"No One You Know": A Novel About Sisters, and Storytelling

Guest blog by Michelle Richmond
Michelle can be found online at michellerichmond.com

In the past year, I've visited many book clubs for The Year of Fog. One of the things I've learned from this experience is how deeply books live inside the minds of their readers: once a reader opens a book, the story is never exactly what the author intended it to be. It takes on a new life, a life informed by the very unique perspective of each reader. The reader is not simply a separate being in a chair, holding a book in her hands. The reader is always part of the story.

At the heart No One You Know, just out in paperback, is an acknowledgment of the power of story, as well as its mutability, an examination of the way stories inform our lives. I knew when I began writing No One You Know that I was interested in the fine line between fact and fiction, and the way stories shape individual lives, as well as the lives of families.

Early in the book, Ellie, a San Francisco coffee buyer, recalls a conversation she had with her sister Lila twenty years before, when Ellie was a college freshman and Lila was a promising graduate student in mathematics at Stanford. Ellie asked Lila whom she had been seeing, and Lila, always private, answered, "No one you know." Weeks after this conversation, Lila was murdered.

Two decades later, Ellie encounters the man who was accused of the crime but never charged. This meeting convinces Ellie that the story she has always believed about her sister's death - a story made famous by a bestselling true crime book - is false. Ellie sets out to uncover the truth about Lila's death, and in the process she discovers that she never really knew her sister. The title is meant to evoke the sense that it is difficult to truly know anyone, and that even the people with whom we are most intimate - siblings, lovers - have secrets they keep from us.

So No One You Know is a novel about stories, but it is also a novel about sisters. I dedicated No One You Know to my own two sisters, Monica and Misty. While my sisters are very different from Ellie and Lila, the intricacies of the sisterly bond that I've experienced in my own life very much inform the book. The paperback edition even includes a Q&A conducted by Monica and Misty. As is the way with siblings, they managed to bring up things about our childhood together that I had entirely forgotten. Misty even remembered my post-college stint cleaning tanning beds for five dollars an hour. There's nothing like a chat with your sisters to bring you back to reality!

I'll leave you with a quote from No One You Know: "A story does not only belong to the one who is telling it. It belongs, in equal measure, to the one who is listening."

I hope you'll visit my website to learn more about the book. On my lagniappe page, you'll find material created specifically for book clubs. I always welcome reader comments and questions, and I'm also available for phone-in book groups.