PORTLAND, OR — A 52-year-old memoirist and former regional architect told his literary agent Wednesday that the manuscript of his forthcoming autobiography was, in his estimation, “really close,” but that he believed the narrative arc would benefit from “maybe just one more murder, toward the end.”
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The book, tentatively titled A Life Examined, is a 340-page account of the memoirist’s childhood in suburban Connecticut, his career as a regional architect, his late-career pivot to ceramics, and what his agent has described, in private, as “three previously undisclosed homicides.”
“I think the second act is strong,” he wrote in an email obtained by reporters. “The first act is strong. The third act is almost there. I just feel like the reader needs one more, you know, moment. Right before the epilogue. Something with stakes. I’m thinking maybe a neighbor.”
His agent, a mid-list literary representative at a two-partner Manhattan agency, did not immediately respond.
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The ceramicist, who is not currently under investigation by any law enforcement agency, has been working on the memoir for eleven years. He has described the project, in previous interviews with small literary outlets, as “an honest reckoning” and “a confession, in a sense, but mostly about the ceramics.”
When asked Wednesday afternoon to clarify whether the proposed additional murder would be fictional, he paused for a long time.
“I want to keep the book honest,” he said.
He has reportedly begun drafting the new chapter this week. His neighbor, a 71-year-old retired schoolteacher, was last seen Tuesday morning watering her tomatoes.
She has not been seen since Wednesday.