63 pages • 2 hours read
Lisa UngerConfessions on the 7:45
Fiction | Novel | Adult | Published in 2020A modern alternative to SparkNotes and CliffsNotes, SuperSummary offers high-quality Study Guides with detailed chapter summaries and analysis of major themes, characters, and more.
Background
Genre Context: Psychological Thrillers
Psychological thriller is a popular subgenre of thriller in which the narrative style reflects the characters’ psychological landscape. There are often unreliable narrators, multiple points of view, events described out of chronological order, and concealed identities, all of which give the reader a sense of disorientation and uneasiness. The reader must piece together subtle clues to determine who the characters really are and the order in which events actually happened. There are often surprising twists and satisfying endings where the pieces fall into place.
Though these thrillers often do involve solving a mystery, they are not strictly in the “mystery” category because they involve domestic situations among spouses, close family members, and friends. The tension between characters and their emotional distress creates a sense of dread, often causing the characters and readers alike to question what is real.
Lisa Unger’s Confessions on the 7:45 has many of the hallmarks of the genre: The story unfolds nonlinearly, and the perspective shifts often. Several of the characters go by more than one name, and the reader has to figure out who they are and understand their different personas. One of the novel’s themes is that men are monsters who cannot be trusted; the women like and respect each other’s power and intelligence, even when they are on opposite sides of a conflict, but many of the men are manipulative, childish, violent, or a combination of those traits.
Truman Capote’s In Cold Blood (1966) is an example of a true story told in the manner of a psychological thriller, but many of the most popular contemporary examples are written by female authors and feature female protagonists. The rise of this genre’s popularity over the last decades is connected to the huge success of the book Gone Girl by Gillian Flynn and its movie adaptation, as well as the popularity of true crime stories in various formats, such as podcasts, documentaries, and TV series. Early examples of psychological thrillers include Rebecca by Daphne DuMaurier (1938) and some of Agatha Christie’s famous mysteries and thrillers, written between 1920 and 1975. More contemporary examples of authors of psychological thrillers are Paula Hawkins, Lisa Jewell, Tana French, Ruth Ware, and Karin Slaughter. All of Lisa Unger’s novels fall into the category of psychological thriller or crime fiction.
Cultural Context: Con Artists in Pop Culture
In the Acknowledgements at the end of Confessions on the 7:45, Lisa Unger references the book The Confidence Game by Maria Konnikova, a 2016 nonfiction exploration of the ways con artists use psychology to deceive their targets, and Liespotting: Proven Techniques to Detect Deception by Pamela Myer, a 2010 book about how to tell when people are lying. Unger used both of these texts, as well as a TED Talk from Pamela Myer, as references while constructing the con artist characters in the novel.
Long before these nonfiction books were published, many movies portrayed con artists. The 1973 film Paper Moon is about a con artist during the Great Depression who finds himself burdened with a young girl after her mother dies, and they begin to work together under the guise of father and daughter. The similarities between the premise of this film and the relationship between Pearl and Pop in Confessions cannot be ignored. The Oceans franchise, the first 1960 iteration of which starred Frank Sinatra and other members of the Rat Pack as casino robbers, later enjoyed a revival in the 21st century. This franchise glamorizes heists and con artistry with its A-list ensemble cast. In 2002, Leonardo DiCaprio starred in the blockbuster hit Catch Me If You Can, a film adaptation of the 1980 autobiography of famed con artist Frank Abagnale Jr. The 2013 film American Hustle, featuring con artists in the 1970s, garnered critical acclaim.
Many of the con artist characters in these films, much like the con artists in Unger’s novel, come from abusive and unhappy families. The outcomes vary, with some con artists getting caught (Catch Me If You Can) and others eluding capture and jetting off into a life of leisure (Ocean’s Eleven). Regardless of their fates, their lives are often romanticized, and the scammers are admired for their intelligence. All these pieces of media signify that the art of conning has been an object of fascination in American culture for a long time. Today, interests in con artists and true crime have converged in a hunger for stories about real-life scammers; the stories of Anna Delvey—the fake German heiress—and Billy McFarland, who organized the fake Fyre Festival, were not only media sensations but also sparked successful documentaries and television series.
