The Usual Silence, new suspense by Jenny Milchman
Author Interview + My Thoughts + Book & Author Info + Author (Foster!) Pet Corner!
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The Usual Silence
Amazon #1 Bestseller
A psychologist haunted by childhood trauma must unearth all that is buried in her past in this twisting, lyrical novel of suspense by Mary Higgins Clark Award–winning author Jenny Milchman.
Psychologist Arles Shepherd treats troubled children, struggling with each case to recover from her own traumatic past, much of which she’s lost to the shadows of memory. Having just set up a new kind of treatment center in the remote Adirondack wilderness, Arles longs to heal one patient in particular: a ten-year-old boy who has never spoken a word—or so his mother, Louise, believes.
Hundreds of miles away, Cass Monroe is living a parent’s worst nightmare. His twelve-year-old daughter has vanished on her way home from school. With no clues, no witnesses, and no trail, the police are at a dead end. Fighting a heart that was already ailing, and struggling to keep both his marriage and himself alive, Cass turns to a pair of true-crime podcasters for help.
Arles, Louise, and Cass will soon find their lives entangled in ways none of them could have anticipated. And when the collision occurs, a quarter-century-old secret will be forced out of hiding. Because nothing screams louder than silence.
To purchase The Usual Silence, click the any of the following links: Amazon, Barnes & Noble & IndieBound
My Thoughts on The Usual Silence
My favorite Jenny Milchman novel to date! I’ve always been a fan, but this book pulled me in and kept me reading even more than her previous novels.
Dr. Arles Shepherd is a flawed and complicated character. The kind of character readers root for, even though she may not be someone they would sit down with to have a beer. Struggling to recover from her own dysfunctional history, she’s committed to helping others overcome deeply rooted problems. But despite her best intentions, she feels just unreliable enough to make her untrustworthy. A deliciously off-kilter experience as we see events through the eyes of multiple characters.
This brings me to another aspect of the novel I liked quite a bit. Milchman deftly weaves multiple events, characters, and timelines together. This is not an easy beach read, but that makes it all the more engaging. Like many great pieces of literature, the reader can’t simply scan the sentences and follow along. Attention must be paid to track the twists and turns, and understand how the past informs the present, which makes the end, when the threads come together, that much more satisfying.
Some novels are an escape, easily read with a cocktail in one hand and the beach shushing in the background. Other novels are complex explorations of the human experience, which require the reader to fully invest their time and attention.
There is room on our shelves for books that fill both these niches. When you’re looking for the latter, this should be the first on your TBR list.
Interview with Jenny Milchman — Author of The Usual Silence
The Usual Silence centers on psychologist Arles Shepherd, who works with children and has a traumatic past of her own. What drew you to creating a character with a damaged childhood who also works with traumatized children?
It’s a little known (or maybe not-so-little-known) secret that many psychologists, social workers, counselors, and others in the profession, have traumatized pasts of their own. Trauma can be a magnet, drawing together those who have survived it. Or perhaps, by working through trauma more or less successfully, industry professionals wish to help others achieve their own versions of closure.
The character of Arles jumped into my head almost full form, born there like Athena from Zeus. Once I knew she was a psychologist, it was clear to me that she must have a trauma background. I just had to unearth what it was.
The Usual Silence expertly weaves multiple storylines together, sending readers back and forth between events and characters. What was the writing process like? Did you write each storyline first, then put them together? Or did it come together as a single strand from the beginning?
I love this question! I wrote the novel linearly, from the vignettes in the father’s point of view to the chapters in the two women’s points of view. Only the italicized passages, which twist (or give one violent wrench) at the end, were added later. But this novel went through so much revision, deep dive after deep dive, that linear makes the process sound way smoother than it was. It was extremely intense for me to pull off what you kindly call expert. I had brilliant editors—more than one of them. They helped keep me on track.
The Usual Silence is your sixth published novel. How has your writing or writing process changed over the course of your career? Has your view or understanding of the publishing industry changed now that you are an established author?
I keep thinking my writing process will change, as in get easier, and then it keeps on keeping on. Actually, to be clear, writing the first draft is a stunningly beautifully, easy phenomenon for me. Seriously. I go out to my converted shed every day—seven days a week when I’m in the throes of a new book—as if there were wings to spur me on. I’m so excited to sit down and write, it feels like Christmas morning.
Then I finish and hand out the manuscript to my first batch of trusty readers and my editors, and…let’s just say there are no wings. Revising for me is more like slogging through wet sand. I’m never sure I’ll be able to do it, and I live in a state of perennial fear. I think it’s that the first, fun draft feels so right to me that once someone points out what isn’t working, I crash to earth. I feel about revising how I hear a lot of writers talk about the first draft. And over the course of six published books, that hasn’t changed.
But with this new one, a significant difference did occur, because The Usual Silence is the start of a series. The layers of Arles that I knew would play out in books to come—like how, at thirty-seven years old, she meets the first love interest of her life—felt so rich to me as I discovered them. I wanted to lie down in Arles’s world and gaze at it. To drink it in like nectar.
In terms of the industry, the biggest thing that’s changed is that I am embracing the many different ways in which publishers get books to readers today, and readers read—or listen—to them. I am an old-fashioned, sit-on-a-bookstore-or-library-floor kind of reader myself. But the expertise at Thomas and Mercer and Amazon Publishing is expanding that view in thrilling dimensions.
How does your own background in psychology assist (or get in the way!) of writing suspense?
I wrote my first—unpublished—novel when I was doing my internship as a psychologist-in-training at a rural community mental health center. I was assigned this very scary case—one I hesitate to describe without a content warning, particularly on this blog—and it was as if life were a real live suspense novel. I sat down and began writing.
Ahem. Unpublished, as I say. It’s hard to convert real life to fiction because where is that satisfying arc, however bumpy or clean, that we love to find in a novel?
Still, until that point, I’d never realized how much I loved thrillers, or that I was going to write them—and write them, and write them, until eleven years and eight manuscripts later, I finally broke through. So my first career in a very real sense gave me this one, the one I feel I was meant to live.
You are incredibly generous helping other authors. What have you read lately that everyone should have on their TBR list? What did you love about it?
When I am writing a new novel, I tend not to read fiction, instead focusing on books that relate to research I am doing, or else books on craft. So apropos of what you said about helping other authors, let me recommend Into the Woods by John Yorke. He’s a legend in British screenwriting—small and big screens—and in this book analyzes what makes a story work. I found his thoughts about series based on the TV world particularly incisive.
And in case your readers are looking for fiction recs, the person who told me about Yorke’s book is novelist Holly Brown who also writes under the pen name Ellie Monago. She writes fun domestic suspense with a deeper layer beneath it. Look her up!
What are you working on now?
I just turned in book two of the Arles Shepherd series!
Words of Wisdom for aspiring writers:
Don’t ever stop.
Great advice! Thank you for visiting with me and my readers!
Author Foster Pet Corner!
Most springs we foster kittens, the most adorable miniatures you could ever want to see.
Oh my goodness, just take a look at what they did with slippers…
Jenny Milchman — Author of The Usual Silence
Jenny Milchman is the Mary Higgins Clark award winning and USA Today bestselling author of five novels. Her work has been praised by the New York Times, New York Journal of Books, San Francisco Journal of Books and more; earned spots on Best Of lists including PureWow, POPSUGAR, the Strand, Suspense, and Big Thrill magazines; and received starred reviews from Publishers Weekly, Library Journal, Booklist and Shelf Awareness.
Four of her novels have been Indie Next Picks. Jenny’s short fiction has appeared in numerous anthologies as well as Ellery Queen Mystery Magazine, and a recent piece on touring appeared in the Agatha award winning collection Promophobia.
Jenny is about to launch a new series with Thomas & Mercer featuring psychologist Arles Shepherd, who has the power to save the most troubled and vulnerable children, but must battle demons of her own to do it.
Jenny is a member of the Rogue Women Writers and lives in the Hudson Valley with her family.
To learn more about Jenny, click any of the following links: Facebook, Patreon, Twitter & Goodreads
