Sumith Prasad
Apple TV+’s murder mystery series ‘Lady in the Lake’ revolves around Maddie Schwartz, a Jewish housewife who leaves her family to reinvent her life in the wake of a murder that shakes her community. Maddie’s curiosity and need to uncover the truth flare up when a Black woman shows up dead. The housemaker then becomes a reporter who explores the possible connections between the two cases. Maddie’s pursuit of the truth and commitment are elements we can find in several real-life journalists. However, the character does not have an exact real-life counterpart. Still, traces of the reporter can be seen in numerous actual figures, including in the creator of the character!
Laura Lippman’s Curiosity
‘Lady in the Lake’ is a television adaptation of Laura Lippman’s novel of the same title. The author conceived the literary work inspired by the deaths of eleven-year-old Esther Lebowitz and thirty-three-year-old Shirley Parker in Baltimore, Maryland, in 1969. In the same year, Lippman was a ten-year-old who couldn’t believe that a child like her could end up being a murder victim. “In 1969, an 11-year-old girl named Esther Lebowitz disappeared, and her body was found a few days later… This was in the newspaper at the time, and it fascinated me because I was only 10. I don’t think I even knew that children could be murder victims before that case,” the writer told NPR.
This child’s innocence can also be seen in Maddie, who cannot accept that a tragedy can befall a kid like Tessie Durst. The housemaker’s disbelief convinces her to join the search party, only to discover the lifeless body of the girl. Lippman learned about Parker’s death only after starting to work for The Baltimore Sun. The author’s experience of discovering these two crimes and her reaction contributed to the creation of Maddie, her protagonist. As an experienced journalist with decades of experience, she relied on her own life as a reporter to perfect the characterization of Maddie. Does that mean the Jewish housemaker turned journalist is based on the writer of the show’s source novel? Not at all.
The Intricate Combination of Reality and Fiction
As the creator of Maddie Schwartz, there are several factors associated with the character that are relatable to Laura Lippman. The author even uses her protagonist to find the answers to some of the questions that had been haunting her. “[…] Maddie, probably more than most characters I’ve created, is definitely an iteration of me,” Lippman told Salon. “In some ways, Maddie allowed me to work out my own feelings about the fact that when I use real crimes for inspiration, as I often do, as I did in this book, am I not appropriating somebody’s story? Am I not using somebody else? And is that right? Is it wrong? Is there a right way to do it that makes it better?” she added.
However, Maddie is an entirely fictional character. Lippman didn’t become a reporter after spending around twenty years of her life in a loveless marriage with someone who failed to understand and accept her. The author also didn’t investigate the inspirations behind the deaths in the novel/TV show firsthand, as Maddie does. The fictional reporter’s reawakening in every sphere of her life, including her affair with a policeman, also doesn’t have real-life roots. Therefore, apart from certain factors associated with the pursuit of truth and journalism, the writer and her creation have immensely different lives. Maddie even represents the ambitious women of her era than the author.
Lippman crafted the structure of the novel with Maddie at its center because she wanted to pay homage to real-life women like the latter. “I set out simply to write a novel about a woman who wanted to matter — who had these sort of restless, shapeless ambitions and needed to find a place to put them,” the author said in the same NPR interview. “The world in the mid-1960s was filled with women who were thinking, ‘I’m not done. This can’t be it. I think I would like to do something more with my life,’” she added. Maddie is one such woman who builds a life of herself after attaining freedom from the kitchen of her husband.
Read More: Lady in the Lake: Is The Pharaoh a Real Club in Baltimore?
