How do you maximize dramatic irony in the opening of a novel?
The first pages of all novels need to pull the reader in, but that goal is particularly pressing for a novel billed as a thriller or mystery. If, as a reader, you are looking for a book that is going to keep you turning pages, the first few chapters are a test of whether the author can create that forward momentum. In The Last Thing He Told Me, Laura Dave has an extra difficulty: the inciting incident is the disappearance of the protagonist’s husband, so she must show us the texture of their relationship without bringing the character himself onto the page. Let’s look at the opening to see how she pulls it off.
To start, Dave leans on the reader’s prior knowledge of the disappearance of Owen Michaels. The book description reveals the hook, and it’s hinted at in the title. Dave knows that we want to see the first dramatic moment the hook makes us envision: the moment Hannah learns that her husband is missing. How is the news delivered? How does she react? What does she already know or guess about what has happened to him?
But before we get to that scene in chapter one, Dave gives us a prologue—and this is a case where I think the book really does need one. (Read our broader discussion of prologues if you are considering one for your novel.) In order for us to care about Owen’s disappearance and get some sense of the relationship between him and Hannah, we need to get a glimpse of the two of them together before that inciting incident. Dave takes us back to the beginning of their relationship, telling the story of their second date, during which Hannah insisted on driving herself to meet him, then lost the parking ticket for her car.
It’s a short prologue (which is a good choice) but accomplishes quite a bit. We learn that Hannah had a tendency to lose or forget things—a quality Owen teased her about, but which Hannah, our narrator, tells us she has left behind. As readers, we wonder, Can we trust this narrator? We learn that their connection was intense, immediate, even “overwhelming.” Owen counters Hannah’s statement during their second-date dinner that he barely knows her with the comment, “It doesn’t feel that way, does it?” We learn that Owen may have more money than Hannah, based on his “fancy sports car” compared to her “rented Volvo.”
And there is a slightly unsettling minor mystery in the anecdote. When he learns she has lost her parking stub and will have to pay $100, Owen smiles, “as if this were the best piece of news about me that he’d gotten all night.” What are we to make of this reaction? Is it possible that Owen himself took the parking stub to put Hannah off balance, maybe even lead her to leave her car behind for the rest of the evening? The unease it generates is compounded by a dream Hannah has a week after his disappearance (reminding us again that we’re going to see the dramatic ripple effects of that event very soon):
He was wearing the same suit—the same charmed smile. In the dream he was taking off his wedding ring.
Look, Hannah, he said. Now you’ve lost me too.
Is someone to blame for Owen’s disappearance? If so, do we think that blame belongs to Owen or to Hannah? Losing a marriage or a person is not the same as losing a parking stub—it takes more than a moment of inattention. The prologue, then, successfully adds to our questions about the inciting incident and gives us some subtle clues we can use to start making our own guesses about what has happened. The prologue, in other words, welcomes us into the mystery and initiates us as sleuths.
Now let’s go to the first chapter, where we move to present-tense narration. Here’s the opening paragraph:
You see it all the time on television. There’s a knock at the front door. And, on the other side, someone is waiting to tell you the news that changes everything. On television, it’s usually a police chaplain or a firefighter, maybe a uniformed officer from the armed forces. But when I open the door—when I learn that everything is about to change for me—the messenger isn’t a cop or a federal investigator in starched pants. It’s a twelve-year-old girl, in a soccer uniform. Shin guards and all.
Dave makes a couple savvy moves here. First, she continues to bring us, the readers, into the story: that you in the first sentence, watching the fateful knock-on-the-door scene on TV, that’s us. It’s a subtle wink—Dave knows we’ve read the hook and picked up the book wanting to see this exact scene. She’s also showing off a bit, making sure we notice that she’s tweaking the trope. This novel, she’s promising readers, is going to deliver exactly what you want to see but in ways that are going to surprise you.
Second, note that even though we’ve shifted into present-tense narration in this first chapter after the past-tense narration of the prologue, the framing of the scene is from the point-of-view of a narrator who already knows what this knock heralds. Dave hooks us here: she knows this is the moment we want to see, the moment that “changes everything” and by telling us this is it, she buys herself time to build in some additional backstory, both about Hannah’s marriage and about her relationship with her stepdaughter, Bailey. Before the girl at the door even hands over the note she’s holding, we learn that Hannah and Owen have been married for a little over a year, that Hannah was thirty-eight when they married, and she hasn’t changed her name because she “didn’t see a reason to become someone else.” We also learn that Hannah and sixteen-year-old Bailey have a rocky relationship that got off to an awkward start and hasn’t improved much since.
The girl hands Hannah the note but, if we’ve read the book description (and it’s a rare reader who doesn’t these days), we already know that it is from Owen and says only, “Protect her.” Dave, again, uses that reader foreknowledge to her advantage, allowing the suspense to build while giving us more context (the family lives on a houseboat docked near Sausalito in San Francisco Bay; Hannah finds teen culture generally bewildering) and a few clues (Owen was in a hurry when he handed off the note; he told the girl his phone was broken).
At this point, Dave drops the advanced-knowledge framing and puts us firmly in the present-tense point of view of Hannah. She wonders perhaps if this is some kind of practical joke perpetrated by her “lovely and silly” husband. She still hasn’t opened the note, and Dave allows us to enjoy the dramatic irony of our own knowledge of its contents to the full as Hannah looks down at it in her hand:
It occurs to me, in the quiet, how much I don’t want to open it. I don’t want to know what the note says. Part of me still wants to hold on to this one last moment—the moment where you still get to believe this is a joke, an error, a big nothing; the moment before you know for sure that something has started that you can no longer stop.
I unfold the paper.
Owen’s note is short. One line, its own puzzle.
Protect her.
And that’s where the chapter ends. Dave continues the pattern in chapter two, coasting on the punchy drama of that chapter-one ending to start with more backstory, telling us how Hannah and Owen met and what Hannah’s life was like before her marriage, before bringing us back to the present with a scene between Hannah and Bailey. Because Hannah is trying to pretend that nothing is wrong—calling Owen repeatedly, still hoping he’ll pick up and provide an explanation—we get a good sense of the tricky relationship between stepmother and stepdaughter before it’s put under additional pressure by Owen’s disappearance. As Hannah puts it, “Bailey almost tries with me. That’s the worst part. She isn’t a bad kid or a menace. She’s a good kid in a situation she hates. I just happen to be that situation.” Hannah doesn’t ignore the note—she assesses whether Bailey will be safe enough if she gets a ride to her play practice with her friend Suz—but she hasn’t fully integrated its meaning either: Owen is gone and Bailey is in need of protection.
By the third chapter, Hannah can no longer avoid this knowledge as the action revs into high gear. We’ll cover that in our next post, studying the timing and pace of these revelations: asking, in other words, what makes this novel a page-turner.
Takeaways:
If your book description reveals the hook or inciting incident of your novel, take advantage of your reader’s foreknowledge and use it to create dramatic irony and build anticipation for seeing the scene unfold on the page, while giving yourself time to deliver important backstory information.
Use familiar, well-loved tropes that are common in your genre but find ways to tweak them, especially if you open the novel with one. Logically examine every element of a trope and then brainstorm different possibilities for each one until you land on the perfect solution for your story and characters.
If you include a prologue in a thriller, mystery, or suspense novel, use it to generate new questions in the reader’s mind, beyond those already created in the book description. Invite the reader into the story as a sleuth by giving them enticing clues they can’t yet decipher.