Billy Gertz’s lover died in the 9/11 terrorist attacks, forcing her to play the role of a grieving fiancee even though she was about to break off her engagement before tragedy struck. A playwright, she chooses to channel her emotions through her new work, “The Lake Shore Limited,’’ a play that features the fictional bombing of a train of the same name.
In Sue Miller’s “The Lake Shore Limited’’ (Knopf), the play tells a story within a story; the performance touches the lives of characters both on and off the stage.
“There’s some connection made with seeing the play, responding to the play, or acting in the play. So the play is kind of central to everyone in the book,’’ said Miller, author of 2008’s best-selling “The Senator’s Wife.’’
A friend’s experience sparked the idea for Miller’s novel. “It just made me ponder the sort of far and unlikely reach of such an event into the life of someone removed from it by several degrees of separation, yet affected by it in some way,’’ Miller said.
She will discuss “The Lake Shore Limited’’ tomorrow at 7 p.m. at Brookline Booksmith.
Marcella di Pavarese Atkinson is a married mother of one who is suddenly swept into an affair with Cecil McClatchey, a married father of two and longtime summer acquaintance from Cape Cod. The night their romance abruptly ends, Cecil’s wife is found dead; Cecil dies shortly thereafter. Seven years later, Cecil’s grown son desperately searches for Marcella after finding her old bathing suit in his Cape Cod house. They fall into a passionate affair of their own, reviving buried memories.
“I definitely geometrically thought of circles, the intersecting ripples of these two families together who didn’t even know they were together for a long time; the secrets that no one knew were having an effect on everyone,’’ LeCraw said.
She also said the pool, not meant to be a deliberate symbol, was a neutral place for significant events to keep happening.
LeCraw reads from her novel tomorrow at 7 p.m. at Porter Square Books in Cambridge.
“I was convinced that the best way to get people to understand what’s going on in Africa was to have them appreciate first the magnitude of the social and personal and familial dilemma associated with HIV and AIDS,’’ said Essex, the Lasker Professor of Health Sciences at Harvard.
The title refers to Botswana’s traditional commemoration of funerals on Saturdays. You begin to understand the magnitude of the disease, said Dow, when death claims every Saturday for years on end.
The authors discuss “Saturday Is for Funerals’’ tonight at 7 at Harvard Book Store, 1256 Mass. Ave., Cambridge.
