Literature and film are replete with characters living double lives, and no wonder: Who among us doesn’t muse upon the road not taken? Whether it’s a character making a detour from one life to live an entirely different one, a con artist pretending to be someone they’re not, or a sci-fi heroine swept up in an alternate timeline, there is huge appeal in watching a character reinvent themselves and make a leap most of us are unable or unwilling to do.
I didn’t set out to write about double lives when I started my novel Last Night at the Disco. My initial interest was to explore a time and place—the late 1970s in New York City—that was a nexus for many different forms of music: glam rock, disco, early punk. As I created characters who were part of these different music scenes, I realized that most of them turned to clubbing at night as an escape from day jobs, families, or even personas they wished to leave behind.
It quickly became clear that my grandiose narrator, Lynda Boyle, would have to live a double life to tell the story I wanted to tell. This headline, from a fictional 1980 New York Magazine article mentioned in my book, sums young Lynda up: “New Jersey junior high school teacher by day, coke-fueled disco queen by night.” In developing Lynda’s retrospective narration—she tells the story of her youth from the vantage point of 2019—a double life emerged in the 2019 time frame as well. As Lynda herself would be quick to tell you, she contains multitudes.
One of the benefits of working with a character who leads a double life is the inherent increase in stakes and tension. The climax of most double life plots is when the two lives intersect or the hidden life is revealed and the character is forced to make a choice—or, in a third option, walk away from both lives. The female protagonists in the following seven novels are all very different characters, but the one thing they share is being trapped between two worlds, even if that trap is of their own making.
Jump at the Sun by Kim McLarin
Grace Jefferson, a highly educated and deeply unfulfilled stay-at-home mom, begins laying the groundwork to pursue a new life shortly after she and her family move to an upscale Boston suburb for her husband’s new job. I could leave them. Grandmother did, she thinks in the opening scene of this unflinching look at the sacrifices of motherhood and exploration of the continuing legacy of slavery. Grace is haunted by thoughts of Rae, the grandmother who abandoned her family, and whose story is woven throughout the novel. As Grace tests out a life free from family obligations, leaving her daughters and husband for increasing periods of time, Rae’s story so consumes Grace that she sets out to find her. McLarin sustains the tension so well that I truly did not know which life Grace would choose until the final pages.
The Woman Upstairs by Claire Messud
Third grade teacher Nora Eldridge announces her duality on the very first page of The Woman Upstairs, in a voice that’s a masterpiece of female rage: “It was supposed to say ‘Great Artist’ on my tombstone, but if I died right now it would say ‘such a good teacher/daughter/friend’ instead; and what I really want to shout, and want in big letters on that grave, too, is FUCK YOU ALL.” Having long ago sublimated her desire to be an artist, Nora finds that life re-emerging as she gets to know the mother of a new student: Sirena Shahid, an acclaimed conceptual artist. When Sirena suggests they rent a studio together, Nora starts a new project, feeling alive and inspired by her double life as an artist and by how deeply that life is enmeshed with her growing feelings for the Shahids. Stumbling deeper into her new life, Nora crosses boundaries with both Sirena and her husband, leading to betrayals involving her two greatest passions: love and art.
The Likeness by Tana French
A common trope in mysteries and thrillers is the imposter: a character pretending to be someone they’re not, living a double life by stepping into another’s identity. Often these imposters are criminals, but The Likeness approaches the genre in a different way: the imposter is Dublin police detective Cassie Maddox, who bears a startling resemblance to a young murder victim and slips into her life to try to solve the crime. As Cassie gets drawn into the young woman’s tight-knit group of college friends—one of whom she suspects might be the murderer—she develops feelings that threaten not only her ability to solve the case, but her own life. Much more than a standard detective story, Cassie’s yearning for this other life of closeness and camaraderie is deeply moving to the end.
All Fours by Miranda July
The demands of motherhood and the trap of the heteronormative family are central themes in All Fours, July’s novel about a 45-year-old artist who takes a detour on a road trip and never quite goes back to her old life. As the book’s narrator transforms first the shabby motel room she stays in, and later her sexual life, she is finally able to confront the traumatic birth of her child, Sam, who survived a condition that is often fatal. After examining and discarding all of her beliefs about limitations in the kinds of lives women can lead, the narrator tries to construct a new life that is not so much a rejection of her first life, but rather a revision.
The Possibilities by Yael Goldstein-Love
A harrowing birth is also at the heart of The Possibilities, in which a new mother sees disturbing images of what might have been, and to save her son must confront not just a double life, but a multiverse of outcomes. Eight months since the difficult birth of her son, Jack, narrator Hannah can’t shake the feeling that her thriving infant might not have survived. As visions of this other life where she loses her baby destabilize Hannah, Jack disappears from his crib, and Hannah must tap into an ability to visit alternate worlds in order to save him. I loved the way this novel flipped the script on the double life plot: Instead of making a permanent shift into a different version of her life, Hannah has to fight for the life and child she already has.
All’s Well by Mona Awad
“Everyone who is born holds dual citizenship, in the kingdom of the well and in the kingdom of the sick,” Susan Sontag famously wrote—and in All’s Well, college theater professor Miranda Fitch experiences both worlds. When the novel opens, Miranda lives with chronic pain from an accident that ended her acting career. She uses opioids to cope with pain and loss, and to help her face a cohort of students she considers beneath her. When Miranda meets three mysterious men at a local bar, she makes a Faustian bargain to rid herself of her pain and regain her old life. As Miranda shifts between two versions of herself in this novel, the book’s play-within-a-play structure—Miranda is mounting a student production of All’s Well That Ends Well—mirrors her doubling.
Tampa by Alissa Nutting
Predators lead double lives by necessity. Celeste Price, the sociopathic narrator of Tampa, uses her job as an eighth-grade teacher as both cover and hunting ground for her sexual obsession with fourteen-year-old boys. Unlike Lolita’s Humbert Humbert, Celeste doesn’t offer justifications for her actions. She knows she’s a monster, but that knowledge doesn’t stop her from pursuing her horrific double life. Because of the disturbing subject matter, Tampa might not be for everyone, but it has important things to say about the impact of sexual abuse on its victims, and how predators are often able to keep their double lives going for far too long.