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Table of Contents
About The Book
For fans of Laura Dave and Rebecca Makkai, a “gripping, engaging novel” (Vogue) 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?
The months leading up to Jonah’s death have been fraught, including a bitter separation and a messy custody battle over their young daughter, Maya. When Hailey files a motion to relocate to Florida so she can be near her family, Jonah retaliates and the divorce begins to spiral dangerously out of control.
Sherry, Hailey’s mother, will stop at almost nothing to keep Jonah from getting what he wants. Nate, Hailey’s impetuous and protective older brother, has tried to keep his distance, but he can’t stand to see his little sister suffer. And then there’s Solomon, the patriarch, who is keeping a secret that threatens the stability and security Sherry has worked so hard to maintain. Soon, they are forced to reckon with who they are as individuals and as a family, and just how far they will go for each other.
Inspired by a true story, We Would Never is “an intellectual mystery—part whodunit, part whydunit, and heavy on the complexities of family dynamics, asking: How far would you go to protect those you love?” (The Boston Globe).
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?
The months leading up to Jonah’s death have been fraught, including a bitter separation and a messy custody battle over their young daughter, Maya. When Hailey files a motion to relocate to Florida so she can be near her family, Jonah retaliates and the divorce begins to spiral dangerously out of control.
Sherry, Hailey’s mother, will stop at almost nothing to keep Jonah from getting what he wants. Nate, Hailey’s impetuous and protective older brother, has tried to keep his distance, but he can’t stand to see his little sister suffer. And then there’s Solomon, the patriarch, who is keeping a secret that threatens the stability and security Sherry has worked so hard to maintain. Soon, they are forced to reckon with who they are as individuals and as a family, and just how far they will go for each other.
Inspired by a true story, We Would Never is “an intellectual mystery—part whodunit, part whydunit, and heavy on the complexities of family dynamics, asking: How far would you go to protect those you love?” (The Boston Globe).
Excerpt
1. Maine, 2019 MAINE, 2019
I watch the video in the middle of the night, trying to understand. The ex-wife sits behind a gray table in a small police interrogation room. The walls are cinder block, the lighting is fluorescent, her hair is blond. On the video, her face appears grainy, the way you would see someone on a security camera.
“We called you here,” says the police officer sitting across from her, “because there’s been a shooting. I’m sorry to tell you this, but your ex-husband, Jonah Gelman, was shot inside his home this morning. He was taken to the hospital, but unfortunately he didn’t make it.”
“Oh my god,” the woman cries, bringing her hands to her mouth and hunching forward.
“I know this is a shock,” the officer says, his voice gentle, his words unhurried. “But I’m hoping you might be able to help us understand what happened.”
The ex-wife begins to weep, with long gasping sobs that sound more animal than human. Frantically, she looks around the room, as if she can’t believe where she finds herself.
Wide awake, I replay the news clips that I’d once tried to avoid but now watch compulsively, in the hope that one of them will yield something new. “Here’s what we know so far,” says a reporter standing in the front yard of a blue Victorian house, yellow police tape visible behind her. “Noted writer and popular professor Jonah Gelman was inside his home a block from the Binghamton University campus when he was shot once in the chest.” There are interviews with friends and colleagues, all of whom describe Jonah as serious, brilliant, and ambitious. “He was the person to turn to if you wanted to hear the unvarnished truth,” says a friend, who attended Yale with him. “He could be uncompromising, but it was out of a sense of deeply held conviction,” says another friend. His literary agent reveals that a few days before Jonah was shot, he had emailed her to say that he was nearly done with his much anticipated second novel. Standing outside his Manhattan office, his editor, a gaunt man with black glasses, blinks back tears. “Jonah had incredible promise. He wasn’t one to get distracted or let anything stand in his way.”
In the days after the murder, thousands of calls were made to the police, some to report potential clues, others to offer theories that ranged from the credible to the preposterous. A jealous colleague. A deranged fan. A student irate about a bad grade. As always, there were a handful of confessions, which turned out to be false. I wonder if those people live in a world of delusion. Maybe they feel guilty about something else.
Lying next to me, in a double bed in a small room in a cabin twenty miles outside of Bangor, Maine, my daughter is asleep. My headphones are on, and my laptop screen is darkened so the light doesn’t rouse her. Outside, dogs are barking, piercing the overwhelming quiet, but my daughter doesn’t stir, a peaceful form under the flannel blankets, which do little to keep out the cold.
On the screen, the police officer interviewing the ex-wife has cottony white hair and ruddy cheeks, and he sits impassively as she cries.
“I don’t understand. Who could have done such a terrible thing?” she is asking.
“Before I can tell you more, I need to find out where you were this morning,” he says.
The ex-wife tells the officer that she was getting a massage, a gift from her brother. She had left the spa and was walking to her car when she got the call requesting that she come to the police station. She had been alarmed, of course, but had agreed.
In the interrogation video, the officer poses more questions: where was she last night (at home, with her daughter) and had she spoken to anyone on the phone or in person today (her mother, twice, and her brother a few times as well).
“I realize this is hard, but I need to ask,” the police officer says patiently, almost disinterested. “Is there anyone you can think of who might have wanted to harm your ex-husband?”
She sobs into her hands, but when she regains control, her voice is steely. “When we first moved here, Jonah used to talk about someone in his department who hated him. They got into a fight and… Jonah could be stubborn. It made some people upset, but I don’t think that—” she says and stops.
“And what about you? How did you and Jonah get along?” the police officer asks.
The ex-wife takes a deep breath. For a moment—I hit pause to capture it—she looks afraid.
“Our divorce hasn’t exactly been amicable,” she says. “It should have been over by now, but there’s been so much fighting and it keeps dragging on. My family has been upset about everything that’s happened and they’ve tried to help me, but…”
The police officer leans forward, and in what is surely an act of superhuman restraint, his tone remains casual. “Can you think of anyone in particular who might have wanted to help you by doing something like this?”
Her hand flies to her mouth and the thought occurs to her—you can see it alight in her head—that she shouldn’t be speaking so freely.
“No. Of couse not. No one I know would ever do something so awful,” she insists. She’s looking not at the police officer but directly into the camera that has been recording her this whole time—standard protocol, she was informed at the start—as if aware that she’s speaking to all of us.
On YouTube, where I watch the video, there have been 130,000 views and 2,527 comments so far.
“An Oscar-worthy performance,” says one of the comments.
“Please. She is WAY too composed for someone who just found out the guy is DEAD,” says another.
“No chance anyone could fake that reaction. She’s crying because she still loved the guy.”
An hour in, the ex-wife asks to check her phone, which she’s allowed to do—she’s there, after all, of her own volition. Not once does she ask for a lawyer or object that the interview has lasted for too long. As the questions continue, the feeling in the room shifts. She speaks less freely and crosses her arms, ceasing to see the officer as an ally. Perhaps she senses that she’s shifting in his mind as well.
“WE ALL KNOW SHE’S GUILTY,” writes a woman, who provides a link to a statistic claiming that, on average, most Americans tell one to two lies per day, and another to a study asserting that it’s the hands that give us away: those who are lying are more likely to gesture with both hands than those who are telling the truth.
I replay the video to see if she’d used both hands or one. I shut the computer and close my eyes, but there is no reprieve. Outside, the dogs are still barking. The wind is howling. I google all the names again, but no matter how intently I search, nothing helps me understand.
“I know we’ve kept you for a long time, and I apologize for that,” the officer is saying to the ex-wife.
I lean closer to the screen to study her face. Who is she, what has she done, what should she have known?
“It’s okay. I understand why you brought me here,” she says wearily, her attempt at bravado fading before she gets the words out. “It’s always the ex-wife.”
It’s impossible to believe that the woman on the screen is me.
I watch the video in the middle of the night, trying to understand. The ex-wife sits behind a gray table in a small police interrogation room. The walls are cinder block, the lighting is fluorescent, her hair is blond. On the video, her face appears grainy, the way you would see someone on a security camera.
“We called you here,” says the police officer sitting across from her, “because there’s been a shooting. I’m sorry to tell you this, but your ex-husband, Jonah Gelman, was shot inside his home this morning. He was taken to the hospital, but unfortunately he didn’t make it.”
“Oh my god,” the woman cries, bringing her hands to her mouth and hunching forward.
“I know this is a shock,” the officer says, his voice gentle, his words unhurried. “But I’m hoping you might be able to help us understand what happened.”
The ex-wife begins to weep, with long gasping sobs that sound more animal than human. Frantically, she looks around the room, as if she can’t believe where she finds herself.
Wide awake, I replay the news clips that I’d once tried to avoid but now watch compulsively, in the hope that one of them will yield something new. “Here’s what we know so far,” says a reporter standing in the front yard of a blue Victorian house, yellow police tape visible behind her. “Noted writer and popular professor Jonah Gelman was inside his home a block from the Binghamton University campus when he was shot once in the chest.” There are interviews with friends and colleagues, all of whom describe Jonah as serious, brilliant, and ambitious. “He was the person to turn to if you wanted to hear the unvarnished truth,” says a friend, who attended Yale with him. “He could be uncompromising, but it was out of a sense of deeply held conviction,” says another friend. His literary agent reveals that a few days before Jonah was shot, he had emailed her to say that he was nearly done with his much anticipated second novel. Standing outside his Manhattan office, his editor, a gaunt man with black glasses, blinks back tears. “Jonah had incredible promise. He wasn’t one to get distracted or let anything stand in his way.”
In the days after the murder, thousands of calls were made to the police, some to report potential clues, others to offer theories that ranged from the credible to the preposterous. A jealous colleague. A deranged fan. A student irate about a bad grade. As always, there were a handful of confessions, which turned out to be false. I wonder if those people live in a world of delusion. Maybe they feel guilty about something else.
Lying next to me, in a double bed in a small room in a cabin twenty miles outside of Bangor, Maine, my daughter is asleep. My headphones are on, and my laptop screen is darkened so the light doesn’t rouse her. Outside, dogs are barking, piercing the overwhelming quiet, but my daughter doesn’t stir, a peaceful form under the flannel blankets, which do little to keep out the cold.
On the screen, the police officer interviewing the ex-wife has cottony white hair and ruddy cheeks, and he sits impassively as she cries.
“I don’t understand. Who could have done such a terrible thing?” she is asking.
“Before I can tell you more, I need to find out where you were this morning,” he says.
The ex-wife tells the officer that she was getting a massage, a gift from her brother. She had left the spa and was walking to her car when she got the call requesting that she come to the police station. She had been alarmed, of course, but had agreed.
In the interrogation video, the officer poses more questions: where was she last night (at home, with her daughter) and had she spoken to anyone on the phone or in person today (her mother, twice, and her brother a few times as well).
“I realize this is hard, but I need to ask,” the police officer says patiently, almost disinterested. “Is there anyone you can think of who might have wanted to harm your ex-husband?”
She sobs into her hands, but when she regains control, her voice is steely. “When we first moved here, Jonah used to talk about someone in his department who hated him. They got into a fight and… Jonah could be stubborn. It made some people upset, but I don’t think that—” she says and stops.
“And what about you? How did you and Jonah get along?” the police officer asks.
The ex-wife takes a deep breath. For a moment—I hit pause to capture it—she looks afraid.
“Our divorce hasn’t exactly been amicable,” she says. “It should have been over by now, but there’s been so much fighting and it keeps dragging on. My family has been upset about everything that’s happened and they’ve tried to help me, but…”
The police officer leans forward, and in what is surely an act of superhuman restraint, his tone remains casual. “Can you think of anyone in particular who might have wanted to help you by doing something like this?”
Her hand flies to her mouth and the thought occurs to her—you can see it alight in her head—that she shouldn’t be speaking so freely.
“No. Of couse not. No one I know would ever do something so awful,” she insists. She’s looking not at the police officer but directly into the camera that has been recording her this whole time—standard protocol, she was informed at the start—as if aware that she’s speaking to all of us.
On YouTube, where I watch the video, there have been 130,000 views and 2,527 comments so far.
“An Oscar-worthy performance,” says one of the comments.
“Please. She is WAY too composed for someone who just found out the guy is DEAD,” says another.
“No chance anyone could fake that reaction. She’s crying because she still loved the guy.”
An hour in, the ex-wife asks to check her phone, which she’s allowed to do—she’s there, after all, of her own volition. Not once does she ask for a lawyer or object that the interview has lasted for too long. As the questions continue, the feeling in the room shifts. She speaks less freely and crosses her arms, ceasing to see the officer as an ally. Perhaps she senses that she’s shifting in his mind as well.
“WE ALL KNOW SHE’S GUILTY,” writes a woman, who provides a link to a statistic claiming that, on average, most Americans tell one to two lies per day, and another to a study asserting that it’s the hands that give us away: those who are lying are more likely to gesture with both hands than those who are telling the truth.
I replay the video to see if she’d used both hands or one. I shut the computer and close my eyes, but there is no reprieve. Outside, the dogs are still barking. The wind is howling. I google all the names again, but no matter how intently I search, nothing helps me understand.
“I know we’ve kept you for a long time, and I apologize for that,” the officer is saying to the ex-wife.
I lean closer to the screen to study her face. Who is she, what has she done, what should she have known?
“It’s okay. I understand why you brought me here,” she says wearily, her attempt at bravado fading before she gets the words out. “It’s always the ex-wife.”
It’s impossible to believe that the woman on the screen is me.
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Introduction
Hailey Gelman is known for her lovely disposition. Raised in sunny Palm Beach, she is a beacon of light to her brother, parents, and daughter. However, no one is more shocked than Hailey to learn she has been accused of murdering her soon-to-be-ex-husband Jonah. Jonah’s murder arrives on the heels of an acrimonious divorce and Hailey turns to her devoted family for help. Hailey soon comes to learn that while her closeknit, upstanding family might be her best defense, they—and their secrets—are also her most damning liability. Inspired by a true story, We Would Never explores extremes to which a family will go in order to protect their own.
Topics & Questions for Discussion
1. How does the first scene of the book, set in Maine in 2019, work as an effective frame for the story that follows?
2. Early in his career, Solomon has an academic discovery stolen from him. How does this intellectual theft inform his sense of justice?
3. What do you think of Sherry and Nate’s plan to initially pay off Jonah?
4. Discuss the moment on page 126 when Nate jokingly suggests murdering Jonah. How did you react to this suggestion initially? Does your reaction to this idea change over the course of the novel?
5. We learn why Adam decides he never wants to see his mother again (page 162). Do you think Adam’s anger toward Sherry is justified?
6. How do Sherry and Solomon approach parenting differently? Do you think one is more appropriate than the other?
7. Both Hailey and Sherry use exercise to cope with their anger. Do you ever use exercise to deal with your emotions?
8. How does Nate’s relationship with Tara affect his decision about how to deal with Jonah?
9. The concept of love is often used to justify characters actions. Are there limits to what you would do to protect the people you love?
10. Sherry becomes focused on getting Hailey to move to West Palm Beach. How much do you think this has to do with watching out for her daughter and how much is it about her own self-interest?
11. With Jonah out of the picture, the Marcuses’ were supposed to be closer than ever. How does this plan backfire?
12. Discuss the revelation at the end of the book. At any point did you suspect who was actually responsible for Jonah’s murder?
13. Why do you think Solomon decided to tell Adam the truth? Why do you think Adam told Hailey?
14. Where do you think the Marcus family goes from here?
Enhance Your Book Club
1. Research the psychology behind birth order. How do you think each sibling does or does not exhibit the characteristics associated with their birth order?
2. Hailey frequently mentions writing in her journal as a way to figure out her feelings. Do you keep a journal? How does writing help you sort through difficult problems in your life?
3. Research the Dan Markel case that inspired the novel. Discuss the ways in which the case is similar to the Marcus story and the ways in which it is different.
A Conversation with Tova Mirvis
When you began writing the book, did you know how it would end?
I didn’t! I assumed I would stick to what I thought had happened in the true-crime story that inspired the book. But a novel is different than a real story, with different demands, and as I began to depart from the true-crime story in various ways, my thoughts about the possibilities for the ending began to change too. I was very surprised by the ending—it wasn’t what I had envisioned at the outset (and I have to credit my husband for helping me think of the plot twist at the end!). Not knowing the ending can be a nerve-wracking way to write, but it injects an element of suspense into the writing process that creates momentum for the writer as well as for the reader. Once I worked out the ending, I spent a lot of time going back and laying the groundwork for it so that it felt like that was where we were going all along. I hope readers were as surprised by the ending as I was!
What was your writing process for this book? Did it differ at all from the process of writing your previous books?
In every book I’ve written, I always start with a burning question that I really want an answer to. In this book, I needed to understand how a seemingly ordinary family could so lose their moral compass as to be able to engineer a murder; I needed to understand how a divorce could escalate so badly that people were willing to kill a man. That question becomes my guide through the book—when I feel lost, I return in my mind to that original question. But overall, I have a very loose process. In the beginning I write any piece of a book I can come up with, scenes or descriptions or conversations, not necessarily in order. In the beginning, I let myself play and explore. I eventually make outlines and try to map things out but I have learned that I have to be willing to live with disorder for a very long time. And then, usually a few years into the process, I start to see the structure and the narrative arcs, and the novel comes into more of an ordered state. That’s my favorite part—when I can finally see its shape clearly but I am still creating and inventing. And I spend years revising, rethinking, undoing, redoing, pushing myself, listening to feedback. I have learned that you can take apart all the pieces of a book and it doesn’t fall apart—it makes a book richer and more layered in the end.
Is there one character you found the most interesting to write?
Nate came easiest to me—and I’m not really sure why, since I don’t think I am like him at all. But even early on, I could hear his voice in my head as I wrote and enjoyed exploring his conflicted sense of who he is. And I loved writing about Adam who has a quiet loneliness that intrigued me. And as a (relatively new) dog person, I liked exploring the sense of companionship he feels with the dogs that he didn’t feel with his own family. To write all the characters, I wrote page and pages of notes and description and really tried to feel them, deeply, viscerally. I wanted to live inside their heads and hearts. Even as they began plotting the murder, I still wanted to locate their humanity. I thought a lot about how we might all claim we would never do something, but I’m not sure we always know what we might be capable of, in situations we can’t yet imagine. Under what set of circumstances might someone commit an act they once believed was impossible? What combination of anger and loyalty and fear might enable someone to lose their moral compass? That doesn’t mean I excuse or condone the actions that my characters take but I wanted to understand.
Did you have to do any research for this book?
I did a very eclectic kind of research. I read a lot about the actual case that inspired the book, as well as other true crime cases, particularly spousal murders. (I printed out a lot of these news articles and sometimes they would accumulate on the family printer; when my kids went to print their homework, they would see all these articles about awful murders and say, “Oh, this must be Mom’s!”) I researched dermatology to create the office setting and learned about various skin diseases as well as cosmetic dermatology. I also spent a lot of time researching dogs—when I started writing, I didn’t have a dog and worried about how I could really write about dogs without having one. During the pandemic, my kids begged for a dog and we ended up getting one which enabled me to do a lot of hands-on research. Even then, I read a lot about dog training and spent a lot of time googling videos of dogs giving birth so I could describe that birth scene well.
Why do you think divorce is such a ripe ground for a good story?
Divorce is not fun to go through but it is definitely fertile ground for a novel. In a divorce, people can be at their worst. So much that feels certain about your life comes undone—it is so destabilizing and so unmooring to have to fight for what you believed was yours—not just money and physical objects but custody of children, relationships with friends. Even a sense of who you are and the story you tell about your life is suddenly up for grabs. In this vulnerable, volatile time, there is great possibility for emotional drama—we get to see who characters are in their most raw, unleashed state. And there is a great sense of disorder from which action and plot can spring. So much of writing fiction is about creating a sense of escalation and causation; in order to have plot and momentum, you need to push characters one step and then one step more. In a divorce, all of those elements are readily at play.
While the divorce between Hailey and Jonah is the driving relationship of the story, We Would Never is largely a story about a mother’s relationships with her children. What drew you to write about these particular relationships, and did your perception of a family evolve while writing these characters?
As I was writing, I felt that yes, this is a book about a murder but really, this is a book about a family and its complicated and evolving dynamics. From early on, I was very interested in the question of what a mother might do when she fears she is losing her children—how a mother who has put everything into raising her children might feel as they get older, and for a variety of reasons, begins to feel that they are slipping away. I thought a lot about the prospect of the empty nest, and how, for a character like Sherry who has tried so hard to cling to her children, this can feel enormously destabilizing. I think that on some level this is where the idea for the dog thread of the book came from—we talk about what animals will do to protect their young, but what will people do? What will a family do when it feels like one of their own is in danger? I was especially interested in the phrase “we would do anything for each other.” Is this a testament to familial love—or something darker? Is it possible to love your children too much? My own wrestling with these questions did evolve as I wrote the book—part of what I love about being a novelist is that you get to turn and turn a question to look at it from all sides, all perspectives. There is no one answer, no prescribed way to feel, and that opens up a lot of space to explore complicated, sometimes uncomfortable truths.
How does the setting—sunny, warm West Palm Beach—contrast the darkness of the story? What did you hope to explore with that juxtaposition?
The true crime story that inspired the book was set in Florida, and while I changed many things in writing the novel, Florida did not feel like a location I could give up. I live in the Boston area, but spend time in Florida because my husband works there several days a week. I have come to love the natural beauty of Florida, the tropical flowers always in bloom and the lush greenery which became important in creating the visual setting for the book. I loved writing the descriptions of Sherry’s swimming pool as her oasis and the garden that becomes overgrown as the events begin to escalate. I pictured the encroaching plants and vines as a way to think about family enmeshment and entrapment. I am fascinated by the way Florida holds two extremes—it is both so manicured and so wild all at once, filled with gorgeous gardens and alligator-infested swamps. It is so sunny yet so beset with terrifying storms. I felt like my characters veered between two extremes as well—on the one hand, a loving close-knit family and on the other hand, a family roiled by conflict and seemingly able to commit a murder.
Have you spent time in all the other locations you write about? Why did you decide to include them in your novel?
I chose rural Maine because it felt like an opposite to West Palm Beach. I haven’t spent that much time in Maine but have spent time in similar rural parts of New England that I drew upon in creating that setting, especially the physical landscape and the weather. I wanted to alternate between the stifling humidity of South Florida, with its swampy sense of entanglement, and the cold pristineness and quiet loneliness of Maine that Adam chooses as antidote to how he was raised.
New York City make a brief appearance in the novel, which is where I went to college and then lived for seven years after. Leaving New York City for the Boston suburbs was hard for me, and I gave some of those feelings to Hailey. As for Binghamton (where the murder takes place), there was an element of randomness in choosing that locale. A few years back, I was supposed to give a book talk at SUNY Binghamton. I was at the airport when I got a call saying that there had been a murder on campus and the event was canceled. Sometimes details lodge in your mind, and then, one day, they make their way onto the page.
As a writer, you’ve written across themes, topics, and genres. As a reader, what types of stories are you drawn to?
As different as each of my books are, there’s a thread that links them all and it’s the same thing that I’m interested in as a reader. I love writing and reading books that delve deep into people’s inner lives. I want to read and write books that go beyond the surface of what people say about themselves to all the messy, conflicted parts below. I love stories that deal in emotional complexity, that illuminate the bubbling stew of desire and shame and love and fear that makes us human, that take us beyond our own lives and deep into the messy experiences of others.
Hailey Gelman is known for her lovely disposition. Raised in sunny Palm Beach, she is a beacon of light to her brother, parents, and daughter. However, no one is more shocked than Hailey to learn she has been accused of murdering her soon-to-be-ex-husband Jonah. Jonah’s murder arrives on the heels of an acrimonious divorce and Hailey turns to her devoted family for help. Hailey soon comes to learn that while her closeknit, upstanding family might be her best defense, they—and their secrets—are also her most damning liability. Inspired by a true story, We Would Never explores extremes to which a family will go in order to protect their own.
Topics & Questions for Discussion
1. How does the first scene of the book, set in Maine in 2019, work as an effective frame for the story that follows?
2. Early in his career, Solomon has an academic discovery stolen from him. How does this intellectual theft inform his sense of justice?
3. What do you think of Sherry and Nate’s plan to initially pay off Jonah?
4. Discuss the moment on page 126 when Nate jokingly suggests murdering Jonah. How did you react to this suggestion initially? Does your reaction to this idea change over the course of the novel?
5. We learn why Adam decides he never wants to see his mother again (page 162). Do you think Adam’s anger toward Sherry is justified?
6. How do Sherry and Solomon approach parenting differently? Do you think one is more appropriate than the other?
7. Both Hailey and Sherry use exercise to cope with their anger. Do you ever use exercise to deal with your emotions?
8. How does Nate’s relationship with Tara affect his decision about how to deal with Jonah?
9. The concept of love is often used to justify characters actions. Are there limits to what you would do to protect the people you love?
10. Sherry becomes focused on getting Hailey to move to West Palm Beach. How much do you think this has to do with watching out for her daughter and how much is it about her own self-interest?
11. With Jonah out of the picture, the Marcuses’ were supposed to be closer than ever. How does this plan backfire?
12. Discuss the revelation at the end of the book. At any point did you suspect who was actually responsible for Jonah’s murder?
13. Why do you think Solomon decided to tell Adam the truth? Why do you think Adam told Hailey?
14. Where do you think the Marcus family goes from here?
Enhance Your Book Club
1. Research the psychology behind birth order. How do you think each sibling does or does not exhibit the characteristics associated with their birth order?
2. Hailey frequently mentions writing in her journal as a way to figure out her feelings. Do you keep a journal? How does writing help you sort through difficult problems in your life?
3. Research the Dan Markel case that inspired the novel. Discuss the ways in which the case is similar to the Marcus story and the ways in which it is different.
A Conversation with Tova Mirvis
When you began writing the book, did you know how it would end?
I didn’t! I assumed I would stick to what I thought had happened in the true-crime story that inspired the book. But a novel is different than a real story, with different demands, and as I began to depart from the true-crime story in various ways, my thoughts about the possibilities for the ending began to change too. I was very surprised by the ending—it wasn’t what I had envisioned at the outset (and I have to credit my husband for helping me think of the plot twist at the end!). Not knowing the ending can be a nerve-wracking way to write, but it injects an element of suspense into the writing process that creates momentum for the writer as well as for the reader. Once I worked out the ending, I spent a lot of time going back and laying the groundwork for it so that it felt like that was where we were going all along. I hope readers were as surprised by the ending as I was!
What was your writing process for this book? Did it differ at all from the process of writing your previous books?
In every book I’ve written, I always start with a burning question that I really want an answer to. In this book, I needed to understand how a seemingly ordinary family could so lose their moral compass as to be able to engineer a murder; I needed to understand how a divorce could escalate so badly that people were willing to kill a man. That question becomes my guide through the book—when I feel lost, I return in my mind to that original question. But overall, I have a very loose process. In the beginning I write any piece of a book I can come up with, scenes or descriptions or conversations, not necessarily in order. In the beginning, I let myself play and explore. I eventually make outlines and try to map things out but I have learned that I have to be willing to live with disorder for a very long time. And then, usually a few years into the process, I start to see the structure and the narrative arcs, and the novel comes into more of an ordered state. That’s my favorite part—when I can finally see its shape clearly but I am still creating and inventing. And I spend years revising, rethinking, undoing, redoing, pushing myself, listening to feedback. I have learned that you can take apart all the pieces of a book and it doesn’t fall apart—it makes a book richer and more layered in the end.
Is there one character you found the most interesting to write?
Nate came easiest to me—and I’m not really sure why, since I don’t think I am like him at all. But even early on, I could hear his voice in my head as I wrote and enjoyed exploring his conflicted sense of who he is. And I loved writing about Adam who has a quiet loneliness that intrigued me. And as a (relatively new) dog person, I liked exploring the sense of companionship he feels with the dogs that he didn’t feel with his own family. To write all the characters, I wrote page and pages of notes and description and really tried to feel them, deeply, viscerally. I wanted to live inside their heads and hearts. Even as they began plotting the murder, I still wanted to locate their humanity. I thought a lot about how we might all claim we would never do something, but I’m not sure we always know what we might be capable of, in situations we can’t yet imagine. Under what set of circumstances might someone commit an act they once believed was impossible? What combination of anger and loyalty and fear might enable someone to lose their moral compass? That doesn’t mean I excuse or condone the actions that my characters take but I wanted to understand.
Did you have to do any research for this book?
I did a very eclectic kind of research. I read a lot about the actual case that inspired the book, as well as other true crime cases, particularly spousal murders. (I printed out a lot of these news articles and sometimes they would accumulate on the family printer; when my kids went to print their homework, they would see all these articles about awful murders and say, “Oh, this must be Mom’s!”) I researched dermatology to create the office setting and learned about various skin diseases as well as cosmetic dermatology. I also spent a lot of time researching dogs—when I started writing, I didn’t have a dog and worried about how I could really write about dogs without having one. During the pandemic, my kids begged for a dog and we ended up getting one which enabled me to do a lot of hands-on research. Even then, I read a lot about dog training and spent a lot of time googling videos of dogs giving birth so I could describe that birth scene well.
Why do you think divorce is such a ripe ground for a good story?
Divorce is not fun to go through but it is definitely fertile ground for a novel. In a divorce, people can be at their worst. So much that feels certain about your life comes undone—it is so destabilizing and so unmooring to have to fight for what you believed was yours—not just money and physical objects but custody of children, relationships with friends. Even a sense of who you are and the story you tell about your life is suddenly up for grabs. In this vulnerable, volatile time, there is great possibility for emotional drama—we get to see who characters are in their most raw, unleashed state. And there is a great sense of disorder from which action and plot can spring. So much of writing fiction is about creating a sense of escalation and causation; in order to have plot and momentum, you need to push characters one step and then one step more. In a divorce, all of those elements are readily at play.
While the divorce between Hailey and Jonah is the driving relationship of the story, We Would Never is largely a story about a mother’s relationships with her children. What drew you to write about these particular relationships, and did your perception of a family evolve while writing these characters?
As I was writing, I felt that yes, this is a book about a murder but really, this is a book about a family and its complicated and evolving dynamics. From early on, I was very interested in the question of what a mother might do when she fears she is losing her children—how a mother who has put everything into raising her children might feel as they get older, and for a variety of reasons, begins to feel that they are slipping away. I thought a lot about the prospect of the empty nest, and how, for a character like Sherry who has tried so hard to cling to her children, this can feel enormously destabilizing. I think that on some level this is where the idea for the dog thread of the book came from—we talk about what animals will do to protect their young, but what will people do? What will a family do when it feels like one of their own is in danger? I was especially interested in the phrase “we would do anything for each other.” Is this a testament to familial love—or something darker? Is it possible to love your children too much? My own wrestling with these questions did evolve as I wrote the book—part of what I love about being a novelist is that you get to turn and turn a question to look at it from all sides, all perspectives. There is no one answer, no prescribed way to feel, and that opens up a lot of space to explore complicated, sometimes uncomfortable truths.
How does the setting—sunny, warm West Palm Beach—contrast the darkness of the story? What did you hope to explore with that juxtaposition?
The true crime story that inspired the book was set in Florida, and while I changed many things in writing the novel, Florida did not feel like a location I could give up. I live in the Boston area, but spend time in Florida because my husband works there several days a week. I have come to love the natural beauty of Florida, the tropical flowers always in bloom and the lush greenery which became important in creating the visual setting for the book. I loved writing the descriptions of Sherry’s swimming pool as her oasis and the garden that becomes overgrown as the events begin to escalate. I pictured the encroaching plants and vines as a way to think about family enmeshment and entrapment. I am fascinated by the way Florida holds two extremes—it is both so manicured and so wild all at once, filled with gorgeous gardens and alligator-infested swamps. It is so sunny yet so beset with terrifying storms. I felt like my characters veered between two extremes as well—on the one hand, a loving close-knit family and on the other hand, a family roiled by conflict and seemingly able to commit a murder.
Have you spent time in all the other locations you write about? Why did you decide to include them in your novel?
I chose rural Maine because it felt like an opposite to West Palm Beach. I haven’t spent that much time in Maine but have spent time in similar rural parts of New England that I drew upon in creating that setting, especially the physical landscape and the weather. I wanted to alternate between the stifling humidity of South Florida, with its swampy sense of entanglement, and the cold pristineness and quiet loneliness of Maine that Adam chooses as antidote to how he was raised.
New York City make a brief appearance in the novel, which is where I went to college and then lived for seven years after. Leaving New York City for the Boston suburbs was hard for me, and I gave some of those feelings to Hailey. As for Binghamton (where the murder takes place), there was an element of randomness in choosing that locale. A few years back, I was supposed to give a book talk at SUNY Binghamton. I was at the airport when I got a call saying that there had been a murder on campus and the event was canceled. Sometimes details lodge in your mind, and then, one day, they make their way onto the page.
As a writer, you’ve written across themes, topics, and genres. As a reader, what types of stories are you drawn to?
As different as each of my books are, there’s a thread that links them all and it’s the same thing that I’m interested in as a reader. I love writing and reading books that delve deep into people’s inner lives. I want to read and write books that go beyond the surface of what people say about themselves to all the messy, conflicted parts below. I love stories that deal in emotional complexity, that illuminate the bubbling stew of desire and shame and love and fear that makes us human, that take us beyond our own lives and deep into the messy experiences of others.
About The Author
Photograph by Sharona Jacobs
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 numerous publications including The New York Times, The Boston Globe, and Real Simple, and her fiction has been broadcast on NPR. She lives in Newton, Massachusetts, with her family. You can connect with her on her website, TovaMirvis.com.
Product Details
- Publisher: Avid Reader Press/Simon & Schuster (February 11, 2025)
- Length: 368 pages
- ISBN13: 9781668061626
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Raves and Reviews
“An intellectual mystery—part whodunit, part whydunnit, and heavy on the complexities of family dynamics, asking: How far would you go to protect those you love?” —The Boston Globe
“A gripping, engaging novel.” —Vogue
"Propulsive, disturbing, and practically begging for a screen adaptation." —Kirkus Reviews
“A penetrating study of a family whose all-consuming love for each other turns sinister. Readers won’t be able to look away.” —Publishers Weekly
“More than a whodunnit, Mirvis’s characters are multidimensional, wrestling with doubts and guilt, not just about murder, but also about a lifetime of questionable choices. . . . The combination of murder mystery and character-driven literary fiction makes the perfect read for a winter snowstorm or beach vacation.” —Hadassah Magazine
“Tova Mirvis pens a riveting domestic drama about the most complicated, painful and love-filled thing of all: family. . . . Sherry is complicated and complex, multilayered in the way that only the most gifted, emotionally intelligent authors can achieve. . . . While not exactly a thriller. . . the book has all the trademarks of one: edge-of-your seat suspense, hidden motives and alliances, and, of course, death. Propulsive in its tone, ambitious in its probing of the human psyche, and full of poignant questions about morality and love, We Would Never is a must-read.” —Bookreporter
“Taut. . . Gripping. . . . As she did with her previous works set in Orthodox Jewish communities, Mirvis expertly digs into the dynamics of a tight-knit group: here, it's a nuclear family that might seem perfect to onlookers yet hides more than its fair share of secrets and betrayals under a wholesome façade. . . . Mirvis keeps readers guessing, paving the way for a key twist. . . . We Would Never poses compelling questions about families' secrets and self-mythologizing, taking a fraught situation and ratcheting up the extreme incidents and emotions until it's finally revealed who would—and did—turn to murder.” —Maximum Shelf
“A deft perspective shift early on asserts authorial control, pulling us in with high stakes and a brisk pace . . . Mirvis’ latest is, at its core, a steady-pulse novel. It doesn’t make you sweat over whodunit or strain to decode its themes . . . Instead, We Would Never forces us to look so closely at this kind of smother-love that we cringe [at]." —Jewish Book Council
"In We Would Never, Tova Mirvis brings a novelist’s eye to a tabloid story, and the result is both gripping and illuminating. Mirvis gets deep into her characters’ heads and their twisted relationships, showing us how the toxic combination of a bad divorce, a custody dispute, and family dysfunction leads apparently reasonable people to a place where the unthinkable starts to look inevitable. Once you start this book, you won’t want to put it down." —Tom Perrotta, author of Mrs. Fletcher
“Thrillingly plotted and exquisitely imagined, We Would Never is a masterful portrait of a family and its many secrets. A relentlessly intelligent barn-burner of a book.” —Claire Dederer, author of Monsters
“We Would Never is utterly spellbinding. Tova Mirvis's characters are so real you’ll wish you could grab them for a heart-to-heart before it’s too late…but the propulsive plot is already sweeping you right along with them toward the unthinkable. Mirvis has written a knockout exploration of the ways people shape and misshape their lives through anger, and the lines people never believe they'll cross until they do.” —Rachel Kadish, author of The Weight of Ink
“A fascinating fever dream of a novel about the gifts and costs of family loyalty. Part mystery, part moral puzzle, We Would Never shines a fierce light on its characters, while never losing sight of their humanity.” —Elizabeth Graver, author of Kantika
“With its crafty engineering and large cast of shape-shifting characters, We Would Never not only keeps you guessing until its very last pages, it gets you asking yourself its intriguing central questions: how far would you go for someone you love, and could you live with yourself if you went too far? In this deeply satisfying novel, Tova Mirvis dares you never to say never.” —Christopher Castellani, author of Leading Men
“Mirvis writes with deep psychological insight into family dynamics and the sometimes fine line between love and desperation. We Would Never is not only a gripping murder mystery, but a moving and thought-provoking exploration of morality. This is a tour de force you will devour in one sitting.” —Jessica Shattuck, author of The Women in the Castle
"An urgent, insightful family drama about complicity and entitlement that could not be more timely. It's essential reading by a true talent." —Sarah Langan, author of Good Neighbors
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