King of the thrill Harlan Coben: 'America used to seem cool – now it's gone berserk'

Harlan Coben was born in January 1962 in Newark, New Jersey. He studied political science at Amherst College, Massachusetts, and after graduating, worked at his grandfather’s travel company, where he started writing. His first novel, Play Dead, was accepted for publication when he was just 26. He has now written 35 novels, many of which were bestsellers. Several of Harlan Coben’s books have been adapted into TV dramas, including Fool Me Once and his new Neflix show, Missing You.

Speaking to the Big Issue for his Letter to My Younger Self, Harlan Coben looked back on an adolescence of escapism, how personal tragedy helped his writing and unimaginable success.

I always say adolescence is a war for everybody – no one gets out unscathed. But, at 16, I was pretty mainstream. I was a basketball player. That was my obsession. I was captain of the basketball team – maybe that was when I was 17 – and president of the student council. So I was a frighteningly normal and mainstream high school student at that point.  

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I lived in a town where you were expected to excel. Many of the students at my school went on to top colleges. It was quite competitive. Both my brothers went to Yale undergraduate and Harvard Law School. They both graduated early and had perfect SAT scores. So it was a competitive town. My parents were pretty good about it, though. They were an interesting team, my parents. My mother was louder, more outgoing – and they knew how to keep the pressure on subtly.  

I grew up in New Jersey in the 1970s, so we’re talking the Bruce Springsteen era. That’s who I grew up on. We didn’t have a lot of albums in the house, but my brother had bought Born to Run, then we got into Greetings From Asbury Park, NJ and The Wild, The Innocent & The E Street Shuffle. And in my senior year, he came out with Darkness on the Edge of Town. I don’t think you could find an artist with a stronger first four albums.   

We were decidedly middle-class, but I don’t think I saw how hard my parents were struggling to make ends meet. There was a tremendous amount of freedom for us as kids. I describe myself as a socially adept introvert. I write for a living so I spend most of my time alone in a room. I’m happy that way. I can go out and I could, especially back then, be social. But even as a child, I liked to create worlds in my head. It wasn’t anything anybody saw – most of my classmates are shocked at what I do now. It wasn’t like I displayed that side of me. But I loved to wander in the woods near our house. It was a water reservation that you weren’t supposed to go into, but I spent hours there, making up stories, finding ways of scaring myself.  

I didn’t write as a kid. I was just more in my own made-up world. So I had baseball cards, which a lot of people collected, they were a huge thing when I was a kid. But people would keep them in boxes and organise them, whereas I would play with them like other people did with dolls – spreading them out, imagining worlds, making up the good guys and bad guys. It’s a bit like what I do now. And I don’t want to be an old man complaining about the modern era, but because we didn’t have things to stimulate our brains with like these things [holds up mobile phone], you had to make it up. I had all sorts of things going on in my head without any distractions. And that was good training for what I do now.  

I had quite a bit of tragedy in my 20s. Things moved along fairly smoothly until then, I led a fairly normal American suburban life, but I did something like seven eulogies that decade. My dad died, my mom died, and a lot of people in my life died. So that probably also shaped me. Tragedy is a very cruel but effective teacher. I think that helped push me and made my writing better. 

My father’s death is still the most traumatic. Maybe because it was the first one. It came out of nowhere. But I’ve come to the conclusion with grief that it’s like you lose a limb, right? You lost your arm. You can learn to go on without that arm, you’re going to learn to do things with the other arm and still have a happy, productive life. But that arm’s not growing back. That’s how I look at grief. I still have imaginations and dreams that they’re still alive. But I’ve learned to live with it. It doesn’t mean your life is ruined. 

No one seemed politically engaged when I was young. We grew up during the Vietnam War and it felt like, when the war ended when I was 13, we would never have a war again. We felt like that was going to be the final war. So until [Ronald] Reagan came around and people became more active, we did not worry about politics much. Also, it wasn’t in our faces as much. We had a newspaper that came to our house, but we never watched TV news. So our knowledge was not great. But also, the disagreements between the right and left in America were much less extreme. For the most part, it seemed like a cool and peaceful time. Now it’s gone berserk.  

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My younger self would be shocked by my career. I’m still shocked. When I decided I’d try to write, back in the 1980s, I just wanted to have one novel published. To one day be able to see a copy in a bookstore. Then it was like, OK, two novels – to show it wasn’t a fluke. After that, maybe earn enough to scratch an embarrassing living so it is not just a hobby. Then, oh, if I could just skim the New York Times Best Sellers list, even for an hour. And it kept growing. I’m glad I couldn’t check Amazon rankings back then – because I thought I was doing great when I wasn’t. That naivety was good for me. 

I got to see every level of publishing before I had success. So I wouldn’t want to give my younger self too much advice because all the mistakes I made led me here. My first bestseller was my 10th published novel. I thought I was the cat’s ass. If I’d known how smalltime I was, I might have stopped. But I have a great appreciation now – maybe because of those books before I hit the bestseller list.  

I still get excited about my books being adapted for television. The most exciting part is always the first day, when I look around and there are maybe 200 people putting this together. I think, wow, I had this little idea, this little ‘what if?’ in my house in New Jersey and now all these people are bringing it to life. But part of doing an adaptation is letting go. Like, for Missing You, I created Kat Donovan – but [actor] Rosalind Eleazar is going to take her in a different direction. That’s really fun. When Netflix pushes a button, it will be in 230 million households in 190 countries. This is not my first time, but that still jazzes me. I hope it always does.  

I don’t want to give my younger self advice about relationships – because I got that kind of right with my wife. I’ve been with her since I was in college. So all the mistakes I made ended up working out for me. I would say take a deep breath, don’t worry about what people think, and relax – everything is going to work out.  

To bring it all back full circle, this summer, I was at the beach in Asbury Park, New Jersey. Bruce Springsteen played for the first time on that beach since we were both pretty young. He played all the songs from those first four albums. It was interesting having my son standing next to me, trying to explain that we didn’t have Spotify back then. I couldn’t listen to eight million songs. I had these four albums and a pop radio station, which played the same songs over and over. So these songs were my childhood. These songs were my adolescence. 

I realise some people think I maybe raise my father to sainthood because he died young. But I don’t think so. I’m fairly clear-eyed, and my brothers are too, that he was actually the ideal dad. He somehow managed to make you excel without pushing, he made you feel tremendous love without having to say it all the time. He was magic. He really was. And when I had kids, I was like an apprentice trying to figure out how the magician did the trick so I could be the kind of father he was. But when I became a parent, I tried to see how my father did it and still to this day I try to emulate what he did. I was extraordinarily lucky in that regard.  

Harlan Coben’s Missing You is on Netflix now.

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