy those places of inside or outside. It's rarely one or the other. That mix, I think, is where many people live.
That's all coming up next.
Welcome to The Five Books, Tova. Thank you so much for joining us today. I'm super excited to talk to you.
I loved reading We Would Never. It was a thrilling plot. I loved the psychological excavation that you did of this family.
Well, I'll let you, how about you give us a little insight into the plot?
Sure, I mean, We Would Never is about a Florida family who in the wake of their daughter's divorce might or might not have done something unimaginable. And it's a mystery, I guess, about a murder. But really, I think it's a mystery about family love and loyalty and about the complicated and hard-to-solve questions of anger and escalation and forgiveness.
Yeah, I'm excited to talk about all of those things with you and how they thread all the common threads throughout some of your other books as well.
Book One: a Jewish Book from Childhood — All-of-a-Kind Family by Sidney Taylor.
I will just say that I've been waiting for someone to pick this book. It's a book I loved as a kid. And so I'd love to hear a little bit more about your Jewish life as a kid, and then we'll talk about All-of-a-Kind Family.
Sure. I grew up in Memphis, Tennessee, in the very close-knit Orthodox community in Memphis, and my entire family was from Memphis. I'm a sixth-generation Memphian. My great-great-great-grandparents moved to Memphis in 1873. And I grew up really in this surround of community with this very strong sense of being rooted in a particular place, with a very strong sense of belonging and an awareness of what it meant to belong to a community like this, and to a family that was so rooted in this particular place. I went to the Memphis Hebrew Academy from the age of three until I graduated high school with the same small group of kids, was related to many, many people in the community. So really, really deeply inside this very small, cohesive, tight community.
Can you tell me about how old you were when you read this, or what was going on in your life when you picked it up for the first time?
I think when I picked it up for the first time, I was probably 10 or 11.
Can you give us like a two-sentence description of what All-of-a-Kind Family books are about?
Sure. All-of-a-Kind Family centers around a Jewish family on the Lower East Side. I think it's set in 1915, and there are five daughters, and it really just details their daily lives.
The adventures are small. They're trips to the library, trips to the father's junk store. There are escapades with a sister borrowing a dress from one another, but they're really about a close-knit family in the Lower East Side world.
And what stuck out about it for you or why did you choose this book?
I was always a huge reader. I think up till that point, my obsession with reading was books about girls who wanted horses, and they were all named Kate. There was a series of books that I would read over and over again.
And then I'm sure it was my mother who bought these books for me. She was a children's librarian, and so she was always very aware of books and, you know, bringing books home. I think it was just the thrill of reading about girls who, on one hand, lived in an entirely different era and a different world than my world, and yet they felt so familiar. I felt like I knew them so closely. I felt like they were siblings and each one, I'm wondering if you had the same memories, I know you said you liked the books as well. What Ella would do? What Henny would do? And who was Sarah? And the differences between Gertie and Charlotte. They just made this enormous impression on me that even to this day, I remember all the stories.
The books revolve around the calendar of the Jewish year, right? So I think it probably, I imagine, felt familiar to you in that way of reflecting your world.
Right. I mean, they were participating in Jewish holidays. They were a Jewish family. They were an immigrant family, which was so different than my own. And yet, that sense of proximity, that feeling that they were just seeing Jewish girls in a book, I think, felt revolutionary at the time.
Yeah. And I know that your Jewish identity has changed over time, and that's something that you explored in such a beautiful and authentic way in your memoir, The Book of Separation. I've heard or read an interview you did where you talked about, as a kid, you said: “There was always this sense that you were being taught one thing and there was [an] attempt to package a kind of contentment—no questions here, we were all happy, and we all believed.” So I just wonder where these books kind of fit into that.
I mean, on one hand, I guess the books are happy, right? I mean, they're sweet stories. There's a certain idyllic nature to the family dynamics. I guess the worst thing that happens, which when I read it did feel terrible, when Henny spills tea on Ella's dress and has to dye it in the bathtub. I mean, that is as bad as it gets in the book.
And yet at the same time, I do think there was an undertone to the books. They are still living as immigrant children in the Lower East Side in 1915. There is still the feeling of, maybe danger is not quite the right word, but problems. I remember so clearly the ones about when they have to go to the seashore because of, I guess, it's the polio epidemic, or the feeling that their Jewishness is comfortable, but not quite, the sort of the relationship between the Jewish world they live in and the outside world.
I remember so clearly the encounter with the library lady where she's the non-Jew and she's kind and benevolent, but there is that question. And so I think there the real world does creep in around the seams of this book. There is a sense that they live inside of a very complicated world even though the stories are very sweet.
Did you feel that this book in any way influenced your own writing when you were starting out?
I think on some level what had influenced me is just the pleasure of reading, the feeling that you could love a book, that you could love characters, that I knew those children. I felt like they were as real to me as my classmates, and I think that idea maybe influenced me more than the content itself, the sense that you could write something that readers could love and they could feel like it was real. It could be completely made up and yet it had that feeling of life and truthfulness.
And I think maybe another way it influenced me was just the fact that stories about Jewish life, Jewish community, the Jewish holidays could be read by many, many people, not just people inside the Jewish world.
I had an experience recently of talking to a few writer friends who are not Jewish, and one of them was saying that she was reading All-of-a-Kind Family to her daughter, and another friend immediately chimed in. She was like, do you remember the one about the dress? I was like, of course, I remember the one about the dress. That sense that, yes, they're steeped in Jewishness and yet they are universal at the same time.
Did you read them with your kids?
I did. I have three kids. My boys did not read them, which is sort of sad for me, but my daughter, my youngest loves them. I told her that I was going to be talking about All-of-a-Kind Family and she just gasped and said, “oh, I love it.” I was like, right? She has the same feeling of just that dearness of those books, that there's something so appealing and so timeless really about them.
I think dearness is really, that's the perfect word for it.
Book Two: A Jewish Book From Adulthood — My Name is Asher Lev by Chaim Potok.
My Name is Asher Lev by Chaim Potok is set in 1950s in New York, and it is about a young Hasidic boy who discovers that he has an enormous talent, an enormous desire to be an artist. And it is about the struggle that he faces to both stay close to his family and his world, and to pursue his artistic passion.
Great. And tell me why you chose this book.
I read this book many times. I read it probably in high school. My mother always told a story about how she read it right when she was in labor with me and read it in the hospital soon after I was born. So she always says like, I'm destined to love this book. But I love — I really love the depiction of the artistic urge, the visual artist’s desire to create something, the sense that artistic passion can be all consuming. I mean, it's really described almost in religious terms, the way that Asher Lev's passion for art is described.
And yet at the same time, I feel like the depictions of his parents and his world, his Hasidic world, are so gentle and tender, even when there's an enormous conflict brewing in the novel.
Yeah, and it seems like these are questions that you've been preoccupied with for a long time, right?
They are. I mean, I certainly feel the connection to the story on a personal level. I think for me, growing up in an Orthodox community, it really shaped everything about who I was, maybe even who I am still.
It was so much a part of every — every childhood memory, every story, every relationship. And at the same time, I think for me, the struggle of wanting to be a writer and wanting to find my own sense of freedom as a writer and an ability or an urge to be honest without the fear of what will they think? I think that question looms enormously large in my upbringing.
I think it's both a Jewish thing, but I think it's also a southern thing in some way, this sense that what people will say. And I certainly grew up feeling a very strong sense of communal expectation. And it's something I've struggled with as a writer to really shed that to whatever degree I can to be free and not to worry quite as much of, you know, what they will say.
Yeah, I certainly see that in all of your books. I'm wondering if you feel like it's possible, I mean, obviously every individual makes the best choices for themselves, but do you think it's possible to live inside that world and be an artist who is authentic?
I mean, it's interesting. In Asher Lev, for a long time, he is able to. And I think that's one of the things that feels so, I think, moving about the book is that he has this talent and his parents recognize the talent, and his father is really uncomfortable with it, and his mother is more amenable to the idea that he really has this gift. But in this novel, it's the Rebbe who actually gives him permission to train with another artist, a non-religious Jewish artist who really mentors him and enables him to become an artist. And that, you know, I had forgotten about that moment, and when I reread it recently, I realized like that was his entryway. It was done within the parameters of the community.
And so I think what is so, I think, moving about this novel is that it's not black and white. It's not all or nothing. Ultimately, he does break with the community at the end. There's a line that says, you know, he had gone too far or there is some boundary and he crosses it. But before that happens, there's a lot of ways that he's both inside and outside at the same time.
And I think so many of us occupy those places of inside or outside. It's rarely one or the other. It's not always that you're completely an outcast or you're entirely an insider. I think people who are on the inside sometimes find parts of themselves that feel outside. And people who are outsiders find many ways of connecting and being on the inside as well. And so I think that mix, I think, is where many people live.
Yeah. And I know that that's another kind of theme that's thread throughout a lot of your books. Being an insider, being able to tell a particular story. And I know that that's some pushback that has been shared with you is like, are you enough of an insider? Are you, you know, and I'm just wondering what your feelings about that argument are.
Right, I mean, that has been, that question is always raised. I mean, are you, you know, whose story is it? And who gets to tell it? And if you are an insider and tell a version that other people don't like, does that automatically make you an outsider? You know, my first novel about the Memphis Jewish community, The Ladies Auxiliary, came out almost 25 years ago, which is kind of wild to believe. And, you know, people said, well, you're not an insider to that world.
And I was like, no, I am. You know, if Memphis counts its insiderness by generations, you know, born there, like, I'm very much an insider, I might see it differently than other people. And that is part of just the complication of living with people, that people see things differently.
And so some people, you know, for me, that sense of insider-ness of that community, on one hand, there was something enormously nurturing about being part of this world, of feeling known, feeling like there was always a place that I knew exactly where I belonged. And it was inside that community. And yet for me, for some people, that same sense of belonging can sometimes feel overly tight and it can feel constraining.
And it's sort of ironic, in The Ladies Auxiliary, I think I really was writing about that tension. I don't think I knew that I was writing about it, about myself. One of the things that I struggled with in writing The Ladies Auxiliary was how to write a character who really is an outsider and is perceived as very different.
I did not — that's a very hard thing to imagine. I never felt that. I had to ask myself, I had to really imagine, what does it feel like to walk into shul and feel like people are talking about you? I was like, I don't know that. I was not at all in that position. Now I know. I know very well what that feels like. And I think maybe that question for me really from the start was there when I think back to the conception of that book, the idea, it was really about what happens when an outsider moves into this close-knit world.
But even though she's an outsider, she wants to belong. She wants some part of being part of a community, even though she can't quite fit in. She doesn't want to shear away all the parts of herself that don't fit in. And then there's the members of The Ladies Auxiliary who do belong, who are sort of the ultimate insiders.
But I felt in writing that book that no one really is the consummate insider. And, you know, I think one of the most striking moments I had when Ladies Auxiliary came out was I always envisioned my grandmother as being the full insider. She was a four-time PTA president, you know, sort of the full insider person. And she read an early copy of the book and she said, I think that you based your character, Bat Sheva, the woman who's the outsider, on me. And I was sort of stunned. And she said, well, I didn't grow up religious and I've never fully felt like I belong here.
And it made me realize you never know. You never know people's feelings about belonging. We all have really complicated feelings about where we belong and where we don't and our outside selves that might seem to know everyone in a community and be fully in, as it doesn't always reflect how we feel on the inside about where we fit in. And so I think those questions are very alive for me as a writer.
Yeah, they felt revelatory to me reading your book, Ladies Auxiliary. And again, everyone has these tensions. For me, my father was a Jewish journalist. He wrote about the Jewish community and frequently about the Orthodox community in ways that the Orthodox community was not always thrilled with. And so that pushback of holding a mirror up to a community and the community saying, like, we do not want to see that, felt really resonant to me.
Right. I have struggled with those questions of what can you say, what can you not say. I think it goes to the question certainly, what is the point of journalism and what is the point of art? Is it just to hold up a nice mirror where everyone looks happy, everyone looks great? I always joke, you know, a novel about how everyone does good deeds all day long. I mean, it's not just that it's not interesting fiction, it's also not true. It's not true about humans.
And I think really from my starting point as a novelist, I really wanted to write the real, the true parts of people, not just the external, but the internal and no matter what community you belong to, no matter what world you're part of, everyone has an inner life and everyone's inner life is complicated. That was really what I wanted to articulate.
I think for me as a writer, it's the thing that I'm fascinated by, who we are on the inside versus who we are on the outside. What are the private thoughts that don't get expression? And that sense that I guess there's an official world that's going on, there's sort of the public version of life. But underneath, there's a whole other world going on. And that — that to me is what's really interesting.
Yeah, and that's the whole point of reading, right, is to get to that layer underneath.
Right. We don't always get it in people we know. I mean, with people we know, we sometimes put on our, like, you know, façades, our game day faces. But I think in reading, you get to go inside, you get to get all that messy stuff.
Book Three: A Book That Changed Your Worldview — The Postcard by Anne Berest.
The Postcard is set in France, and it is about a woman's exploration of her family history, which she previously has not wanted to explore. And a postcard arrives at her mother's house, which lists the names of their family members who were killed in Auschwitz. And no one immediately does anything about this postcard or begins to investigate. But in a current moment, the current moment of the book, in a climate of antisemitism, the writer decides that she's going to investigate her family history.
And what about it has been sticking with you since you read it?
I guess I loved the way — I mean, I've read, you know, I think we've all read many stories about the Holocaust. We've read fiction and nonfiction. I think what struck me as so new about this book was the way that the writer drew a connection between where she was right now in the world to the past, the need to understand and excavate her past based on her own questions of her own Jewish identity. I thought the novel was so brilliantly done in the way it moves back and forth between time periods. It talks about her life as a contemporary French woman with a very nominal Jewish identity, and yet the urge to delve into the past, the sense of the past just waiting to be excavated and explored.
And I think one of the things that really moved me so much about it was the acknowledgment that not all of the past can be recovered. There were parts of the story she was not going to be able to find out, and there she imagined it and brought it to life in such a rich, authentic way. And that I think is what really sticks with me.
I've started working on a new novel about some of my Memphis Southern Jewish family history, and this is one of the books that's really helped me shape my thinking about how to structure a book like that. These sort of unwieldy novels that have so much material and so many directions you could go in. I keep it by my bedside because I feel like that is a guiding light for me in terms of how you tell a story that moves between time periods.
That's so interesting because I mean the postcard is this very literal, like the past comes back. And I'm just wondering if that's the part of it that feels relevant, you know, this idea that you kind of can't escape your past, or if it's more just about being interested in what happened before.
I think it is true you can't escape the past. I mean, what's so fascinating, as you said, literally the past is mailed into the future, right? And this mystery of, well, who's done it and what are their intentions and why?
But I think that it's so evocative because even though the character in the book doesn't do anything about the postcard for so long, it waits. It waits for the right moment. And the right moment in the postcard is when the writer or the narrator's daughter has some kind of antisemitic incident at school and all of a sudden she is forced to confront what it means to be Jewish in contemporary France.
And there's, I mean, history I think has these cyclical moments where the postcard can sit and wait, but not forever. There's always a moment it's drawn back in. And I think that probably is why it's so poignant to read right now.
And if it’s okay to ask, what are the parts that are — you’re most interested in in going back to your Memphis roots?
It's funny, ever since I wrote The Ladies Auxiliary, I had planned to write a Southern Jewish family novel. I wanted to take several generations of my family. And I would start the book and then I would always get sidetracked and write a different novel. And it just happened over and over and over again. So I have files from decades of these stories. And I ended up writing a few short stories.
I did write those and they're all called Potatoes. So I have Potatoes One and Potatoes Two and Potatoes Three, just multiple, multiple potato stories. But I'm really interested in a family story about my great-grandmother Gitole, who I was named after, Gitole being good, being tova, who used to tell this story to my mother and her mother about growing up in Gredno, Poland and going out one day to dig for potatoes and coming back and seeing that her shoes had been stolen. And I was sort of told this maybe picturesque story, this little anecdote. My mother wanted to write a children's book about it. And then over the years, for a variety of reasons, my mother began to dig into this story more. And began to wonder if it was a much darker story that was actually being told.
And so that really fascinated me. I think the piece or maybe one of the potato stories that I've written was really about how every generation tells this story differently. You know, for my great grandmother, it was a story of a warning story of, you know, be careful. You don't know what — who's out there. For my grandmother, my southern grandmother, my bubbe, who would tell this story about like a coming to America story or sort of this redemption story. My mother used to tell it as a fairy tale, and then she started to tell it in a darker way. And in that sense, the stories we inherit are changed by our own circumstances. And so that is the basis of my new novel, which is, of course, called Potatoes, at least for, for right now.
But I'm interested in really exploring, what is that story? This potatoes story took place in 1921. And Gredno in 1921 was post-World War I, but a period of immense pogroms, immense uncertainty, the Bolshevik-Polish Civil War. It was a time of enormous, enormous violence. And so it raises the question for me about that story. And so what I've been doing for the past year or so, while waiting for my new novel to come out, is just reading.
And so I've just been reading, you know, if you looked at my bookshelf, it's like pogroms, you know, like just, you know, Gredno, Belarus, just really trying to learn that time period. And so the book is going to alternate between Gredno and Memphis. And so I'm interested in how you tell a story that moves between two time periods.
I can't wait to read it.
Thank you. It'll probably take me a decade. But I'm on the way.
I'm waiting. That's great. And also, just noting that it's taking you back to All-of-a-Kind Family time, right?
Right. It's funny. I was thinking about that, how 1915 is, you know, that’s one of the — I'm fascinated by that time period. I had never been to Ellis Island until a few weeks ago, which was sort of shocking that I had never been. And it was so incredibly moving. And I was able to find the shipping records of when my great-grandmother's family came over. They were the late arrivers. My other, on the other branches of my family, they were already in Memphis. But this is the latest arrival to Memphis. And it was really just, just, just stunning to see my great-grandmother's name, to see destination, Memphis, Tennessee, on the shipping record.
And so I feel very close to those stories now. But All-of-a-Kind Family is the world that she would have lived in. It wasn't the Lower East Side, it was Memphis. But there was a Jewish immigrant neighborhood in Memphis called The Pinch that I'm reading a lot about also and trying to conjure up in my mind right now.
Book Four: The Book You're Reading Now — Songs for the Broken-Hearted by Ayelet Tsabari.
So I am reading Songs for the Broken-Hearted by Ayelet Tsabari, which I've heard from so many people how fabulous it is. And it's been sitting there as this treat on my nightstand waiting for me, and I'm just at the beginning of it. But it is a gorgeous novel about a Yemenite family history in Israel, and really this question of what does it mean to belong, what does it mean to be part of a community, to leave a community.
And it's just one of those books that, you know really, from the first sentence, it just sort of washes over you. And it's a gorgeous book.
Book Five: The Author's Latest Novel — We Would Never by Tova Mirvis.
Okay, so now we get to talk about We Would Never. I'm excited to dive in. You told us a little bit about it. It is centered, as I understand, on a real-life case. So can you tell me a little bit about what piqued your interest about this particular scenario?
Sure. I was never, you know, a true-crime person. It was never my interest in reading or watching shows.
But it really did not begin in that angle. It really began somewhere much more personal. I guess it was about 10 or 11 years ago, I saw on Facebook that someone I knew very tangentially had been killed, Dan Markell, who was a friend of my ex-husbands and had many, many friends in common with, and I immediately was, of course, horrified and shocked, and started going down the rabbit hole of news coverage. And a lot of the early news coverage speculated that maybe he had been killed as part of a disagreement about his legal theories. He was a law professor. There was speculation that maybe he had been killed as part — a student who was upset about a bad grade.
And I remember one of the first articles I read, the last line said that he had been in the middle of a contentious divorce. And you know, the stories we read that hit us are as much about the stories as they are about our own lives. At that time, I was just on the tail end of a very contentious divorce. And I just had that feeling, that horrible knowing feeling of, oh, I think this is what this story is going to be about. And, you know, certainly my divorce was in no way violent in any way, even close to that kind of anger escalation.
But what I did know, I knew the way divorce could unmoor you, the way it could destabilize your life and the ripple effects it had. And I think that piece is why the story felt so personal. And so I followed the story over the years.
I tried to write another novel. I was going to write my Potatoes novel, and then somehow I got sidetracked to a different novel. And I was working on that for about a year.
And I just didn't have, I think, to write a novel, it's so many years, it takes me forever. It has to have that, like, match striking a sandpaper feeling against yourself. That feeling that it's really hitting up against something vulnerable inside you. And the book I was trying to write just didn't have that feeling of emotional friction.
But this story, it really did. I felt, it felt far away, obviously, it felt like this horrific story of, oh my God, how could something so crazy happen? And yet, it was a Jewish family, it was in southern Florida where I've spent a lot of time. I grew up going to Miami Beach every summer for my grandparents lived there. I just felt like, how could something like this happen? And I went way deep down the rabbit hole, read everything, everything that was written about it. There was a podcast, there was a Dateline special. But I always came away so frustrated from whatever I read because, yes, there are facts. I mean, it was amazing the kind of facts you could find. An endless Google search would give you so many details that would be private about their lives, and — but every part of it and what every single person had to say about everything, but it never gave me that feeling that I understood the story. I feel like none of the coverage gave me any kind of glimpse into their souls, into who these people were, and I wasn't after an understanding of a forensic understanding or a legal understanding or even like a crime understanding.
I wanted the human understanding. I really wanted to know how does a divorce escalate so terribly? How do people do things that I'm sure they would have never imagined themselves capable of or someone, people around them, never would have thought they would do this? How do people lose their moral compass so completely, so tragically? How does no one in this story say this is not going to be a good thing? How does no one forgive or back down?
And that, there was nowhere to find the answer to those questions. And it was frustrating. It really, it drove me crazy that I couldn't get that kind of answer. And I just, I guess I came to feel that the only way to gain that kind of understanding, that kind of deep dive into these questions was to take that story and transform it into a novel and to fictionalize it and to feel free to do whatever I wanted in terms of fictionalizing it. But to really ask that question of how, how do you do such a thing?
And you created this just incredible like Rube Goldberg situation of feelings where each one pushes a different level in a different way that you can understand how you get to this ending. I thought it was just a brilliant psychological take on it. And there's also, it's also a story about siblings, right, there are three siblings in the story, Nate, Hailey and Adam. Adam is estranged from the family. I thought that was such an interesting thread. And I just wonder what about that piece of it you were hoping to tell.
I was interested in siblings and how, I've always been struck by the saying people sometimes say how every kid grows up in their own version of the family. That idea is always interesting to me. And I felt like each of these kids, even though they're part of one family unit, had such a different experience of their parents and of what family dynamics meant.
I was interested in loyalty. Nate, one of the brothers in the family, feels an immense sense of loyalty to his younger sister. And I wanted to explore what that comes from. I felt like it was about love, but also the feeling that he wanted to almost exonerate himself from his own guilt, that he was mean to his other brother. And so he became even nicer to his sister to think about how everything is sort of, all the dynamics are at play with each other. And I thought about those ball sculptures. That was really, I would look at them, that a ball rolls down a little ramp that opens a door that leads to another pathway. That sense that in a family, everyone is pinging off each other in one way or another. And I felt like, yes, the murder is at the center, but really that's not where the heat is. The heat is in these sibling rivalries and in the parent-child relationships. That's where these stories, I think, really begin to simmer.
Yeah, you can absolutely feel that. And also, just the sense that the, what went wrong between the siblings isn't some huge event or, you know, abuse. It is the day-to-day friction, things that don't necessarily feel so foreign to any parent or sibling.
Right. And I think we hold on to things. You know, you never know what stands out in your mind from your childhood. What are those moments you can't let go of, the slights or the hurt that somehow lodge in that place that you can't get it out of? And so I was fascinated by that idea of what makes a child become estranged from his parents.
And I think one of the themes throughout the book, but certainly in the sibling relationships, was I was really interested in the idea of forgiveness. I felt like I wanted to orient all the characters in one way or another around that question of who could forgive and who couldn't. You know, be separate from a murder or a divorce, who could forgive a parent who was less than perfect? Could you forgive a mother who didn't give you what you need? Could a brother forgive his brother for teasing him as a child? And what does it take to forgive? And what happens when you can't forgive?
I thought a lot about the Yom Kippur idea that I grew up with. You know, you ask for forgiveness three times, and if you're not forgiven after three times, the sin is no longer on you. You know, it was a source of endless games when I was growing up, where we would ask everyone that and see how far you could push that question of who would be forgiven and who wouldn't be. And I used that. But that question of if you ask and you ask and you ask and you're not forgiven, what happens? What happens to the people in that story?
I've always loved the Buddhist saying that when you forgive someone, you set free a prisoner and you discover that the prisoner was yourself. And what does it mean to hold on to anger, to be unable to let go of any of it?
A theme throughout your books is this pull of community that we've talked about. And this book is maybe on the face of it a bit different in that it's focused on this particular family and the events that happen. And yet even in the formulation of the title, We Would Never, you know, it's sort of this outward facing defense of the family. And so I'm just wondering how you think about the role of community in this book.
It's funny, the title was very late in coming. I could not think. I was stuck for years and years. It was so stressful. I had a working title of Sunshine, which I knew wasn't really right.
And then I thought of We Would Never because it's a phrase they do use. And I realized very late that I think that's probably I think that's in the opening paragraph of The Ladies Auxiliary, that they say “it's something we would never do.” And it was just sort of funny because I realized, oh, that's still in my mind always, this sense of the “we” of how we speak.
And I think the “we” in the title is on one hand, the family, right? They feel like, I mean, who could imagine that you could be a family that could — could murder someone? I mean, it's unimaginable. And I was interested, though, in the reader also. I certainly look at the family and think, well, you know, I would never. And I feel confident that I would never, you know. And yet. I think that I'm interested in the way we say we would never do that. I would never do something like that. But at the same time, I think we don't always know what we would do in situations we can't imagine.
And I think especially when it comes to our children, I feel like to what degree would I go to to protect my children? Far, I would protect my children. And so I think that question, that assertion of the We Would Never of the title, I feel like as soon as someone says “we would never do that,” at least my mind always starts to think, well, you might.And so that playing with the reader as well, the reader looking at this family. Initially, you look at the family in the book and think, I would never be like them. Who are these people?
And I guess I want to implicate the reader a little bit just to say, are you so sure? Are you positive? Would you do none of it? Maybe you wouldn't go as far as, so extreme as they do. But what would you do if you felt like your child was in danger?
Yeah. And I think that's the escalation. And again, those levers and pulls of — just keeps getting, everyone gets pulled a little deeper and a little deeper.
The escalation was a word that was crucial for me in constructing the plot. I feel like it wasn't like all of a sudden they wake up and say, we're going to kill somebody. That would be so extreme. I couldn't even envision those characters. It was, I think, to imagine the characters and to be inside their heads, I had to start them way back from that to say, they're just, they're going to help her. They're going to do a little more. They're going to do something that's a little far-fetched, a little extreme, but it's not murder. They're just going to do this, and then they do this.
And I felt like in writing them, I felt like I had to give them in some weird way the benefit of the doubt. And you know, because for most of the book, they haven't done anything wrong yet. And even though I, of course, knew the real story and knew where they were going to end up, I had to sort of imagine that my characters had free will and they had not yet done the thing they were going to do. And so I wanted to approach them with the empathy that they still deserved because they hadn't yet done, they hadn't yet gone so far off the rails.
I thought you handled them just so tenderly. And so thoughtfully.
Thank you.
I think people are going to love reading We Would Never. It's a fun read in the sense that you get pulled into a story and just trying to understand, as we've talked about, all the different levers that push — make you really, I think, think very deeply about your own relationships, how things lead to places you maybe have no idea where they would go.
Right. Thank you. Yeah, and I feel like, you know, we consume these stories one after another, but we just get the surface. We never get like the real, like, reckonings of people.
Well, thank you for sharing the story with us, and thank you for sharing all of these books with us. It was wonderful to have you. Thank you.
Thank you. It was my pleasure.
Thank you so much for joining us today for The Five Books. Our guest today was Tova Mirvis, discussing her novel, We Would Never. You can find a link to the book and all the others Tova discussed in our show notes.
This was the last episode of our very first season. Thank you so much for listening along with us and know that we'll be back in just a few weeks in mid-March with a brand new season of Thoughtful Conversations and Recommendations for your Spring Reading List. If you enjoyed the show, please be sure to subscribe and share with friends and family.
You can also find us on Instagram @fivebookspod. I'm Tali Rosenblatt Cohen. Our producer is Odelia Rubin.
Music by Dov Rosenblatt and Blue Dot Sessions. Art by Dena Friedman. Thank you especially to Lauren Wien and to the Jewish Book Council.
