Dream Girl is the fourth Laura Lippman book I’ve read after Lady in the Lake, Prom Mom, and Sunburn. DG is now up there with Prom Mom as my favorite so far, not least because the female characters get their revenge on the men who have wronged them.
Dream Girl is the story of Gerry Andersen, a successful writer who has moved to Baltimore from NYC to care for his dementia-ridden mother, who then suddenly dies as Gerry is moving into his new apartment. Lippman, writing in third person, captures so many facets of Andersen’s personality: his inferiority complex, his writer’s block, his fear of his own mental decline, and especially his ruinous relationships with women. Gerry suffers a catastrophic fall and begins to receive phone calls and letters from someone claiming to be Aubrey, the titular Dream Girl of his smash novel. Or is this harassment a sign of impending mental decline?
Lippman toggles between present-day Gerry, in his bed cared for by his nurse and his assistant, zonked out on drugs and in that twilight between stages of consciousness, and flashbacks to various moments from his past. These flashbacks reveal Gerry’s troubled relationship with his mother as a result of his father disappearing when Gerry was a child, his three marriages, his interactions with students and colleagues as a creative writing fellow, and his abandonment of his college friends.
So Gerry pretty much sucks! He’s a terrible person who treats pretty much all women like sex objects or like potted plants depending on how attractive they are to him. But thanks to Lippman’s incisive writing, I could not stop reading. I wanted to find out if the voice claiming to be Aubrey was real or just an illusion brought on by drugs or mental decline. I love when writers puncture the lofty ideal of the writer as grand artiste, as Lippman does. She’s particularly incisive about it: “When the class left at the end of the three hours, Gerry noticed the moron had his hand on the small of the gorgeous girl’s back, piloting her, the way some men do with women. It always made Gerry think of a wind-up toy with a key in its back. Well, this girl was quite a toy. Slinky, Asian–” (112). The easy progression from observation to objectification really captures Gerry in his grossness.
Dream Girl is a clear homage to Misery, and Lippman successfully “repurpose[s] books that are beloved to me, trying to figure out how to further the conversations they began in my head” (309). DG is a horror novel, and Lippman’s Final Girl gets the last word. Or does she? 😉
