Dispatches from the Empire
The kidnapping I can’t escape
…I was about to start writing my second novel. It was about a wealthy family on Long Island who lose their money, the leakage of my frustrations at watching the middle class disappear and at the moneylessness of my own youth. (Let’s all agree, for the sake of this story, that relative moneylessness isn’t a dollar amount but a state of mind and stomach born of your own particular circumstance.) I was grappling with a question I had, which was this: Who was better off, people who were born with money and neve
I wanted to see the Teiches because I was embarrassed to report that, though the fictional family in my unfinished novel bore only rudimentary biographical resemblance to them, a kidnapping kept finding its way into the plot. There was something I couldn’t resist thematically about it, because it elucidated one of the many paradoxes of money: that money can put you in a kind of danger even as it brings you safety, too.
Dispatches from the Empire