A Whisper From The Front: The Book That Kept Getting Bigger

A Whisper From The Front is about a man whose job is knocking on doors. Jay Morrison is a casualty notification officer, the one who tells a family their soldier isn't coming home, and by the spring of 2003 he's knocked on ninety-three of them. Then a widow opens her door before he knocks and offers him tea. It's the most finished novel I have, and also the one I'm least sure how to end. You can read it here, both the current draft and the one before it.

What it's about

Renee Harrow says she can help Jay carry the dead differently. Not forget them, just hold them some other way. The sessions work, and that's the problem. Something in the tea and the talk starts wearing Jay down to make room for Ezra Harrow, a translator with a calmer mind and memories Jay never lived. He notices his hands doing things he didn't decide to do. He reads Hebrew he never learned. There's a woman named Sarah calling his phone, and he can't place her.

Jay isn't the only one at Renee's kitchen table, either. Other notification officers start coming to the Thursday sessions, and three of them begin turning into someone new: a painter, a philosopher, a musician. Eventually an FBI agent starts asking questions.

The question underneath all of it is simple to say and hard to answer. If the person you become is happier than the person you were, who exactly lost something?

Where the idea came from

It didn't start with soldiers. The older version, which I called The Shattered Self, was about a writer named Ezra Harrow who finds a hidden room in his psychologist wife Renee's office and a file with another man's name on it, Mason. A life he doesn't remember but that feels like his. That book was a psychological thriller about a man slowly realizing his marriage, and maybe his whole memory, might be a construction.

The names survived. So did the hidden room and the idea of a self being built by someone who claims to love you. What changed is where Jay starts. Making him the man who delivers death for a living gave Renee something real to offer him. He's not a stranger she picked at random. He's someone already carrying more than a person can.

How it changed between drafts

The earlier full draft opened on Mason's side of the war, in a Humvee outside Nasiriyah, with Renee waiting at home for a knock she already knows is coming. It ran through forty-four chapters, then an unsent postscript set twenty years later and an epilogue that leaves it open whether Renee was ever there at all. A lot of that draft is written in a clipped, telegraphic style. It fit Jay coming apart, but it got tiring over a whole book.

The current draft makes a few big moves:

• A new prologue built from Jay's notifications, one door at a time, until they blur and he ends up at Renee's.
• A new first chapter that starts with Jay waking in a house he doesn't recognize, with forty-seven missed calls from a Sarah he can't place.
• A new midpoint where Jay stops sleeping in his bed, can't carry it anymore, and drives back to Renee's at eleven at night.
• Smaller threads: Harper trying to reach him, lists of the things Jay has forgotten, Renee's journal entries turning up as evidence, and a few quiet moments, like a diner waitress named Dolores.

The postscript and the epilogue came out. So right now the book ends at The Covenant, with Jay feeling a third self start to form.

What's still unfinished

Honestly, a lot.

The core story, the one I'd tell in one breath, is small. One man, one widow who can't let go, a family looking for him, and the slow horror of him not wanting to be found. What's on the page is much bigger: four officers, a network of therapists in other states, raids, a trip to Phoenix, a trial. Some of that is the best writing in the book. Some of it buries Jay.

There's also a loop hiding in the prologue. Jay has been in that house before, maybe more than once, and the draft hints at it without ever paying it off. If I cut the book back, that's the spine.

Then there's the housekeeping. Jay's wife is Sarah, and Mason's real widow is also Sarah, which is one Sarah too many. Harper and Sarah are both pulling Jay home in different chapters without the book deciding who's who. The notification count moves around. And there's a rewritten ending sitting in a folder that I haven't put in yet.

Note

If you read both drafts, read the first chapter of each back to back. That's where the change in voice is easiest to hear.

So that's the choice in front of me: keep the big book and make it hold together, or cut it down to the story I actually started with. The small one is the story I set out to tell. The big one is the story I actually wrote. I haven't decided yet.