Since moving to New York in 2008, onetime Shepherd Express intern Andrea Bartz found success writing for Psychology Today, Martha Stewart’s Whole Living, Glamour and other magazines. The Milwaukee expat’s first novel, The Lost Night (published by Crown, a Random House imprint), is a sharply written story of murder and memory that catches the beat of everyday life. The Lost Night concerns an alleged suicide and the chance reunion of friends that leads to unsettling possibilities.
“I’m fascinated by the idea that we’re a product of our memories, yet our memories are these diaphanous, malleable things, and we can forget entire chunks of time, thanks to heavy drinking, brain damage or disease, or even just the brain letting a memory go,” Bartz explains. “How does that forgetting impact the present? How do the memories, and the gaps in those memories, help determine who we are in the present? In The Lost Night, my protagonist, Lindsay, marvels that of all the possibilities spinning out of any point in the past, her choices took her on this path, to this present moment, to this person she’s become.”
In the story, Lindsay finds that her memory of the night of a close friend’s death conflicts with the recollections of others. “We absolutely construct our memories the same way we construct our realities,” Bartz continues. “Lindsay explains that when we remember something, we’re not remembering the actual event, we’re remembering the last time we pulled up that memory—a photocopy of a photocopy. There’s plenty of research showing how unreliable and vulnerable to influence our memories are. Yet whatever we remember feels like the gospel truth, and we march along presuming we’ve got our recollections straight.”
Stay on top of the news of the day
Subscribe to our free, daily e-newsletter to get Milwaukee's latest local news, restaurants, music, arts and entertainment and events delivered right to your inbox every weekday, plus a bonus Week in Review email on Saturdays.
The death at the heart of The Lost Night is set in 2009, the nadir of the Great Recession. “I enjoyed capturing the differences between 2009 and today, because it was this odd in-between time in terms of technology,” Bartz says. “Instagram and iPads hadn’t been invented. We had Twitter, but no hashtags—no way to organize the info. Most people didn’t have smartphones yet, so we pulled out digital cameras and Flip cams and saved stuff to our devices instead of ‘The Cloud.’ So it was fun to examine the unique challenges of scuba diving in the past when all of the documentation of 2009 is sort of frozen in time.”
Bartz rebukes those who say the novel—and for that matter, reading itself—is dead. “I don’t think books are going anywhere,” she says. A few stats out there back me up. Libraries are seeing an uptick in checkouts, and sales and indie bookstore are booming, for example. We’ll always be hungry for the entertainment and enlightenment we can get through powerful storytelling, and books can provide that with a relatively low barrier to entry—for both the writer and the reader. I couldn’t have told Lindsay’s tale of reckoning and redemption through a series of essays or listicles; it had to be long-form prose. I didn’t have the budget or manpower to tell the story on a big or small screen or the skills to produce a serialized podcast or something.
“Books are how we tell stories directly from the author’s brain to the reader’s, and anyone who insists the novel is dead hasn’t been paying attention, because in the last year alone, books like Circe and An American Marriage absolutely have entertained millions of readers and sparked thoughtful dialogue.”
Andrea Bartz will discuss The Lost Night at 7 p.m. on Friday, March 15, at Boswell Book Company, 2559 N. Downer Ave.
BOOK HAPPENING
Polish Baseball on Milwaukee’s South Side
Long ago, baseball clubs were deeply grounded in their home city or even their home neighborhood. One example comes from Milwaukee’s South Side. At the turn of the last century, the neighborhood’s Polish Americans rooted for their own semi-professional team, the Kosciuszko Reds. Thousands of fans showed up at the team’s Sunday afternoon games, and some of the players went on to the major league. Neal Pease, a UW-Milwaukee history professor with an interest in Poland (as well as sports), will give a lecture, “The Kosciuszko Reds: The Home Team of the Polish South Side, 1908-1919,” at 7 p.m. on Tuesday, March 12, at the Shorewood Village Center (3920 N. Murray Ave.).
