Dennis Lehane was born in 1965 to Irish immigrant parents in Boston’s violent south. Coup de Grace (Salamandra Black), which is new to bookstores like Mystic River, is also a product of her childhood in her own neighborhood, she admits via video conference from Los Angeles. It goes back to 1974, when a young black man died on the subway and a teenager disappeared in a neighborhood controlled by a gangster, all inspired by real cases, when race riots broke out in the neighborhood upon a judge’s decision. ended segregation, forcing schoolchildren to go to schools in other neighborhoods.
Protagonist Mary Pat lost her son to drugs and is now looking for her missing daughter. Pure maternal courage.
I came across stories of mothers taking revenge for the death of their children. Every mother has the brutality of just being a mother. Even if he didn’t have children, he would be very harsh; he is a product of the same kind of abuse and violence around him. We are a product of our environment.
You can see the desperation of someone who has lost everything.
Yes, I was wondering what would happen if he took a woman so brutally and took everything she had. And now you see that you have nothing left to lose. Either she succeeds in what she sets out to do, or she will die doing it.
“She is an unbreakable woman, but paradoxically broken,” he writes.
I knew a few Mary Pats when I was a kid. They were fierce women who raised terrible children. There is something broken, destroyed, burned about such people… and they are seemingly unbreakable.
Scary kids?
Their parents instill lies and hatred in them, and they end up receiving racist reactions. No one is born a racist, hatred is passed on from parents to children.
The biggest theme of the novel is racism. You were 9 years old during the protests against Judge Garrity in 1974.
I remember that summer very well, it was unforgettable: the anger, the protests, how they burned the effigies and hung them on the lampposts, the posters in the windows, how they painted the KKK, the Ku Klux Klan, or the Animals Come Home on the walls. home). At the age of 9, the child’s natural narcissism disappears and you begin to see yourself as a part of the world and become aware of what is happening around you.
What do you think about this racism?
At first these were demonstrations not against blacks, but against your children being forced to transfer to a school on the other side of town. That’s how it all started. And that was a legitimate argument. He wasn’t against desegregation, he was against how it was carried out and how it only affected poor neighborhoods. However, this turned into great anger and rage against African Americans. It was angry, discriminatory and derogatory language. This took me away from my surroundings a little bit and I kept quiet and observed, so I had to become a writer.
How was your family life?
My parents were not racist. One of my brothers didn’t do it either, but he went out on the street. This existed in families, in neighborhoods, and even today it has not disappeared. This is the perception of otherness, the perception of the other and that others are not members of the same human race. You cannot shoot another person if you identify with him. But if you remove the layer of humanity, yes.
He seems to point out in the book that this divides poverty, not race.
I used to think so too, but not anymore. At the Black Lives Matter protests, two middle-class white men emerged from their homes armed with shotguns at protesters. This no longer comes from poverty, but from the institutionalized idea that these are the others, that we are two tribes. Many people view the African American community as a colony within the country. This is bullshit.
Has the situation with Trump gotten worse or has it just come to light?
It came to light. Many things are better now. For example, my marriage is mixed, something that wasn’t possible 30 years ago but people don’t care about today. This is progress, no one cares. But portraying America this way doesn’t make money. Money divides us, turns it into entertainment, makes people froth at the mouth on TV and makes it seem like everything is terrible.
He writes that the Boston neighborhoods where he grew up were “people who were tired of living, working like mules, and had no chance.” Is it still like this?
It’s not in South Boston anymore. It’s actually gentrified, it’s completely different. But the white movement of poor and angry people disappeared in the countryside, no longer in the cities. Cities are the meeting point of cultures. In small towns with all-white areas, they are the ones who voted the most for Trump. Trump can’t do anything in cities, so he always paints cities as hotbeds of crime.
When he came to Barcelona to receive the Carvalho Award in 2017, he said about Trump that 250 years of democracy will not be destroyed, they will survive and they know how to deal with it. Do you think the same?
Yes, it would be painful if Trump came to power again, but he did not change the country last time. Even though he did two very damaging things: he got the courts his way and rolled back the abortion law; but the cost of doing so proved so high that it meant Republicans would lose many seats in the House of Representatives in 2022. Of course, this worries me, but I believe that the American system continues to work, and we are fighting in court to prove it, for example, on January 6th. [el asalto trumpista al Capitolio de 2021] This was an abomination. We’ll see…
Many of his books have successfully reached the big screen. He is the screenwriter of TV series such as The Wire. Which actress do you see playing Mary Pat?
Yes, but I can’t say who it is. I am preparing a series as a producer and I am also responsible for the scripts. If I say who I want but can’t understand, he will know that the second option is the second lesson…
There are scenes in Coup de Grace that are perfectly displayed on screen. Do you write novels with a cinematic mind?
No, the word cinema seems strange to me because books appeared long before cinema. A good novel is a living thing. I write through the creation of characters and language. I need to understand the voice of the book telling the story, what it will sound like in my head. Different voices are evident in my novels. This is told in the voice of Mystic River and The Delivery, this is my favorite voice, I compare it to the voice of a man sitting at the bar of a bar and telling good stories. When I gave birth to Mary Pat, I started writing without knowing exactly how it would progress, I didn’t want to know. On the other hand, when I write a script, I don’t pick up a pen until I know all the scenes in every aspect; unlike my books, I plan them a lot.
He wrote the book during Covid but nothing leaked.
No, I was making a television series when the pandemic hit and everything fell apart. And my brain split and I started writing this book. That saved me, saved me from all this madness. It’s like when I wrote as a kid and thought: “I don’t like where I am, and I’m going to create a place that I like.” It was a way to confront my past and my ghosts. It was a book where no one wore a mask and there was no Covid. Fantastic!
Which ghosts are you talking about?
To everything. I see myself as a 9 year old, it was crazy growing up in that environment. No wonder I have so many emotions writing about this. I hadn’t come to terms with what it was like to process this when I was 9 years old.