Review: Before You Knew My Name

Two women, one exactly twice the age of the other, head to New York. Both are after new beginnings and a jettisoning of a troubled past, and what better city to remake yourself in?

Alice is a just turned 18 year old from small-town Wisconsin who carries deep trauma from a family tragedy and a recent abusive relationship with a much older man; the other is Ruby, a 36 year-old Melbournian who hops on a plane to escape her addiction to a booty-call lover. He is also - a la Bridget Jones Diary - engaged to be married.

Geographicals, of course, never work - “damage gets packed in your suitcase, people stay on your skin” - and if this sounds like a pretty conventional beginning hang about, Bublitz has bigger things on her mind.

While the two women never actually meet in any conventional sense, they’ll impact on each other’s lives (and deaths) in surprising ways. Alice will end up murdered and narrate Ruby’s story from the afterlife (that’s not a plot spoiler, it’s flagged on the book’s synopsis) and it’s Ruby who will find her body while out on a jet-lagged, early morning run.

The buzz around New Plymouth based Bublitz’ enthralling debut, which she edited at her favourite local wine bar, has been growing with rights sold in multiple territories, and one can see why. It’s a book that never quite goes where you expect - it’s a romance, a crime story, a celebration of New York, a political polemic and a tale of self-discovery and female empowerment. It’s also a real page-turner.

The novel was inspired by a summer trip Bublitz took to New York where she says she spent too much time “hanging around morgues” and “the dark corners of city parks.” But while Before You Knew My Name deals in the darkest of subjects - death, trauma, grief, loneliness, male on female violence - Bublitz has a light touch.

There are similarities to Alice Sebold’s The Lovely Bones which also uses a teenage posthumous narrator. Bublitz, however, employs it with subtlety. Alice’s posthumous powers are limited to encouraging a character to turn his head to notice something and, in one lovely moment, when she wills a new couple together as they sit at a bar, her “words come out as a saxophone solo, filling the room.”

Our pretty, white narrator - “named for a girl who fell down a rabbit hole” - knows she’s luckier than other murdered girls who, because of their colour or station in life, get little publicity or press coverage: “There are enough of us dead girls out there. From a distance, so many of our stories look the same… Maybe you’ll like the truth of me better, and maybe you’ll wish this for every dead girl from now on.”

Bublitz also rails at the public’s fascination with women’s killers rather than their victims, “…for many, my identity only has meaning in so far as it might help identify him. Him. The everyman behind… each sad, bad Jane Doe story.”

While this is, broadly speaking, crime fiction Bublitz plays with genres throughout. There are echoes of classic rom coms, old musicals as well as New York movies, true crime podcasts and cop shows. The book takes a turn around halfway through after Ruby attends a trauma group meeting and joins something called Death Club (anyone remember the 1990 movie Flatliners?).

It’s a delicate transition from a more “conventional” narrative that might’ve tripped up a writer less in charge of her material but not Bublitz. Readers looking for a conventional whodunnit may be disappointed. What Bublitz has created here is a far richer stew - one that entertains as readily as it questions and challenges.