In April 2007New York Times metro news runescape money assistant Jennifer Mascia penned a "Modern Love" essay for the paper's Sunday Styles section titled, "Never Tell Our Business to Strangers." Her story, which detailed her strange but love-filled childhood later followed by the adulthood discovery of her father's murderous past, remains one of the most popular "Modern Love" columns ever published by the paper. Soon after it ran, a book deal materialized and now Mascia's book, which bears the same title as her 2007 essay, went on sale last runescape accounts week. She graciously took some time recently to answer a few questions about her book for Yahoo! News.
Yahoo: Your story is, let's be honest, rather dark, so I could imagine how many people might prefer to keep such things locked away in a closet and not talk so openly about them. With that said, what motivated you to first tell the story of your family's history in the Times, and what, if anything, gave you the most pause?
Jennifer Mascia: It was a deadly boring Sunday night shift on the Metro desk in January of 2007 and I was killing time by reading the complete archive of Modern Love columns. After about 10 or 15 pieces, I realized I also had a story to tell, and the words began pouring out - 2,500 of them. I wrote about how my father had died when I was 23, and how I'd just lost my mother, making me an orphan (albeit at 28). I wrote about how much these losses had pained me, as I was an only child and the three of us had been unusually close. This closeness, I theorized, had begun when the FBI arrested my father when I was 5, when we were living in Southern California. He was returned to us five months later, and I'd always wanted to know what he'd done, but whenever I asked my mother she'd become rather evasive and serve up partial-truths. In 2000, the Internet was expanding, and I searched the New York State Department of Corrections web site in search of my father's inmate record. I discovered that he'd been incarcerated for a dozen years before I was born -- for murder. My stomach dropped through the floor. At this point, my father was a year away from dying of lung cancer, and I didn't want to upset him. So I confronted my mother, and she was forced to admit that the reason he was arrested when I was 5 was because he'd broken his parole by selling cocaine. Faced with the runescape gold prospect of a long prison stay, he ran away, first settling in Houston, then California. Because we'd crossed state lines, the FBI was after us. They found us, even though we'd adopted fake names and social security numbers. No wonder we'd been so close -- we'd been fugitives.
I thought that was the end of the story, but right before my mother died, in January of 2006, she told me from her hospital bed that my father had actually killed half a dozen people right before we went on the lam, a by-product of his drug-dealing career. "It was part of his business," she rationalized. "Nothing more."
After she died, I was burdened with her secret, which she'd kept from everyone else in her life. How she hid something like that for two decades, I'll never know, but I did know that I couldn't do the same. So I wrote about it. But it was more than that: I was suddenly faced with the fact that I was the only one left to tell our story, and the thought haunted me. Flawed as they were, I couldn't live with the prospect that I would be the only one who remembered my parents, who, despite their flaws had been loving, and witty, and my best friends. They were my soul mates, and having their memory just fade into the ether was a not something I could live with, so I wrote the book. I suppose it was a way to keep rs gold them with me longer, to keep them alive.
What gave me the most pause was writing about my father's former cohorts. I was scared, I'll admit, that one or more of them would come after me. After all, his "career" brought him into contact with made men, and they detest rats. And judging by the title of my book, I was the biggest rat of them all.
Yahoo: Well I have to ask...I'm assuming that you haven't heard from any of your father's former cohorts up to this point, so are you worried at all that the book might bring more attention to your talking publicly about your Dad's crimes than the Modern Love column did?
Jennifer Mascia: My mother told me the circumstances of only one of the unsolved murders my father committed in the late 1970s in Florida before we went on the lam, and as I was writing the book, friends and relatives (and my editor) expressed concern that the murder victim's son and ex-wife might come after me. Maybe not with knives or guns, but with a piece of their mind. But no one has come after me -- yet. I am sure people will come out of the woodwork, and not all of it will be pretty.
Yahoo: So the title of your book, "Never Tell Our Business to Strangers," I'm guessing these were words that your family drilled into your head as child, apparently for good reason?
Jennifer Mascia: I was told from a very early age that I was never to tell our business to anyone outside the family, as they're not my blood. Now I know where this comes from -- we were fugitives from 1978 to 1983, and our very survival depended on our silence -- but that mentality persevered even after that. When I was seven I let slip to a friend that my father had been arrested in front of my eyes but I didn't know why, and I told my mother what I had done. She scolded me, told me never to do that again, and demanded I tell my friend that my father had gone to jail because he'd gotten a speeding ticket. Three strikes, I guess? I wasn't old enough to question the lies she was feeding me, but now I think, what was she supposed to tell a child?
Yahoo: Well then I have to assume that being able to tell your story after your mom and dad both died had to be quite therapeutic, right? Just to be able to sit down and let it all spill out onto the page had to be a bit of a soul-purging?
Jennifer Mascia: It's funny -- when they were alive it was understood that this was the one subject we never, ever broached. In fact, aion gold I had buried it so deeply that whenever I'd raise the topic with my mom -- every five years or so -- it surprised us both. It just lived so far beneath the surface that I didn't even realize how badly I wanted the answers. As I got older I had come to believe that I would never get to the bottom of this, the greatest mystery of my life, and for several years I accepted that.
The most therapeutic part of the whole process was not just remembering our history and recording it for posterity, though that was very empowering. It was the uncovering of my father's criminal record, FBI record, court testimony, letters my parents wrote back and forth that were never meant for my eyes, interviews with relatives and family friends who, now that my parents had passed, finally felt comfortable to betray their secrets. To hear my mother admit the truth about our lives was eye-opening, but to see it in print accords it a legitimacy that can't be refuted. Before that, I could pretend that my mother had told me a fairy tale, but reading about my parents' past from multiple sources outside the family made it real.
Yahoo: One of the things that struck me about your story is that it reads like the plot of something out of Hollywood? Is there a deal in the works for the movie rights, and who's on your aion kina short list of actresses you'd like to see play you in the movie? (Jamie Lynn Sigler seems like the obvious choice to me!)
Jennifer Mascia: As I got deeper into my twenties, and I began telling this story to my closest friends, each one of them had the same reaction: "This should be a movie." Now that I've written the book, the first question I get asked is, "Who is going to play you in the movie?"
I understand the cinematic qualities of the book, specifically that surprises tend to lurk around every corner, and just when you think it can't get any worse, it does -- someone gets arrested, or goes to rehab, or dies. I wouldn't mind selling the film rights, but I am aware that if I do that, the story belongs to someone else. In film form, it must exist on its own, and can't be a carbon copy of the book. And I am OK with that -- I already wrote my version, and I'm content with my control of the story ending there.
In terms of an actress to play me, it would have to be someone in her twenties, because that's when I discovered the bulk of this information, and when both my parents died. A friend told me several years ago that Anne Hathaway and I share a strong resemblance, and she was excellent in "Rachel's Getting Married." Can Carey Mulligan master an American accent? She was terrific in "An Education." And I'm not ashamed to admit that I'm a huge "Gossip Girl" fan, and in my opinion, the best actors on the show are Ed Westwick and Leighton Meester. And I know Leighton has a history similar to mine -- both of her parents did time for selling marijuana when she was an infant -- and I think aion kinah she's be fabulous in this type of role. Plus, she's the perfect age.
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