How to Time Travel
An opera, an ex, a deja vu of a deja vu
In October of this year, I visited Baltimore to see the premiere of Tim Holt’s opera adaptation of my first book, Nobody Is Ever Missing.
Let me first say— the very idea that anyone would ever want to adapt anything I’d written into something else, much less an opera, will always feel like such a humbling and weird honor. Humbling because what else could you call the feeling of making something that reaches another artist deeply enough that they feel inspired, and weird because any act of adaptation feels like you’re lending out an old piece of your subconscious, letting someone else slip into it like it’s an old peacoat you used to love but lost at some point, then this person in the peacoat will act out a dream you had long ago, and if you’re lucky you get to see this recreated dream performed by someone or many people wearing your old peacoat, in a deja vu version of deja vu.
Or, at least, this was my experience.
Tim first contacted me in 2016 to ask if he could try to adapt my novel for opera. At that point he was still in grad school, so I told him to have at it, and if he ever wanted to stage it for real we could figure out something with the rights then. We exchanged a few more emails into 2017, and though I was fascinated by the idea, I assumed it would never actually happen. A few more years passed before he sent word it was on track to be staged relatively soon (then, of course, it was then delayed by the pandemic.)
Sometimes, after you publish a book, film and TV producers show up with the hopes of transforming your book into a more profitable and culturally relevant viewable thing, and I’ve had my fair share of meetings and options and projects-in-the-works and so on, but it strikes me as both hilarious and affirming to see that the first person who was able to successfully adapt my work wasn’t a film studio with tons of capital, but rather a young, puckish composer who just went for it.1
But there are probably no such big wigs in the opera world (except for maybe an occasional large wig) and I don’t know if anyone is making much money from making operas but my feeling is… probably not? So it gets left alone, as an artform, to simply be itself and not to be judged according to its financial soundness, but rather on its own terms. This isn’t to say that good art made for its own sake can’t also make money, but rather that it simply feels good to see people endeavoring to create something beautiful because it is inherently satisfying to do so. And it’s a joy to play even the most distant part in that process.
When I was a kid, I spent almost all my time either participating in or watching performances at the church and at the community theater. Being on stage or watching something on stage always seemed to sharpen my focus. The proscenium had a way of making whatever happened off-stage seem like something to endure until life could be staged again. Writing a novel, in some ways, gives me the same feeling, just much more slowly. It’s almost as if all the writing is a rehearsal for the final form.
Tim Holt and his team (singers, musicians, a director, design people, and costume people and set people and lights people and sound people) workshopped the Nobody Is Ever Missing opera in January of 2025, but I wasn’t able to see it until the first week of October when it premiered. Since the novel is a first-person rant (one of those insane-girl-thinking-about-stuff novels) the opera is also in that vein— insane-girl-singing-about-stuff— and the majority of the piece was a solo.
It was staged outside, in a park, under a bridge covered in graffiti and later in a more open patch of grass. The way the sound echoed under the bridge was marvelous and intense. In the novel, the narrator keeps talking about this “wildebeest” that she has inside of her (I had almost forgotten about this detail) and Tim had translated the wildebeest into the drums. The effect was absolutely brilliant and—for several reasons— it brought me to tears. At the end of the last act the soloist, the ethereal Heather Morrison, appeared to be consumed by a tangle of bushes.
Afterwards, I spoke with some of the people who’d worked on the show, and I only wished I could have had more time to get to know them all. Opera people and classical music people— it seems to me they do their work for the sheer love of it, perhaps more so than other type of creative person.
Of course all artists have our big stupid egos, and our unmanageably large imaginations, and we can all be so annoying and obsessive, but while novelists sometimes act like they toil in obscurity, we still live in a world where there are bookstores. If you’re into classical music, if you’re in a string ensemble, if you’re a career cellist, if you’re adapting obscure literary books into obscure literary operas, or singing in said opera, or directing it, or light designing it, or or or — well you are probably doing this because it delights your soul. Thankfully there are venues that stage and organizations that celebrate this kind of art, but it seems to me the intrinsic motivation in creative people in this world is typically much stronger than the external validation or desire for compensation. I can’t say the same for everyone in the film world or publishing world.
The other weird thing about seeing the Nobody opera was that it was happening in the city where my ex-husband, Peter, lives with his partner and their three-year-old, and while we’re not the kind of exes that became best friends, I wouldn’t miss an opportunity to catch up with him in person since neither of us are great at keeping up with people from afar.2
So the walk and the talk we had before the opera really can’t be untangled from the experience of watching the performance itself. Do you still have an anniversary with the person from whom you are divorced? If so, we just passed ten years.