Richard Flynn’s Writing of The Book of Mirrors

Richard Flynn’s writing of The Book of Mirrors manuscript turns a buried past into the work that reawakens his abandoned identity as a writer. Triggered by a discovery whose details he does not disclose in his query to Peter, Flynn revisits the events of 1987 involving Laura Baines and Professor Joseph Wieder, and begins to write with the aim of making the hidden truth known.

The Discovery and the Return of Memory

Twenty-seven years after studying English at Princeton, Flynn describes himself as someone who had set aside his literary ambitions. He had published a few short stories and written a three-hundred-page novel, but abandoned it after publishers rejected it and he came to regard it as mediocre. He entered advertising in New Jersey, telling himself at first that the work might lead him back to literature; that return never came. The discovery he mentions in his letter breaks into this settled account of his life by bringing back the tragic events of the fall and winter of 1987, his final year at Princeton.

Flynn presents the memories as something long hidden rather than wholly lost: an old, neglected part of the mind suddenly gives way, and the past comes rushing back. He says the recovered months became more vivid and powerful than his present life. The account is therefore framed not as a gradual decision to write, but as a response to the force with which the past returns.

The Writing Begins

An hour after learning the news, Flynn was still considering its significance when he sat at his desk and began writing. He continued until long after midnight, producing more than five thousand words. The episode marked a change in how he understood himself: he felt as though he had rediscovered who he was after forgetting himself, and the reflection in his bathroom mirror seemed to belong to a different person.

The change carried into the following day. For the first time in many years, Flynn fell asleep without taking a pill. He told his advertising agency he would be absent for two weeks and continued writing. In the letter, he describes the details of 1987 as returning with unusual clarity, as though his mind had been preparing for the moment when he would write about the people at the center of those events: Laura Baines, Professor Joseph Wieder, and Flynn himself.

Purpose and Completion of the Manuscript

Flynn says the story had appeared in newspapers at the time, at least in part, and that detectives and reporters had harassed him for a considerable period. That attention was one reason he left Princeton and pursued an MA at Cornell, where he spent two years in Ithaca. Despite the public reporting, he maintains that the truth of the whole story was never discovered. Three months before writing to Peter, he says, he chanced upon that truth and decided it had to be shared.

He acknowledges that anger and frustration remain part of his response, and describes pain and hatred as fuel for the writing. The effort to complete the manuscript left him physically and mentally exhausted, but he presents it as finished and ready for submission. His query includes a sample, as requested on Peter’s website, and offers to send the complete manuscript. The writing thus carries two connected consequences: it gives form to a truth Flynn believes was missed, and returns him, after decades in advertising, to the literary ambition he had thought he had abandoned.