Tim Green Will Return: The Sequel

Four and a half years ago I published a post titled “Tim Green Will Return,” and hints have been dropping ever since about a sequel to Believe in Me. While it took substantially longer than I’d imagined for that prophecy to come true—my fortune-telling skills never have been the greatest—the good news is, it’s about to happen.

Isolated open book

As suggested in “Tim Green Will Return,” the new story will pick up a thread that I purposely left dangling early on in Believe in Me, because I knew it wasn’t what that book was about, and I didn’t want to sidetrack the main story by following that trail. Here’s an excerpt from page 42 of the print edition:

By now you’re probably wondering about my mother. Me, too. I have a picture of her and that’s pretty much it. Dad had met her dancing in the aisle at a Bob Seger concert at the Oakland Coliseum on New Year’s Eve. They had ended the night in a feverish tangle in the back of Dad’s VW van, and that had been the last he’d heard from her for eleven months. Then one mild November day he had opened the door to his San Rafael apartment to find her standing in the hallway with a baby in her arms.

A few paragraphs later, Tim’s mother disappears into the ether, never to be heard from again. This narrative was something that Tim had always just accepted as part of his unique reality. But how much of it was strictly accurate, and how much represented the efforts of a protective single father to shield his only child from harder truths?

The new novel opens eight months after the end of Believe in Me, now two years after Tim’s father’s death. Tim is just starting to feel like he’s getting his feet back under him when he discovers a copy of the only picture of his mother he’s ever seen, squirreled away in his father’s files like a secret treasure. This discovery triggers him as surely as if he had PTSD, and his mind floods with questions he’s never before allowed himself to ask: Who is she? Where is she? Is she alive or dead? And how could she just hand him off to his father and walk away, never to be heard from again? These questions and the whirlwind of emotions they generate quickly spin into obsession.

There’s more, of course. At the same time Tim decides to try to track down his mother, he’s drafted into a new gig writing an authorized biography of a formerly-huge band that’s now on the downhill side of its career, drawing him into the orbit of an entirely new musical family very different from the one he encountered in Believe in Me. (Not that there won’t be familiar faces popping up here and there…)

It’s a story full of moments that let Tim do what he does best—observe and report on the interesting people around him—while also thrusting him into the center of the action, with personal stakes that couldn’t be higher. The question at the heart of the story is both simple and potentially life-changing: who is Tim Green? By the end, you’ll know.

We’ll be back soon with more news about the story, the title, the cover and such, but for now, a brief pitch: won’t you please take a moment to use the form at the bottom of this page to sign up for our newsletter? It comes out no more than a few times a year, but signing up will ensure you stay connected with the latest news, in addition to giving you exclusive access to unique giveaways not available anywhere else.

This September, Tim Green will return. And around here, that’s cause for a celebration…