Alafair Burke On Writing Crime Novels and Teaching Law

The Book Review

The New York Times

Books, Arts

4.2 • 3.7K Ratings

🗓️ 24 January 2025

⏱️ 34 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

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Summary

In Alafair Burke’s new thriller, “The Note,” three friends are vacationing together in the Hamptons when they have an unpleasant run-in with a couple of strangers and decide to exact drunken, petty revenge. But the prank they pull — a note reading “He’s cheating on you” — snowballs, eventually embroiling them in a missing-persons investigation and forcing each woman to wonder what dark secrets her friends are hiding. Burke joins host Gilbert Cruz and talks about how she came up with the idea for “The Note,” and how she goes about writing her books in general.

Transcript

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0:00.0	I'm Gilbert Cruz, editor of the New York Times Book Review, and this is the book review.
0:12.5	It is freezing out, but in the note, the new novel by author Alifair Burke, it's summertime.
0:19.7	Set in the Hamptons, it's a thriller about three
0:22.5	female friends and the small but consequential decision they make one night while enjoying a
0:28.0	weekend getaway. Alifair, welcome to the podcast. Thank you so much for having me.
0:38.3	So you write or you have said that the note grew from a real life seed, something that actually happened three years ago.
0:46.3	What was that?
0:47.3	Like the characters in my book, The Note, I was one of three women getting together with friends who lived long distance, but we talked constantly and we see each other a couple times a year at most.
0:57.0	And we had a girl's trip over the weekend and we were being silly and someone stole a parking
1:02.2	spot from us in a very brazen way.
1:04.5	We were not happy about it.
1:05.8	We had the universal language of the turn signal.
1:09.5	The clicking turn signal waiting patiently for our spot. That was our
1:13.5	real estate. And someone swooped in and took it. And we kind of became a running joke all day long,
1:18.9	like what we wanted to do to this person who definitely knew she kind of almost waved at us. Like,
1:26.5	yeah, I just stole your parking spot and I don't care.
1:28.7	But we started saying like notes we would write on like to leave on the car and we kind of turned
1:33.3	into a joke and we were writing these notes and the waitress started writing notes and the people
1:38.8	at the next table started writing notes.
1:40.7	And then we started thinking about that's probably a really stupid thing to do,
1:44.5	like leave a very triggering note to somebody that might stir up trouble. And the note in the book
1:50.3	that I don't think it's a spoiler, they leave a note on someone's car that says he's cheating on you.
	...

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