Acclaimed Screenwriter Jeff Arch Writes a Rock-’n’-Roll Novel

The name Jeff Arch might not immediately ring a bell for most people, but his most famous piece of writing almost certainly will. Ever hear of a little-known movie called Sleepless in Seattle? Arch, nominated for Oscar, Writers’ Guild, and BAFTA awards and the writer behind that timeless film as well as many others, has finally published a novel more than 30 years in the making. Inspired by his time at a boarding school in Pennsylvania, Attachments is the story of three former friends whose tumultuous past at their prep school refuses to stay buried. 

It all starts when the school’s dean, Henry Griffin, has a stroke and barely manages to say the names of former students Pick and Goody: 

Griffin’s head went limp and heavy. He had to tell her about Piccolo and Goodman. He had to tell her, and she had to get them here, so they could be there for Chip. He felt his eyes rolling, fluttering upwards while some deeply planted instinct told him not to let them do that. He felt helpless, and inevitable, and doomed. Mrs. Levering was talking again. Her voice like it was leaving on a train. He had to try, one last time, before he wouldn’t be able to do anything at all.

When Pick, Goody, and their third friend, Laura, finally come back together after almost 20 years, all the secrets about what happened at school begin to spill out. Kirkus Reviews praises Attachments, saying it has “fine writing, memorable characters, depth of feeling, and gripping drama” and calling the novel “a real keeper.” 

Arch, who splits his time between Southern California and Cape Cod, couldn’t be happier with such warm praise. He spoke to many publishers who wanted to publish the novel so long as he made big structural changes. Arch considered their ideas and eventually decided to publish independently and write the book he wanted to write, which he acknowledges sounds like a cliché. “I wrote the book I would be most jealous of if someone else had written it,” he says. “It feels like if a rock-’n’-roll song was a novel, this would be it.” Now that he’s seeing enthusiastic feedback from readers and reviewers, he knows it was worth it to do things his own way. 

Getting into too many of the entanglements between Pick, Goody, and Laura would reveal secrets best learned by reading the book. But Arch confirms in the early chapters that part of the drama from their school days involved a love triangle, and though we see that Laura ended up with Pick, their marriage is struggling. Pick is an attorney working to distance himself from his notorious mobster father; Laura is still reeling from the loss of their child and feeling lonely in her marriage; and Goody? Well, no one’s quite sure where he’s been since he left school. 

There are many more secrets to be spilled than Goody’s whereabouts, though, which is why Dean Griffin tried so hard to call for them during his stroke. Some of the twisty plot points come from Arch’s own life experience or stories he heard from one of his former teachers, including one about a student whose father was in the mob. He also remembers a time when his girlfriend tried to sneak into the boys’ dormitory and ended up staying in his best friend’s room after getting lost. Though nothing happened between them, Arch later imagined how he would have felt had he discovered them in bed together and how much harder that would be for a high school student than a college student just a few years older.

Arch took that bit of inspiration and cultivated it into an idea for starting a novel, but he didn’t include an outline for finishing one. “I just knew there would be a betrayal, a teacher, and three kids,” he says, “but I didn’t know anything else.” What he did know was that he liked the idea of chapters alternating characters’ points of view. As he worked on the novel and got to know his characters, he found that technique to be a big help, because when he ran out of steam with one character, he’d end the chapter and switch to another. “I’d say, ‘Who’s next? Who wants a chapter?’ and one of the characters would step up and say, ‘I’m ready.’ ”

Arch kept track of plot pacing and the big events that needed to happen, like the friends coming together for the first time since they were kids, but other than that he focused on his characters. “It was all just figuring out how to paint myself out of a corner that I’d painted myself into every day,” he says. “People have called the book a mystery, but really it was me just trying to figure out story logic, which I love doing.”

One place where that combination of following his characters and following story logic got sticky was with the older version of Goody. As it turns out, Goody ran off to live with Buddhist monks, a choice inspired by a story Arch heard about a kid who’d gone to his school and left to live in India. Getting Goody’s voice and point of view just right is one of the reasons Arch is glad his journey to publishing this novel took as long as it did and that he stuck to his instinct to write the book the way he wanted it to be written. “All the philosophical stuff? I didn’t know about it; it’s like I wasn’t even there when that was being written,” he says. “But that’s the magic—when you surprise yourself.” 

Attachments is available for purchase, so readers can discover for themselves that same magic. A board member of Story Summit and regular screenwriting master class teacher, Arch is currently working on adapting Attachments into a screenplay as well as writing a romantic comedy TV series called Tiny Houses. Readers can find more information on Arch, as well as buy a copy of Attachments, on his website. 

Chelsea Ennen is a writer living in Brooklyn.