Spoiler Discussion and Plot Summary for Dream Girl

Are you a Laura Lippman fan? What were your thoughts about Dream Girl, a book that (to me) seemed like a real departure for her, but an interesting one. Check out my Spoiler discussion and Plot Summary for Dream Girl.

Spoiler Discussion and Plot Summary for Dream Girl

Warning: SPOILERS AHEAD!

For me, Dream Girl was a LOT: the backstory of a male writer and his failed relationships (the snooziest part for me), a Misery-like drama about that man being held prisoner by his employees, and a #MeToo story about a man and a woman with drastically different memories of a sexual encounter in a hotel room.

Table of Contents for Spoiler discussion and Plot Summary for Dream Girl

List of Characters in Dream Girl

Timeline

Plot Summary for Dream Girl

Who Was the Dream Girl?

Spoiler Discussion for Dream Girl

List of Characters and Mini Timeline for Dream Girl

Gerry Anderson is a white male writer in his early 60s who recently moved from New York to Baltimore when his mother was dying. Gerry’s first book, based on his parents and their ill-fated romance, won him the Hartwell Prize in 1986. He has no living parents, no siblings, no children, no current wife.

Gerry taught writing at Johns Hopkins in the 1980s and 1990s. In 1986 a Johns Hopkins colleague named Shannon Little went to their supervisor and accused him of initiating a relationship with her and harassing her afterwards.

He denied the charges, but quit the teaching job. Shortly after that, and he and first wife Lucy divorced.

Gerry’s most successful book was Dream Girl, published in 2001, a Lolita-inspired book about a 72 hour romance between an older man and a much younger woman. In 2012, he teaches creative writing at Goucher College.

The women in Gerry’s life

Lucy – Gerry’s first wife. An extremely talented writer, she met him in an MFA program. She gave him a fancy letter opener as a gift. It’s unclear exactly when they married but their marriage ended with the Shannon Little accusations in 1986.

Gretchen – met her in 1986 in New York waiting in line for the bathroom. She waived all rights to his writing income, which was a mistake because he later published Dream Girl. She left him in 1999. In 2008, she called him, unemployed and bitter, and he revealed the identity of the “dream girl.” In 2015, a woman named Gretchen calls into a radio interview Gerry is doing and asks is he had a female collaborator for Dream Girl.

Sarah – married her in 2011 and were only married a few years. (In 2014 he says he knew he and Sarah would divorce within the year.)

Kim Barton – in 2014 he meets her at a hotel bar in Columbus. They go up to his room and have sex. He feels it was consensual, she says she was raped.

Margot – his most recent girlfriend. They met in 2016.

Victoria is Gerry’s new assistant. She studied at Goucher when Gerry was teaching there and tells him their paths never crossed, but actually she is his former student Tory. Gerry didn’t remember her.

Aileen, Gerry’s new night nurse after his accident, is Victoria’s roommate. It turns out she is actually Leenie, Tory’s friend and now roommate.

Gerry’s friends and family

Thiru Vignarajah has been Gerry’s agent for forty years.

Tara and Luke are Gerry’s friends from Princeton. He and Tara have a falling out after he doesn’t visit Luke in 1990 when Luke is dying.

Plot Summary for Dream Girl – with spoilers!

Thiru, Gerry’s agent, visits Gerry’s Baltimore apartment, which is flashy and modern with a floating staircase. Thiru tells Gerry his publisher is pressuring him for a new manuscript.  

Thiru also drops off a stack of mail, in which Gerry notices a letter from someone who lives on the same street as Aubrey, his main character in Dream Girl.

Dream Girl: Gerry gets injured

He’s pondering this weird detail when he trips over his rowing machine and falls down the floating staircase. 

After his accident, Gerry is confined to bed and recovering at home with the help of Victoria, his assistant and his night nurse, Aileen. Due to his injury he will be completely bedridden for months. He asks both of them about the mysterious letter he received before he fell. Both deny seeing it.

Gerry gets a call from “Aubrey”

Gerry’s ex-girlfriend Margot shows up, angry that when he sold his NYC apartment he got rid of her things. When Margot leaves, he gets a strange phone call from “Aubrey,” who says that she thinks it’s time the world knows she’s a real person.

Gerry asks Aileen to check the caller ID but she tells him no one called. He’s worried he has dementia like his mother but decides it’s the drugs he’s on after his accident.

Gerry tries to figure out who could have called him.  He thinks of Shannon Little, his teaching colleague in the Johns Hopkins MFA program, the woman he cheated on his first wife with in 1986.

Shannon seemed “determined to seduce him” so he gave in. Later she accuses him of harassment.

After that he divorced Lucy and moved to New York. Fifteen years later, he published Dream Girl and Shannon, who thought she was the inspiration for Aubrey, wrote a self-published rebuttal.

“Aubrey” calls again. The next day, Victoria tells him that someone called @DreamGirlAubrey is tagging him in her tweets about his uncircumsized penis.

Thiru tells Gerry the person is a troll and to ignore them. The tweet gets deleted. Aubrey calls again saying she can’t wait to see him. She wants half of the profits from Dream Girl.

Gerry hires a detective

Gerry decides to hire a detective (Tess Monaghan, the character in Lippmann’s detective series). Tess says she doesn’t think she can help and suggests that he buy a recording device to tape the calls.

Margot comes back, asking for money. Gerry refuses and she tells him that she knows secrets about him. They argue and she slaps and scratches him.

He pushes her away. She takes money out of his wallet and leaves.

In the morning he wakes up to see Margot’s body on the floor, stabbed through the eye with the letter opener that Lucy gave him.

Aileen comes upstairs and she and Gerry discuss calling the police and/or a lawyer. Then Aileen says she’ll handle it. He tells Victoria not to come in to work so that Aileen can deal with Margot’s body.

Aileen buys a large freezer and claims it’s to hold a side of beef that Gerry ordered during an Ambien haze. (She seems to have ordered an actual side of beef, then donated that and cut up Margot’s body and disposed of it.)

The police show up looking for Margot. They tell Gerry Margot’s mother told the police that  Margot had a secret about Gerry that she was planning to confront him about. Gerry admits that Margot was there, asking for money, and that he and Margot argued and that she attacked him. 

Flashback to 2014 when Gerry meets a woman named Kim Barton in a hotel bar. They go up to his room and she admits that she knows who he is. He makes a pass at her and she objects but he keeps going and they have sex twice (this is Gerry’s account of the evening; Kim accuses him of rape.)

Victoria is annoyed that Aileen got a parking space. Gerry says they can share it. Victoria has also brought a certified letter saying that Gerry’s father’s will was contested but that the challenge was denied. He calls his father’s lawyer who explains that Gerry’s parents never divorced. Gerry’s father remarried but that second marriage wasn’t legal.

That night he gets another phone call from Margot’s phone. It’s a woman who says they need to talk. Aileen claims she dropped Margot’s purse in the harbor. Gerry thinks Margot has an accomplice who is using her phone.

Who’s been gaslighting Gerry?

Gerry wakes up to hear Aileen arguing with someone who calls her Leenie. This jogs his memory to two students he taught at Goucher: Leenie and Tory. Aileen and Victoria. Aileen comes upstairs carrying his book prize statue covered in blood.

The next day, Aileen admits that she and Victoria are friends. Victoria was insulted that Gerry hired her and didn’t remember her from Goucher.

They think he doesn’t care about women and that Aubrey had to be based on a real woman (or that Gerry stole a real woman’s life). So they decided to gaslight him with letters and phone calls. Aileen says Victoria’s death was an accident, just like Gerry accidentally killed Margot.

Leenie wants Gerry to read her writing, a story called Mobius Dick, the Great White Male. She also tells him she’s moving in as she can’t make rent without Victoria’s contribution.

Gerry asks Leenie what really happened to Margot. Aileen says she took come cash and the security pass, left and then came back and found Leenie and Gerry in bed together. Leenie had given him pills to knock him out. Leenie and Margot fought and Leenie defended herself with the letter opener.

He gets another phone call from someone asking if he got her letters. Leenie is working on a book that she wants Gerry to help her get published. He’s playing along, trying to string things along as he’s afraid of her. He will soon be allowed to get out of bed and into a wheelchair.

What was the secret Gerry was being blackmailed about?

Leenie arrives one day with a visitor, Kim Karpas. She’s the secret Margot was keeping. She was sending letters to Gerry’s former New York apartment, and Margot was reading them. Kim claims Gerry raped her. She’s Kim Barton, the woman from the hotel in Columbus.

Kim is also the daughter of Gerry’s half-sister, the daughter of Gerry’s father’s second wife, who was cut out of Gerry’s father’s will. The woman who claims Gerry raped her was his niece.

Gerry realizes Kim is his only hope for escape from Leenie. He writes Kim a note, warning her that Leenie has killed two women and that she’s next. He tells her to push his bed at Leenie and he helps her. Leenie is pushesd down the stairs by the bed and is killed. Gerry gets flung out of the bed and also dies.

Gerry’s agent is discussing a book with Kim. It’s supposedly written by Gerry in the voice of his insane nurse. After Gerry and Leenie were killed, Kim snuck out of the building through the parking garage. Then she returned to the front door, saying she was Gerry’s niece and asking to be let in.

The building staff let Kim in and discovered the body. Kim found and shredded the letters that she’d sent to Gerry, the ones Margot read and Leenie found.  She also found Leenie’s manuscript.

The police assume that Gerry tried to kill Leenie and died in the process. That he had become paranoid and delusional after his accident, and taking a lot of medications.

Kim finishes Leenie’s manuscript. She adds the scene of her own rape. She asks Gerry’s agent to call the book The Floating Staircase. As his niece, she is presumably Gerry’s heir? Is this mentioned because I don’t remember that.

Who was the Dream Girl Who Inspired Gerry’s Original Book?

Nobody believes that Gerry wrote Dream Girl without some kind of help. Shannon, the woman he cheats on Lucy with, thinks she’s the inspiration. On the radio show in 2015, someone who says her name is Gretchen, accuses Gerry of having a secret female collaborator.

At the end of the book there is a flashback that might explain the inspiration for Dream Girl. In 1999, Gerry goes into a bar and sees a couple on a date.

The woman is twenty-something and the man is Gerry’s age, forty. He watches them together and feels inspired, thinking about the anticipation in a first date.

He reflects that the woman “might sleep with [her date] but she would never be his, she would never belong to anyone. She was quicksilver, a treasure that would flow through a man’s fingers.” He goes home to write (presumably to write Dream Girl.)

Spoiler Discussion for Dream Girl by Laura Lippman

Here are my questions but I want to know yours in comments!

What did you think of this overall? The Goodreads ratings are not great, but that could be because this isn’t a typical Laura Lippmann mystery

I assumed that @DreamGirlAubrey, the tweeter, was Kim, as she would have known that Gerry was uncircumcised. Was that information that Kim revealed in the letters to Gerry that the two intercepted? Or did Leenie and Tory take a peek? (Sorry! I’m curious)

Gerry is SUCH an unlikeable character. He’s a serial cheater, he’s been accused of sexual harrassmant, he fictionalized the story of a woman he pressured into sex, he didn’t visit his dying friend. Did the flashbacks to his childhood make him more sympathetic to you (I found them boring so I skimmed them)?

Gerry’s agent tells Kim that he thinks The Floating Staircase, told in the voice of Gerry’s insane nurse, would appeal to women? Do you think so? I feel like the main weakness of Dream Girl is that Gerry is completely loathsome and that it’s really hard to care about him or any of the characters.

The “Dream Girl” was such a silent presence for most of the book and everyone in the book thought she was a real person from Gerry’s life. But (as Stefan points out in comments) it seems like the real Dream Girl was just a random girl that Gerry saw in a bar back in 1999.

This reminded me a LOT of The Plot, a book I just read. Both are books about unlikeable middle-aged white male writers who are targeted and punished by mysterious women who write them harassing messages, etc. You can find my review of The Plot here and my Spoiler Review and Discussion here.

Thanks for reading my Spoiler discussion and Plot Summary for Dream Girl. Talk to me in comments!! What did you think of this and did you have questions?