"It was a terrible time for me,” author Lindsey Lee Johnson remembers. “Everything was just falling apart.” She’s talking about 2008, when her college teaching contract wasn’t renewed because of the economic crash, her boyfriend left and she could no longer afford the home she’d just bought.

To try to put the pieces back together, Johnson moved in with her parents in Marin County, California, and began tutoring high school students at a learning center. 

Her first assignment was teaching SAT math, hardly her favorite subject, and her initial encounters with students were disappointing. “At first I just thought, oh my God, the way they talk, the constant foul language,” Johnson recalls. “It was loud, and I thought, why should I even be doing this? What happened to my life?”

Fortunately, what seemed like a catastrophe ultimately ended up being one of the happiest times in Johnson’s life. As she got to know the students, she enjoyed the new job, ended up marrying a fellow tutor and got the inspiration she needed to write her debut novel, The Most Dangerous Place on Earth, a page-turning high school drama that’s being compared to Curtis Sittenfeld’s Prep. 

Speaking by phone from her home near Los Angeles, Johnson says she didn’t read Prep or many other books about high school until after finishing her manuscript (at which time she found Prep to be “fabulous”). 

“One of the reasons I wanted to write this book was that I saw a need for it,” she says. “I saw a place for a literary vision of contemporary high school and teenagers that was written for adults. I didn’t see much of that in bookstores.”

The seeds of Johnson’s story were sown as she spent hours listening to hundreds of teenage students. “The experience helped me out of my own head, to stop making everything about me, and actually invest my time in other people, just listening to these kids and really developing compassion and empathy for them—and remembering what it felt like when I was that age,” she says.

The Most Dangerous Place on Earth follows an ensemble cast of characters, beginning with an incident in their eighth-grade year: A boy commits suicide after a love note he writes is revealed on Facebook, prompting merciless ridicule and bullying. The tragedy causes reverberations that linger throughout these characters’ high school years. Set in Marin County, the novel chronicles a wealthy world that Johnson knows intimately, although she fictionalized the high school she once attended. She based her characters on a variety of student archetypes, including Ryan the jock, Cally the hippie, Elisabeth the beautiful girl and Damon the delinquent, but with a twist.

Growing up, Johnson felt that such categories were too limiting, noting that she was both a cheerleader and a nerd. “For each character, I thought of the archetype, and then I gave them a problem,” she notes. Overachieving Abigail, for instance, suffers from loneliness and takes a particularly destructive path with a male teacher to solve her dilemma. “I remember that feeling of being a teenage girl and going through that awkward phase,” Johnson says, “and feeling unappealing and unattractive. You know, kind of unseen.”

Although Johnson didn’t have to contend with the pressures of social media during her high school years, she vividly remembers a spiral-bound notebook that she and her friends circulated, writing notes to and about one another. “I don’t remember what we wrote in these things,” she muses, “but I’m sure it wasn’t lovely and nice. I’m sure it was a lot of gossip.”

"I don’t think kids today are any more cruel. It’s just that everything they do is public. And so the stakes are raised; the impacts are greater and more far-reaching."

She adds: “The thing is, those notebooks were private, so their ability to hurt was limited. . . . I don’t think kids today are any more cruel. It’s just that everything they do is public. And so the stakes are raised; the impacts are greater and more far-reaching.”

Johnson acknowledges that several of her characters make what she calls “questionable decisions,” and those are the personalities that intrigue her. “As a writer I’m very interested in characters who are not obviously likable and who do things that make us cringe, because I’m interested in the psychology behind it—and in trying to find empathy even for people I don’t want to empathize with. I think that’s an important job that fiction does in our world.”

She quickly adds a crucial qualifier: “The kids in the book feel 100 percent real to me, but I don’t want people to think that these are real kids that I tutored.”

Their dilemmas feel authentic, including struggles with grades, dating, sex, drinking and drugs. And when Johnson finished writing these teenagers’ stories, she added yet another layer, inserting several chapters from the point of view of a newly hired young teacher, Molly Nicoll, who becomes overly invested in her students’ struggles.

“I empathize with Molly in particular,” Johnson says. “Being a young teacher is a struggle, especially when you’re not that much older than the students. You want to help them, but you have to walk the line of how invested and involved you get.”

Happily, Johnson’s own teaching and tutoring experiences were productive for both her and her students. “I’ve always wanted to be a novelist,” she says. She wrote her first book at age 24, but says it was so terrible that she “sat down and wrote another one.” The Most Dangerous Place on Earth is her first published novel, but her “fourth or fifth manuscript.” 

“There’s no reason why I should have kept going,” she says with amusement, “except that it was the only thing that I cared about.”

This article was originally published in the January 2017 issue of BookPage. Download the entire issue for the Kindle or Nook.

Ann Beattie discusses her new novel, A Wonderful Stroke of Luck, about a group of millennial boarding school students who grow up in the shadow of 9/11—and under the wing of a manipulative teacher.

Ben and his friends at Bailey Academy reminded me of orphans in many ways, as they all have dysfunctional families or have lost a parent to cancer, or in Jaspar’s case, the 9/11 terrorist attacks. Overall, the theme of loss and abandonment is overwhelming. Are you sympathetic to these kids?
I’m an only child and was shy and pretty much a loner until I got to college. Your calling them “orphans in many ways” certainly gets the sense of it, though that way of looking at things might be surprising to them. Kids tend to accept as reality the world around them, including their parents—so it was an interesting age at which to begin the book. They might have technically left home, being at Bailey, but their parents don’t seem uncaring to me, just adults muddling along, at least the majority of them trying to do their best. And then all of this is eclipsed by an event of a different magnitude, of course, which changes not just their families, but the world they live in.

As a writer, I’ve visited many schools. One of my former students teaches at an all-boys school, and when I was having dinner with the students there, one of the teenagers told me that he was at the school because his father had remarried and didn’t have time for him. He said it bluntly and very matter-of-factly, and of course there was nothing I could say because he certainly might have been right. That stuck with me. As a writer, though, I’d also have to try to understand the situation from the POV of the parent. But you know what? I didn’t want to, nor did I think of myself as a writer in that moment.

We learn that Ben was sent to a school for troubled kids with mental health issues, although he was pretty much a normal teenager. Did this odd placement by his father end up being a benefit or a disadvantage?
Well, Ben was overpowered, or outmaneuvered, or however you want to say it. He does sometimes speak as though he was a real participant in the decision (for example, asking a friend what kid wants to live with his parents in a boring place, rather than being away from home), but either some or all of that is bravado. As the reader learns, his father is not at all acting merely on his son’s behalf. I wasn’t trying to have the real circumstances of Ben’s being at Bailey be ambiguous; rather, some truth—because it’s there, somewhere—has been withheld, at least according to LaVerdere. The wrinkle is whether LaVerdere has finally been worn down by the adult Ben, or whether he, himself, is warping the truth. Who’s the authority figure—merely the person who grabs authority?

I kept holding my breath, fearing that Pierre LaVerdere was going to sexually abuse one of his students, most likely Ben. But it never happens, and LaVerdere’s abuse is primarily his power over his young students. Do you view LaVerdere as evil, or do you see him as simply an arrogant academic who enjoyed his role as Master of the Universe to the kids at Bailey?
I assumed, because of the world we live in, that the reader would assume LaVerdere quite probably abused Ben and/or others. But no: Sometimes even terrible scenarios are trumped by different—and more insidious—forms of abuse.

There is a scene early in your novel when I sensed this tension between “town and gown,” when Ben and LouLou hitch their ill-fated ride to a concert. As a reader, I was terrified this guy was going to turn out to be an ax murderer, but it all ended harmlessly enough. But it seemed to me that the driver might have been a symbol of the socioeconomic divide between the wealth and advantages of the kids at Bailey and the poverty and lack of opportunity for folks in the surrounding rural areas. Was that your intention?
Right. (Though I wouldn’t say that there was no harm done; clearly, psychic damage was done, and LouLou ends up in tears, even in the moment.) Again, this lurking danger is related to your question above, and (ultimately) to reversed expectations. You’re right in your reading: Jasper is calculating; he writes a paper about trees and how they’re taken care of in the poor community outside Bailey where and when they become damaged, vs. the trees on the grounds of the school. Binnie and Tessie also figure in. There are many dynamics involving the advantaged and the disadvantaged.

I noticed that Ben’s friends, unlike him, have some very unusual names: Arly, LouLou and Aqua, for example. In some ways, these kids seemed like pets to their families, but I’m not sure if that was your intent. Do you see these millennials from wealthy families in some regard like “trophies” for their baby boomer parents?
I like the question, and sometimes things emerge that aren’t the direct intention of the writer, but I wouldn’t say they’re trophies. However painful, there seem to be real connections between Jasper and both of his parents, and Akemi’s father (while we sense not in agreement with his wife) wants his daughter to have more age-appropriate experiences, rather than starting college at such a young age. Elin, however neurotic, is on her stepson’s side. These people have what’s synonymous with real life, to me: real limitations.

A prevailing theme of cultural touchstones—the Kennedy assassination and 9/11—is present throughout your book. When you were writing your novel, did you see these events as bookends? And do you see the conclusion of the Camelot years and the post-9/11 early aughts as having similarities in terms of the end of innocence?
“Camelot” turns out not to have been exactly Camelot. I’m not sure “innocent” is the word I’d pick. Maybe militantly oblivious, in many cases, and, as a nation, very self-congratulatory. I’m glad you notice the bracketing: presidential portraits that will be recontextualized by the reader, even in the moment of reading. In a larger sense, the novel covertly and repeatedly questions the relationship between how a thing looks (or how we speak of it, whether “Camelot” or “The Peaceable Kingdom”) and what it really is or was.

The village of Rhinebeck is presented as a Hudson Valley utopia for the wealthy on the surface, with a litany of alcohol-fueled sorrows and secrets unfolding behind closed doors. What was your motivation in creating this picture of upper-middle class despair? And will Ben ever find happiness?
Any time you go behind closed doors, anywhere, you find (among other things) secrets unfolding, sorrow, and, right—often alcohol. But obviously, writers won’t get anywhere if they stop just because a door is closed. As for Ben finding happiness, he has found some things—things of value—by the time the novel concludes, hasn’t he?

ALSO IN BOOKPAGE: Read our review of A Wonderful Stroke of Luck.

Author photo by Lincoln Perry

What inspired Dear Edward?
It started with my obsession with a real plane crash from 2010. A commercial flight from South Africa to London—filled with mostly Dutch passengers on their way home from vacation—crashed in Libya, and everyone on the flight died except for one 9-year-old boy named Ruben van Assouw. Ruben was found still strapped in to his seat about a half-mile away from the wreckage. Investigators speculated that he’d been sitting near the fuselage and had been ejected from the plane. He had a badly broken leg and a punctured lung but was otherwise fine. Everyone else, including his parents and brother, died immediately. I couldn’t read enough about this story, and I knew fairly quickly that I was going to have to write my way into understanding how this little boy could possibly walk away from this crash, from the loss of his entire family, and find a way to not only survive but live.

What is your relationship with flying?
After doing a lot of research on worst-case scenarios and spending eight years in the heads of characters on a plane that was doomed to crash, I don’t love it. But I do fly, and in promoting this book, I’ve flown more in the past six months than I have in years. When I’m in the air, I feel hyperaware that I’m at 35,000 feet in a metal bus. And half of me thinks that fact is AMAZING, and I’m in awe of the ingenuity of my fellow, smarter humans for inventing a miracle. The other half of me is anxious, though, because I’m at 35,000 feet in a metal bus.

We know at the very beginning that the plane crashes and Edward is the only survivor. Yet we live with the characters on the plane through the whole novel. Was it challenging to pull off that structure?
I knew that the two storylines had to sit side by side, in part because I thought that if something this absolutely devastating happened to a person, he would carry it with him for the rest of his life. It wouldn’t be a matter of whether he was able to set that trauma down, it would be a matter of learning to bear its weight. That’s why the two storylines alternate and have (roughly) equal space in the novel. And perhaps because I saw the structure as inevitable, I found it to be a creative positive. I had two arcs I was following at all times, and that kept me on track.

Read our review of Dear Edward.

Why did you choose the passenger characters that you did—the curmudgeonly billionaire, the gay soldier, the libidinous flight attendant and particularly Florida, who remembered past lives?
When I was beginning to think about this book, my husband suggested I spend a year taking notes, reading and researching before I actually started writing. Writing sentences is perhaps my favorite thing to do, and I am very good at making things up. However, writing is more intuitive than cerebral for me; in my prior novel, A Good Hard Look, I had struggled with the plot and struggled to pull the narrative into the shape of a book. I ended up having to cut hundreds of pages I’d written. My husband’s suggestion was a reaction to watching me write that novel; he thought I should engage my problem-solving brain before I began to make up stories willy-nilly.

I found that year of note-taking frustrating, because I couldn’t write pretty sentences, but he was right. A lot of my planning that year went into the characters on the plane. It was an exciting opportunity to choose who I wanted to delve into, because every kind of person flies. I wanted the characters to be very different from each other, and once I sketched out the idea for a character, I would read a book or two in research for him or her. For Crispin Cox—the curmudgeonly billionaire—I read Jack Welch’s Jack: Straight From the Gut (which is unintentionally hilarious). I came up with Florida after reading Neil Gaiman’s Sandman series, inspired by how Gaiman disregards boundaries like time. For Benjamin, the soldier, I read War by Sebastian Junger and also spoke to a friend who is a captain in the army.

You focused on the small details in Edward’s life during his recovery—his wanting to leave the house for nighttime walks and not wanting to sleep upstairs. Tell us about this portrayal of his trauma.
Edward’s first year after the crash, which takes place in part one of the book, felt very clear to me from the start. His focus was on physical survival: Could he eat, could he walk, could he sleep? After his first year, though, I struggled with his chapters. The possibilities for his forward motion felt infinite, and in fact there’s a version of the book in which we see Edward’s entire life, ending when he’s about 75 years old. Eventually (like, after five years of writing), I decided to align his recovery with the psychological framework known as Maslow’s hierarchy of needs. The hierarchy is shaped like a triangle, and the bottom, largest “need” is for survival, shelter, food and water. It narrows gradually through the need for safety, then love and belonging, then esteem and finally self-actualization. I used these stages as reference points as Edward grew, grieved and healed.

Edward is filled with decency. He refuses to cash the check that’s given to him, he’s horrified when Shay’s mother suspects he’s been sleeping with her daughter, and he rejects some undoubtedly excellent universities because he wants to remain with Shay. His moral compass is unwavering. Were there other versions of Edward in which he wasn’t so upstanding?
Hm. No. There were other versions in which Edward was more boring, though. I wanted to write a book about kind people maneuvering a terrible situation. I had no interest in Edward being immoral, and he felt so soaked in sadness that true anger or rage felt inaccessible from inside him. In the weakest/worst drafts, Edward was too muted, though, and too passive. I had to fight to bring him to his own surface, in order for him to show up in his new life.

You edit a literary magazine and teach creative writing as well as having your own family. How does your writing process work within that dynamic? Do you write at the same place every day for a certain amount of time, or cram it in when you get the time?
Before I had children, I had routines and word count goals and strong preferences for my work environment—in the morning, on my couch, in an empty apartment—but that ended with the birth of my older son. For the past 12 years I’ve written whenever and wherever possible, which I’ve come to feel fine about. It feels like another layer of acceptance that writing is part of me, as elemental as brushing my teeth, and if I only have five minutes to write after brushing my teeth on a given day, I say thank you and take it.

Author photo © Dan Wilde