How do you plot a page-turner?

This post discusses the entire plot of The Last Thing He Told Me, including the ending.

In this final post on Laura Dave’s The Last Thing He Told Me, I’m going to step back and examine the overall architecture of the novel to find out how Dave handles plotting and pacing to produce a bona fide page-turner.

As I discussed in my post on the structure of The Searcher, most novels do not match up exactly with any of the popular story structure outlines—and this is true of The Last Thing He Told Me as well. Dave discusses her process in the author interview included at the end of the novel:

Having examined the novel closely, I’m not surprised it took Dave eighteen drafts to find her ending because it feels so completely earned. When the pieces settle into place in the final chapters, the resolution seems inevitable—we know this is where the characters have been pointing all along.

How does Dave pull it off? Part of the magic is in her plot: She offers up plenty of active puzzles for readers to try to solve alongside her protagonist. But a big piece of the magic is in her use of backstory, which she strategically stitches into the story in small, subtle patches and then bigger, showier pieces.

One classic story structure Dave does follow is to organize the plot in three acts, clearly signaled by her part breaks. Using a three-act structure allows a storyteller to provide cathartic stopping places for the story arcs. A part break signals to readers that one part of the story has concluded or resolved, and that it’s going to continue in a different way on the other side of that brief pause of the blank page. Dave uses three-act structure in exactly this way.

The figure below shows the three parts of the novel. Each chapter is given an intensity ranking, with backstory chapters given a cross symbol. Compared to The Searcher (see the chart in my post on its structure), Dave’s novel has a fast start—Hannah’s husband disappears, leaving her only with a note telling her to protect her sixteen-year-old stepdaughter, Bailey, with whom she has a fragile relationship. Part one ends with Hannah deciding that she and Bailey need to travel to Austin, Texas, following a hunch that they will learn something important about Owen’s past that will tell them where he might be now.

Even in part two, which has a slower build, Dave makes sure to deliver a high-intensity scene about a third of the way through. Part two begins with Hannah and Bailey on the airplane and then plunges them right into their quest, following Bailey’s hazy childhood memories around the city. Dave steers them into seeming dead ends before they finally find the right track. Hannah and Bailey realize they are close to finding the truth when a man named Charlie Smith reacts violently to being shown a photo of Owen and addresses Bailey as “Kristin”—a name she later admits to Hannah she now remembers having been called. Hannah learns that Owen changed his and Bailey’s identities after his wife was murdered. Owen believed his father-in-law’s mob clients were responsible for the murder, so he turned over evidence that eventually landed his father-in-law and several of his clients in jail. At this point, before Hannah can even tell her what she’s learned, Bailey disappears, ending part two on a cliff-hanger and forcing us to hurry over that blank page to find out what’s going to happen next.

Part three, matching the classic principles of three-act structure, is all about finding resolution and restoring the story world to some kind of order; an intense climax is positioned in the middle of the act, followed by lower intensity scenes as we move toward resolution. At the beginning of part three, Hannah must make a crucial decision: Should she follow the advice of the US marshal, Grady Bradford, who has been advising Owen since his original identity change, and accept new identities for herself and Bailey, which could someday allow them to be reunited with Owen? Or does she fight to protect Bailey’s still emerging self-identity, believing that’s what Owen would want, and sacrifice any chance of seeing him again? It’s a classic best-bad-choice scenario, and the stakes couldn’t be higher.

Hannah ultimately chooses the second option, venturing into the heavily guarded estate of Owen’s ex-father-in-law, Nicholas, to broker a deal that would allow her and Bailey to continue living their current lives, protected from mob retribution, in exchange for Bailey’s grandfather having contact with her again. Nicholas is adamant, however, that there will be no forgiveness or amnesty for Owen—either from him or his mob associates. The work of the end of part three is to show us this was the right choice. In the final pages of the novel, Dave shows us that the story we were reading was about the relationship between Hannah and Bailey all along.

One more thing I want to call attention to is that Dave directs us to new story questions in each of these three parts:

Notice how those questions shift? At the beginning of part one, we think Owen’s disappearance is related to the fraud charges against the startup he works for. But the importance of that aspect of the plot recedes quickly, and by the time we get to part two the questions we are asking are all about Owen’s (and Bailey’s) distant past. Then in part three, the questions focus more on Hannah and Bailey and their future.

No matter what structure your novel follows, take some time to think about what questions you want to be uppermost in your readers’ minds as they move through the story. Where and how do you want those questions to shift? You can look to Last Thing to see how Dave makes us ask those questions, but one key is interiority—readers will naturally mirror the questions that are most important to the protagonist at any given moment. If you can show us what your point-of-view character is asking, we’ll know what we should be asking as well.

Let’s look now at an area where Dave departs a bit from standard storytelling approaches. Every novel has its own specific problem to solve, which is precisely why a single beat sheet or story structure can’t work for all novels. Dave’s problem, as I touched on in my post on the opening, is that in order to maximize suspense, she must make readers suspicious of Owen; however, in order for her ending to feel satisfying, she must then convince readers of his integrity and his love for Hannah and Bailey. How can she achieve this in a novel whose hook and inciting incident is the character’s disappearance?

Dave finds an answer in backstory, which she weaves in liberally throughout the novel. If you look again at the figure above, you’ll see that the backstory chapters occur at regular intervals, every few chapters. There are nine of these chapters, and they move steadily further back in time; the first one shows us the day before Owen’s disappearance and the last one shows us the night Hannah and Owen met. They are all short chapters, so Dave doesn’t keep us too long from the “front story,” and they are often positioned right before or after a particularly intense scene. These choices are part of what makes the book a page-turner. Compare, for example, my discussion of the way Ann Patchett handles backstory and story chronology in The Dutch House, a novel that asks readers to linger in the present and take leisurely swims in the past rather than hurry forward.

The backstory chapters in Last Thing have different functions in different parts of the novel. The initial backstory chapters do two things: First, they show us the closeness of the relationship between Hannah and Owen, making us believe in their love and share Hannah’s fundamental trust in Owen. Second, they provide little clues for readers to gather up and use to speculate about what has happened to Owen. Because Last Thing only has one narrator, Dave can’t easily make use of dramatic irony—when readers know something the protagonist does not—except in these backstory chapters. For example, in part two we see a scene eight months before Owen’s disappearance in which someone recognizes him as a high school classmate—except that high school was in Texas, not in Massachusetts, where Owen claimed to have grown up. The reader waits for Hannah to remember this encounter and add it to her small store of clues.

Then, just before we find out Owen’s true identity and start coming to terms with the fallout from what he’s done, we get two backstory scenes that reaffirm that his relationship with Hannah was true and real. One is a tender scene at the end of their wedding dinner; the other is an intense conversation on the flight that marks Hannah’s move from New York City to California to live with Owen and Bailey. We need the reassurance and emotional ballast of these two scenes to carry us through the tense final act.

In that final act, the backstory chapters shift again, to focus on Bailey and her relationships with both Owen and Hannah, mirroring the shift in the story questions in this part. The two backstory scenes show us that Hannah can be the parent Bailey is going to need her to be in Owen’s absence, and they confirm Hannah’s belief that she is making the choice Owen would have wanted for Bailey—even if it means he can’t be part of her life. The last backstory scene takes us to the night Hannah and Owen met. When she asks him if there is one thing that defines him, he tells her this: There is nothing he wouldn’t do for his daughter. Those words echo through the bittersweet resolution of the plot.

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