Kill Your Darlings

Thom Graves is a tenured English Professor in his mid-fifties. His wife Wendy also works in academia, and was a published poet in her youth. She considers that her husband drinks too much, has a wandering eye and worryingly has started writing a novel – a murder mystery. Wendy can tolerate his drinking and even his flings with younger women at the University – but what she cannot accept is his writing.

At a dinner party she ponders what her life would be like without him so she decides to murder him. The reason has little to do with his infidelity but all to do with Wendy’s fear that her husband’s writing may reveal a dark hidden secret from the early days of their relationship; a deadly confidence that forms the pact that cemented their union.

The novel then flows in a backward manner, with sequential chapters detailing their marriage and the secrets hidden from the view of others to what came [or lurked] before.

Swanson’s writing style is beguiling in its hypnotic involvement [or participation] of the reader in the intricacies of Thom and Wendy’s lives right back to their childhood – a bus journey when they were the school children Thom Graves and Wendy Eastman who shared the same birth date.

Secrets are gradually revealed to the reader echoing the title of Wendy’s collection of poetry - ‘Specifics Omitted’. We are introduced to several characters that pepper the lives of the couple, from their son Jason, Thom’s boss [English Departmental Head] the lecherous Alex Deighton, Wendy’s parents Frank and Rose, Brother Alan and Aunt Andi - and her first husband Bryce Barrington.  All the characters are written with a lightness of touch, deftly delineated so they stand bolt upright on the page, adding a textured richness to the proceedings.

It is little surprise that Wendy and Bryce Barrington lived in Texas, because Swanson has often been noted as the ‘heir to Patricia Highsmith’ who was born in Texas. 

There is a trail of bodies, and deceptions that appear to be unfortunate incidents in the randomness of life.

When the reader reaches the climax, it becomes an imperative to return to the opening chapter, because we all like to see how the magician’s levers operated, and what was hidden behind the curtain. Swanson’s novel is not misdirection per se, but a manifestation of Søren Kierkegaard’s assertion that “Life can only be understood backwards; but it must be lived forwards.”

I sat in silence when I put the book down, and have been pondering the narrative as Kill your Darlings provokes deep thought – contemplation of fate intertwined with free-will to form our lives and our deaths and that of others that we interact with.

It is of little surprise that this novel is in film development.

Totally unmissable.