Jeff Hoffman Explores Accountability in Suspense Novel 'Like It Never Happened'

In his second published novel, Like It Never Happened: A Novel, prize-winning suspense novelist, Jeff Hoffman, writes an intriguing story about four long-time friends and a years-long secret they keep that ultimately threatens to destroy each of their lives. Hoffman explains, “Four boys do something terrible when they’re 18 and then their friendship falls apart around that. They get away with it, but as they’re trying to decide what to do and what kind of accountability they’re willing to accept, their friendship shatters and they don’t see each other for 30 years until one of them dies. The three remaining, men now, show up at the funeral and see each other for the first time, and they fully expect that to be a 45 minute encounter until they meet the wife of the dead man who happens to know everything and happens to be a reporter and happens to be very angry about what her husband went through as a result of what happened thirty years ago, and decides to draw them towards accountability.”

Similarly to the characters, Hoffman also faced a distressing encounter when he was 18 that was significant enough to have stayed on his mind years later. While Hoffman’s experience may have been traumatic and unforgettable, his situation was not unique. “The crime that happens, in its way, [is] somewhat mundane, mundane in a terrifying, terrible way… that it happens in parking lots in hundreds of cities every Friday night.” So much so that this type of storyline is a trope used many times in literature. So, how was Hoffman then able to make the story his own? “…I didn’t want to center the book on that trope, right? It drives the plot forward… It draws these men back together. I kind of think of it as the maypole around which the real story is wound, and the real stories are each of these men’s stories and the stories of their families… in some cases they’re lying, in some cases they’re keeping a horrible secret, and in all cases they haven’t really come to grips with the accountability that was demanded of them by what they had done… my way of making the story my own is examining how those repressions and how the lack of accountability can affect it and in a lot of ways introduce rot and problems into the relationships that are most important to them… If my first novel was about expectations, I would say this one is about accountability, as these men were drawn towards accountability, and resisted that accountability, and then made decisions about whether to embrace that accountability. I wanted to explore how that begins to repair some of the damage that they’ve done to their lives. “