Threesome - Lawrence Block [59]
Threesome was Jill’s second book for Berkley, and I can’t begin to tell you how much enjoyment I got out of writing it. It was very much a tour de force, and the tour was a pleasure.
The idea grew out of a recent publishing phenomenon. Naked Came the Stranger was the product of a batch of journalists—all of them connected with Long Island Newsday, if I remember correctly. They took turns writing chapters of a trashy novel, got somebody’s girlfriend to lend them her bare behind for the cover photo—it was a splendid behind, I must say—and promoted the resulting product artfully enough to get on the bestseller list.
God knows they weren’t the first to think of this idea. In point of fact, five friends and I had the idea of producing a book in a single night, with each one taking a turn writing a chapter while the other five played poker downstairs. (I recount this in detail in the introduction to my memoir, Step by Step. It, uh, didn’t work, but it’s failure was quite spectacular.) We never had bestseller dreams for Lust Fuck, and it’s just as well. But it worked out for the Newsday crowd, and it’s been tried occasionally since then, some times successfully, sometimes not.
But for Threesome what I dreamed up was this: Three people, a man and two women who’ve established a sexual ménage à trois, are themselves inspired by the success of Naked Came the Stranger, decide that they ought to write a book in the same fashion. And what better subject could they conceive than their own relationship and its evolution? So they agree that they’ll take turns writing chapters, and what we’re reading are the chapters that they write.
But as each writes a chapter, and as each reads the chapters the others have written, they begin to discover things they hadn’t known. And what they read affects what they write, and their life together continues to evolve. There’s not only the story of What Happened before they started writing the book, there’s the story of What Happens as they write it.
Damn, it was fun.
I wrote the book in New York, at the Hotel Royalton on West Forty-Fourth Street. The hotel’s still there, but it’s now a trendy and pricey place. When I went there it was owned by two brothers, Henry and Barry Shenk; the same three doormen traded shifts there for thirty years. I could get a room there for ten bucks a night, and they may have given me a weekly rate.
It was while I was writing Threesome that I had an experience that I wound up adapting some months later, in a book called Ronald Rabbit is a Dirty Old Man. I was done with the day’s work and went down to the Village, where I wound up drinking in the Kettle of Fish on MacDougal Street. (It’s not there anymore. It closed and reappeared on West Third Street, and closed again, and blossomed yet again on Christopher Street, where the Lion’s Head pub used to be.)
I had a lot to drink and came out of there just as a great big station wagon full of girls pulled up in front, with their teacher at the wheel. They were from a fancy Catholic girls’ school in Connecticut, and they thought I was exotic and worth cultivating, and I got in the car and went back to Connecticut with them.
Where do you get your ideas, Mr. Block? Oh, I dunno, they just sort of pop into my head.
When this happens to Laurence Clarke, the hero of Ronald Rabbit, he gets lucky with all six of them. That’s the neat thing about fiction, you get to make it come out right. I made out a wee bit with one of the girls—well, maybe it was with two of them—but it didn’t go all that far.
The next day I went back to the Royalton and resumed work on Threesome.
Where do you get your ideas, Mr. Block? Oh, I dunno, they just sort of pop into my head.
—Lawrence Block
Greenwich Village
Lawrence Block (lawbloc@gmail.com) welcomes your email responses; he reads them all, and replies when he can.
A BIOGRAPHY OF LAWRENCE BLOCK