Rebecca Miller’s The Private Lives of Pippa Lee

Central question:

Who is Pippa Lee?

Rebecca Miller is a writer first—first she writes the book, then she makes the movie. As a fiction-writer/director, she’s no moonlighter. She’s taken multiple turns in the desk and director’s chairs, and her process calls to mind the way Graham Greene approached his film treatment for The Third Man: “To me it is almost impossible to write a film play without first writing a story. Even a film depends on more than plot, on a certain measure of characterization, on mood and atmosphere; and these seem to me almost impossible to capture for the first time in the dull shorthand of a script.” So Greene wrote a novella. Done with that, he wrote the screenplay. Miller has done Greene one better: she’s directing the movie of her screenplay adapted from her debut novel.

Doting mother of two, devoted spouse, Pippa Lee has a complex past. She suffers from an “excess of empathy. Sometimes, she found the mystery of other people almost unbearable to contemplate: rooms within rooms inside each of them, an endless labyrinth of contradictory qualities, memories, desires, mirroring one another like an Escher drawing, baffling as a conundrum. Kinder to perceive ­people as they wished to be seen. After all, that’s what Pippa wanted for herself: to be accepted as she seemed.” At fifty, Pippa has moved to a Connecticut retirement community, and she’s not adjusting. Her early entry into the sagging, slowing ranks of old folks—having left behind, without a backward glance, the social and kinetic extremes of Manhattan privilege—is necessitated by the bad turn in her husband’s health. Herb Lee, nearing eighty, is a publishing scion, “heroic owner of one of the last independent publishing houses in the country.” Herb has edited most of the literary lions, Sam Shapiro among them, “probably the finest fiction writer in the country.” Sam and Herb have a kind of Thomas Wolfe–Maxwell Perkins co-dependence. “Sam had been so loyal to Herb, in fact, that people began to wonder if the great Shapiro needed his editor a little too badly.” This becomes the emotional crux: all of the characters need one another more than is healthy—all of the characters, it would seem, except Pippa.

Miller constructs her novel like a screenplay—in three acts. Part one: Pippa in the present, before her hushed breakdown and backward spiral. Part two: Pippa in the past, the...