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Lisa Shanahan

Author of Murder by the Book

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  • The Huffington Post

Medium

What I Do Not to Be Fat (Editors’ Pick)

Medium, December 3, 2016

I have a palpable fear of being fat that began when I gained the “Freshman 15” at Vanderbilt. None of my clothes fit when I came home from school that Christmas. My parents could not contain their shock, and I felt mortified. Read the full article 


Live Music is the Soundtrack of My Daily Life 

Medium, November 3, 2016

My husband, Jim, is one of those gifted humans who plays piano by ear. Name any song. He can play it. Doesn’t look anything up. Music pours out of him through a magical process I’ll never understand. Read the full article


Breakfast Conversations in L.A. (A Mother/Daughter Story)

Medium, October 27, 2016

My daughter, who lives in L.A. and works in the film and TV industry, is connected like a made guy. She knows all the cool places to go, all the cool places to eat, all the cool places to stay without spending wads of cash. She’s a cool, sweet kid, more interested in unearthing cool stuff than in being cool, if you know what I mean. And the kid has taste not only in highbrow stuff, but in fine lowbrow stuff. Read the full article


Dealing with mortal fear. Will I dodge the breast cancer bullet? 

Medium, August 25, 2016

Home alone, I flip through the stack of mail on the bar in the kitchen. Hmm…my mammogram results. Letter good, phone call bad, I think, slitting the envelope from SIRA Imaging Center and unfolding the letter. Read the full article


My College Roommate–My Bodyguard. A Story and Review of My College Roommate’s New Book, An Interracial Comedy 

Medium, April 21, 2016

Come for the wisecracks and the sex scenes. Stay for the message.

The funniest woman I’ve ever known is my college roommate, Beth Wareham. Her new book with co-author, Jason Davis, about a housewife from Westchester County and a gangbanger from Harlem getting it on in hilarious circumstances, is a beautiful thing, y’all. Read the full article


Up a Tree with a Book: Figuring Out What I Was Always Meant to Be 

Medium, March 8, 2016

I’ve always known who I am. A bookish nerd who loves libraries, bookstores, museums, and travel. What I never knew about myself? What I was.

I started publishing personal essays on Medium a couple of years ago and recently wondered: Why travel? Why was I always writing about my travels? While conjuring this piece, it dawned on me I’d discovered many links to my past while on the road — in museums through art and in libraries — that helped me finally figure out in my fifties what I was always meant to be. (Defining my life’s calling has bedeviled me since I turned twenty, since I gave up being a pre-med my junior year at Vanderbilt.) The answer seems simple now, obvious even, looking back. How could I not have known? Read the full article


The Storm with Four Names

Medium, October 28, 2016

Halloween always reminds me of a scary night when I lived on Cape Ann in Rockport, Massachusetts, a few blocks from the ocean. I was thirty, a new mom, with a little baby girl. My husband, Jim, commuted twenty-eight miles to his office in Boston, and I was often home alone in the early evening with Isabel. Read the full article


5 Boston Landmarks That Inspired My New Mystery Novel (A Fictional Tour of the City)

Medium, September 24, 2015

The Boston Public Library in Copley Square

On a visit to Boston in 2007, the inspiration to write a novel struck me while I was sitting on a bench in the park in Copley Square, drinking my go-to coffee, admiring the Beaux Arts architecture of the Boston Public Library where I used to hang out years ago when I worked at a nearby publishing house. Bam. Happened in the instant I looked up at the frieze around the building, noticed the list of names from literature’s hall of fame carved in stone, and flashed back to the Eighties. I had an instant vision of what I wanted to put into a book based on those times. Read the full article


Got Kicked Out of Our Airbnb! Wish You Were Here! (A Postcard from California)

Medium, September 14, 2015

“Hey, Mom,” my daughter, Isabel, wrote last winter, “check out this cool house in Palm Springs on Airbnb. I think we should rent it and invite G-ma and have a family vacay there for the Fourth of July. Whatcha think, momz?” Read the full article


Chapter One From My New Novel. When I Got Lost in the Woods, Almost Eaten Alive

Medium, August 25, 2015
MURDER BY THE BOOK: A Boston Publishing House Mystery

I PEERED OUT A FROSTY WINDOW from the bar in the hotel on the hill above the Olympic Center, the highest point in Lake Placid. A snowstorm brewed on Whiteface Mountain in the High Peaks. Lights dotted the village like fairy dust — winked at me, put a spell on me. I picked up my glass and gulped a potent ale, concocted at a local brewery. A fire hissed in the thirty-foot-high, granite fireplace. A copper sculpture of a stag and his mate stood guard on a table in the middle of the room. The walls and the pitched-roof, made of peeled logs, formed a live shell, a forest lodge, a refuge from bad things that happen to creatures lost in the woods at night. Read the full article


Fireside, Unplugged. My Week off the Grid

Medium, January 19, 2015

My husband and I’d planned a weeklong vacation in a cabin in the Adirondacks, and I dreaded it. When I asked him what we’d be doing, he said, “Nothing! We can disconnect. No Internet, no TV, no cellphone service. And I can fish.” He sounded like a cute little kid, so I said, “Sounds great, hon!” Read the full article


How to Reinvent Yourself

Medium, October 5, 2014

I have a cosmic thing going on with the Peacock Room after reading about it in a recent Boston Globe article. The dazzling room, a permanent installation in the Freer Gallery of Art at the Smithsonian, blew my mind with its Wizard-of-Oz swag. Iridescent murals, gold-leaf peacocks, and an otherworldly painting — The Princess from the Land of Porcelain — decorate the paneled walls. A latticework of shelves display an exquisite porcelain collection, and frosted pendant lights twinkle in the Tudor-coffered ceiling. Read the full article


Why I Took a Pregnancy Test

Medium, September 12, 2014

“Am I pregnant?” I’ve been answering this question for years. (If you must know, for many years.) Earlier this year, though, something unusual happened, and I got an answer for which I was unprepared. Read the full article


Bicoastal Moms: A Queen and I

Medium, August 7, 2014

My plane from Boston hits the runway at LAX. I text Isabel, my daughter, “I’m here!!!” Read the full article


Why I Was Happy to Check My Medium Stats in The ER. An Ironic Sequel

Medium, July 28, 2014

Around ten o’clock on Saturday night, June 7, Medium tweeted a link to my last piece, “What I Did When My Life Was at Stake: Climbing Rock Candy Mountain,” that described the two surgeries I had twelve years ago to repair my twisted colon and my grueling month-long hospital stay. Immediately, total strangers tweeted me, retweeted the piece, recommended it, made heart-warming comments. Needless to say, I was blown away by this care and concern from people I don’t know, especially since the story was a big time commitment — a ten-minute read. That night it was hard to sleep. I kept waking up to check my iPhone — my Medium stats, my Twitter feed. Read the full article


What I Did When My Life Was at Stake. Climbing Rock Candy Mountain (Editors’ Pick)

Medium, June 4, 2014

I order a tall Americano, sit by the window of the Starbucks on Memorial Drive with a view of the Charles, the river that runs through Boston, my new home. I pull out a five-page document from my bag — a document it has taken me twelve years to request, which I obtained from the Harvard Vanguard doctor I’d just been to see. I raise my coffee, drink a toast, dub him my new life protector. Read the full article


Skater Girl: 5 Steps to Becoming an Adult Figure Skater

Medium, April 9, 2014

I skip into the den, sit cross-legged in front of the color TV set. Jeff and Scott, my brothers, plop beside me. Daddy turns the TV on to channel nine, gets comfortable in his brown leather recliner. “Spanning the globe to bring you the constant variety of sport … the thrill of victory … and the agony of defeat … the human drama of athletic competition … This is ABC’s Wide World of Sports!” we recite with the announcer. This week, figure skating. The World Championships from Yugoslavia … Read the full article


Masterpiece: My Astonishing Connection from Art to Childhood Artifact (Editors’ Pick)

Medium, February 26, 2014

In the seventies my brothers and I loved a board game called Masterpiece: The Art Auction Game. It had a deck of twenty-four cards, each card a masterpiece, a reproduction of a famous painting. We traveled the circular board with our character tokens — “collectors” who came complete with autobiographies — buying up masterpieces by bidding on them at auction. When we won an auction, we received our masterpiece card, like Monopoly but with paintings. The player who amassed the most valuable collection won the game. Read the full article


Extended Stay, LA: What I Learned, What I Left Behind

Medium, December 19, 2013

I squeeze into the crappiest seat on a USAir flight to LA. 36E, the middle one in the last row. I crane my neck, search for my daughter twenty rows up, who’s crying, sad to be leaving home — Ithaca, New York — “ten square miles surrounded by reality.” An LA agency had called two days before to offer her a job, her first after college. Two days to pack, organize a move across country. Read the full article


How to Write a Medium Fairy Tale 

Medium, December 8, 2013

The computer at my Gravity XX station buzzes me. I click on the live feed, scan the crater. The Sea of Tranquility. I observe the astronaut, our explorer, descend from the lunar landing module as planned, on time. Read the full article


A Fairy Tale Ending

Medium, November 15, 2013

My husband, Jim, and I load up his Jeep Wrangler on Brookline Street in Cambridge for our anniversary trip. The summer light, oozy. The briny smell of the ocean, fresh off the Charles. Excited, like the kids we were in 1981 when we met by accident in Harvard Square. His college gang. My college gang. Bang. Read the full article


My Naked Self (Baggage Optional) (Editors’ Pick)

Medium, October 15, 2013

Dateline: Friday, March 8, 2013

Wake me up before I go, go at three thirty in the a.m. with the harp-tone, I instructed my iPhone. Up in the dead of the night. Yippee. A trip. A vacation from winter, upstate. Read the full article


A Dog’s Life (Warning: Ending Foretold) (Editors’ Pick)

Medium, October 2, 2013

I spin the lazy Susan in the corner cabinet of the Ithaca kitchen, scoop out Annie’s Iams dinner, pour it into the silver bowl she’s eaten out of her whole life. I set it on the plastic placemat, the one my daughter Isabel used when she was a toddler, the one a nine-year-old Isabel willed to the yellow Lab puppy she named Annie the day we brought her home from an Amish farm on Seneca Lake. Read the full article


LA: A Mother/Daughter Story. I Was the Visitor, She the Guide (Editors’ Pick)

Medium, September 16, 2013

Headed cross-country, I peer out the window. The plane bounces, lofts high above Vegas, where I’d taken her and G’ma to celebrate her twenty-first. Now, two years later, I’m on my way to L.A. to visit my daughter’s new home, anxious to see how she’s doing, if I’ll like her new boyfriend. She’d booked the hotel, planned the itinerary, recommended the restaurants we’d try. I, the visitor. She, the guide. A role reversal I looked forward to playing. Read the full article

Christopher Matthews Publishing
(November 21, 2016)
231 pages
ISBN: 978-1945146145

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Copyright © 2021 Lisa Shanahan