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ALEXANDRIA MARZANO-LESNEVICH
Author of Fact of A Body
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Alexandria Marzano-Lesnevich is the author of THE FACT OF A BODY: A Murder and a Memoir, named an Indie Next Pick and a Junior Library Guild selection; one of the most anticipated books of 2017 by Buzzfeed, Book Riot, and the Huffington Post; a must-read for May by Goodreads, Audible.com, Entertainment Weekly, Real Simple and People; long-listed for the Gordon Burn Prize and a finalist for a New England Book Award; one of the 10 best books of the year so far by Entertainment Weekly; and one of the best books of the year so far by Audible.com and Book Riot. It was published May 16th in the US and May 18th in the UK, to be followed by the Netherlands, Turkey, Korea, Taiwan, Spain, Greece, Brazil, and France. The recipient of fellowships from The National Endowment for the Arts, MacDowell, and Yaddo, as well as a Rona Jaffe Award, Marzano-Lesnevich lives in Boston, where she teaches at Harvard.

Copyright © 2017 Alexandria Marzano-Lesnevich · Site Design: Ilsa Brink · Background photos © Calcasieu Parish Sheriff’s Office

Grandfathers and Child Molesters
Tucker Coombe interviews Alexandria Marzano-Lesnevich

14 0 3

MAY 28, 2017

IN HER STUNNING first book, The Fact of a Body: A Murder and a Memoir, Alexandria Marzano-Lesnevich doesn’t so much introduce her two main characters as immerse the reader directly in their lives. What does one character — the author, a graduate of Harvard Law School with an MFA from Emerson College — have to do with the other — a pedophile and murderer named Ricky Langley? The connections that emerge are surprising and deeply unsettling.
To the casual observer, the author’s own childhood seems idyllic. Marzano-Lesnevich and her twin brother, along with their two younger sisters, grow up in a ramshackle Victorian house in Tenafly, New Jersey. Her parents, both small-town attorneys, are ambitious and devoted to their children. On a typical summer afternoon, the author shows her younger self perched at the top of an old swing set, reading a Nancy Drew book. Her father mows the yard on his tractor, and music blares from a boombox in the grass.
But there are secrets: the inexplicable scar across her brother’s stomach, a sister who died in infancy, and nighttime visits — by Marzano-Lesnevich’s own grandfather — to the girls’ bedrooms.
Down in Louisiana, another story unfolds. Young Ricky Langley is at once pitiable and repellent — jug-eared, slow-witted, and haunted by visions. Before he’s even a teenager, Ricky has begun to molest young children. Some days — fully aware of his hideous impulses — he begs to be locked up. Other days he wishes for nothing but to be left alone, to hunt and fish and live quietly down by the river. In 1992, a six-year-old boy named Jeremy Guillory knocks on Ricky’s front door, looking for his friend Joey. Three days later, Jeremy is found dead, stuffed in Ricky’s bedroom closet.
The author first learns about Ricky Langley when she’s a 25-year-old law student, interning with a firm that’s working on his defense. More than a decade later, she’s still troubled by his story.
Is Ricky Langley a calculating killer, Marzano-Lesnevich wonders, or was the murder of Jeremy Guillory a warped reaction to some long-buried trauma? She begins a thorough unearthing of Ricky and his family — poring over some 30,000 pages of legal documents, wandering through overgrown graveyards, and visiting the site of his last crime. And as she absorbs the story of Ricky Langley, she begins to examine the uncomfortable truths of her own family.
Marzano-Lesnevich writes about her own life in a way that’s both sensuous and heartrending. One can feel the anxiety of children watching their parents leave for the evening, and smell the stale breath of an old man as he spits out his false teeth, grins, and unzips his pants. “I’m a witch,” he whispers. “Don’t forget. If you tell I’ll always come find you.”
“I have layered my imagination onto the bare-bones record of the past,” she writes, in order to better be able to evoke the grim and eerie world of Ricky Langley. And her writing is evocative as well; the house where young Jeremy is murdered, for example, has “an ominous shape, as if [it] were just a skin worn by a creature who lurked underneath.”
Marzano-Lesnevich has contributed essays and short fiction to publications including The New York Times, Oxford American, and Virginia Quarterly Review. She teaches public policy at Harvard’s Kennedy School of Government and works with memoir-writers at Grub Street, a writing center in Boston.
She spoke to me from The Writers’ Room, in Boston, where much of this book was written.
¤
TUCKER COOMBE: One of the central characters of your memoir is your father. In your early years, he’s characterized by a tremendous love of family, optimism, and unbridled enthusiasm. Tell me about him.
ALEXANDRIA MARZANO-LESNEVICH: My father is a bit larger than life. He’s a bon vivant. He loves a good time, he loves a good party, he loves a big family. He’s very large hearted, and likes to be in front of a crowd. When my brother and I were in our 20s and realized we actually liked going to sleep at a reasonable hour, we would laugh because our parents would have dinner at 11 o’clock at night and always keep a later bedtime than us.
Your childhood seems to have been fun and chaotic, but also full of silences and closely guarded secrets. Can you talk about how these two very different attitudes co-existed in your family?
There was always a lot of love. It was always very loud, and always very exuberant. We would have 30 or 40 people over for Christmas dinner. Everything was a big party, and I loved it. As a child, it was very confusing for me that we would have that outward joy, but then there would be all the impossible-to-miss silence. There were many things that we were just not supposed to talk about. I had no way to put the pieces together, to understand why both sides existed. And as an adult, I was very drawn to this question.
Shifting to the story of Ricky Langley, I’d like to ask you to recount one of the most unforgettable scenes in this book: the night six-year-old Jeremy Guillory disappeared. In particular, you tell of one police officer who stayed out at the edge of the woods, looking for Jeremy, long after the other searchers had gone home.
The night Jeremy disappeared, word got around the small town where he lived in southwestern Louisiana, then spread around the whole area, which was a knot of several small towns that I’ve now been to many times. It’s rural, but very close knit. One of the people who testified about that night was a young police officer, Calton Pitre.
Ten years after the murder, Calton Pitre remembered that Jeremy had been wearing a Fruit of the Loom T-shirt. And he said, “I remember it because my own son used to wear those T-shirts.” That night, no one had any idea where Jeremy was, but they thought maybe he was in the woods. Calton Pitre just stayed there: he flashed his lights, and flashed his lights, and flashed his lights, and watched the woods and hoped that a child would come out. It was really striking how much that night had stayed with people, how much they remembered the feeling of Jeremy being missing, and how much they remembered searching for him.
Your depiction of Ricky, on that night, was particularly chilling.
Earlier that evening, Jeremy had gone over to the house where Ricky Langley was a lodger. He went over to play with his friend Joey, and Joey’s sister. But they were away. Ricky answered the door, invited Jeremy in, and strangled him. And then he hid Jeremy’s body in the closet. Jeremy’s mother came to the door shortly afterward, looking for her son. Ricky invited her in to use the phone. She made some calls, then left to go to some other houses. She came back to Ricky’s house, and called 911. It really struck me that Ricky called 911 right after she did to give them a better description of where to find the house. Meanwhile, the child’s body was upstairs in Ricky’s closet.
That night, while the searchers were looking for Jeremy, Ricky took care of their children. He played with them in his bedroom. Later, the searchers collected their children and went home. Ricky stayed up that night. He did laundry, he washed the floor repeatedly, and he put aluminum foil over his windows. I have no way of knowing why he did this, but from statements he made at his confession, I think he felt like he was being watched.
You’re a graduate of Harvard Law School. Was there a specific reason you decided to turn away from the law and become a writer?
I have always written. I wrote a great deal of fiction, actually, all the way until my grandfather died. When he died, I stopped writing — cold turkey — because somehow I was afraid that I’d write something that was close to my own life.
When I was in law school and starting to learn about death penalty cases, the need to write came back to me. I had always seen the world through the lens of writing, and I had no other way to process what I was seeing. During my second year of law school, I started taking fiction-writing classes at night at the Harvard Extension School.
After I finished law school, I knew I wasn’t going to practice law. The only law I’d ever wanted to practice was death-penalty defense. That got emotionally quite complicated for me, for reasons that I think become clear in the book. So I decided I’d get a PhD and do academic research related to the death penalty.
But before doing that, I also decided to give myself a fiction MFA as a present — for fun. I enrolled in an MFA program, thinking I would work on a novel and also write an academic book on the death penalty. But that’s not what happened. Super not what happened.
Slowly, through my MFA program, I started writing about things that had happened in my own family. And thinking a lot about Ricky and Jeremy.
You first became aware of Ricky Langley when you interned with a firm that worked on his defense. It was years later that you decided to return to Ricky and his story. What drew you back?
Through the MFA program, I had slowly started writing about things that had happened in my own family. And yet, the way I understood things became so tangled up with Ricky that when I tried to explain my own life, I needed also to talk about Ricky’s life, which had had a tremendous impact on me.
When I got the initial set of court records — 8,000 pages — I had no intention of writing about Ricky. I just wanted to try to lay his story to rest inside of me. Had I known I would spend as many years as I did thinking about Ricky’s case, I’m not sure I would have gotten those records. I think that’s often true with memoir: that we stumble toward things we don’t quite understand, things that have a hold on us. And often we land someplace quite deeper than we ever intended to go.
Ricky had a hold on me that I didn’t understand. But I thought that if I just had the facts of what had happened in Ricky’s case, it would not be so mysterious to me. Being able to pin it down would collapse it, would make it safe in some way, and mean that I didn’t have to keep thinking about it. And of course that’s not what happened.
I thought, at the time, that the law was a realm where we left our personal experiences behind. I wanted the reason and rationality of the law. I wanted to get out of my own emotions — to wipe the past away — and I really thought it was my own failing that I couldn’t do that.
And then I started reading the records. And I was shocked to learn that all the people who had come in contact with Ricky’s case had interpreted it through the lens of their own past — that I hadn’t been the only one. Ricky’s lead defense attorney saw the case through the lens of his own childhood. The jury foreman saw the case through the lens of his own family. And I saw the case through the lens of my grandfather.
As I say in the book: What you see in Ricky depends as much on who you are, and what’s happened to you, as what he’s done.
Reading this memoir, I thought you were immersing yourself in Ricky’s story to help make sense of your own life. What you’re telling me is that your own experiences influenced how you saw Ricky’s story.
I think both are true. I’d read something in Ricky’s file and it would make me think of my own life. I’d work on a piece about my own life and suddenly I would think of Ricky. The book begins in a very strict, braided narrative. Ricky’s story stays in his chapter, and my story stays in my chapter. And then, the two narratives start to co-mingle.
Looking at his life taught me about my own. Looking at my life helped me try to understand his.
The first moment I saw Ricky, and heard him describe what he’d done, I immediately thought of my grandfather. I had a really strong, emotional response, and — despite what I believed about the death penalty — I thought that Ricky should die.
Initially, you may have wanted Ricky Langley to die. But throughout this book, you depict him with remarkable compassion.
When I first started reading the files, it’s fair to say I did not feel much compassion for him. I had a great deal of trouble reading the files. They were really disturbing. But the more I read, the more I saw that this young man was in some way trapped by who he was. I was struck by his repeated attempts to try to get away from the past, to start all over again. As if, maybe this time he could have a different life.
I too was someone who had felt trapped, for a very long time, in a totally different way, and under totally different circumstances. So I have empathy for that.
At the same time, I wanted to write into the book, and acknowledge to the reader, how dangerous and slippery it was to have empathy for this man. Ricky was a child murderer and a pedophile. He had done terrible, terrible things.
When I first saw Ricky, I viewed him purely as evil because he was a child molester and a murderer. And in the course of getting to know him, I began to see him as a complicated person. I began to see both sides of him. In some ways, the entire book is a reckoning of that duality.
You did a tremendous amount of research on Ricky Langley. It was much harder, as you point out, to get the backstory on your own grandfather. Did your understanding of Ricky in any way help you to understand your grandfather?
I think in some ways I was looking at Ricky Langley as a substitute for my grandfather. I don’t have any records of my grandfather. I have no way of understanding who he was in a deeper way.
And what my grandfather did blotted out the rest of who he was in my memory. I couldn’t remember, for example, that he had taught me to draw when I was young. But he was both things, really: a grandfather, and a child molester.
¤
Tucker Coombe writes about nature and education. She lives in Cincinnati.

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THE LOGIC OF THE BOOK: TALKING WITH ALEXANDRIA MARZANO-LESNEVICH
BY SHARON HARRIGAN
September 13th, 2017

The Fact of a Body: A Murder and a Memoir is the culmination of ten years work by an NEA and Rona Jaffe award-winning writer and Harvard-trained legal expert on the death penalty. As the subtitle suggests, the book is a braided narrative, a combination of memory and true-crime reporting. In alternating chapters, it follows the story of the murder of a six-year-old boy and the story of Alexandria’s own past, which the murderer’s testimony forces her to revisit and try to understand.

I met Alexandria several years ago at the Virginia Center for Creative Arts when we were fellows at the same time. I was working on my memoir, and her memoir proposal had recently sold to Flatiron Books, and was on submission to international publishers. I was writing about events I had witnessed and those I hadn’t seen but had to figure out how to put in scene. At the heart of my story were acts of violence, but I wanted to present them in a way that was not emotionally manipulative. When I heard Alexandria read excerpts from her book, I was stunned. She had figured out how to handle all the technical and ethical issues I was struggling with, and she did so with the elegance and grace of a master stylist. Her work has been compared to the podcast Serial, and the TV show True Detective. It’s also been likened to books by Wally Lamb and Truman Capote. I would agree but go further. Her finely chiseled prose has the resonance and intellectual heft of a writer like Joan Didion.

While we were at VCCA, the book sold in the UK. It was an exciting moment that I enjoyed experiencing vicariously through her. I wasn’t surprised there was so much interest in her story. It has everything a reader could want: a plot as compelling as a legal thriller; fully rounded characters; a perceptive and insightful narrator who guides us through the story, as we discover the facts at the same time she does; and a myriad of dilemmas that couldn’t be more relevant and topical.

I wish that I had read this memoir before I wrote my own. There’s so much technique to learn from it as a writer. There’s also a lot we can learn, as citizens advocating for justice in a world that seems less fair and predictable every day. In my interview, I asked Alexandria about both big social issues and questions of craft.

***

The Rumpus: Let’s start with the big social issues. How did you get interested in the death penalty?

Alexandria Marzano-Lesnevich: As a child, I was on vacation with my family when my twin brother told a joke with a punch line that included “the electric chair.” I had never heard of the electric chair. So I asked him what it was, and he explained. From that moment on I knew I was an opponent of the death penalty. I had a visceral response to the idea that as a society we would decide to kill somebody in a methodical, intentional way and that we had built a system to execute people. I am the daughter of two lawyers. I grew up idealizing the law as a philosophical record of our commitment to society, and I thought of it as something that pursued justice. The idea that the law would take someone’s life seemed immediately to violate that. So even as a child I had a strong response. Then I went to law school to try to understand why the courts found the death penalty constitutional. I thought there must be an explanation, something I was missing. Because to me, it had always seemed like it would be considered cruel and unusual, certainly. I didn’t understand yet that I might just disagree with the courts. So I went to law school to try to study that. Before I went I really thought of the law as this truth-seeking mechanism, where we have a trial and that trial is designed to elicit truth. I think until very recently in society we still pretty much thought of it that way. We still thought that when somebody was adjudicated of a crime, for example, that the truth was that they were guilty of that crime. Now I think we question that assumption. We understand more that a trial is a competition between two stories.

Rumpus: That’s an interesting way to put it.

Marzano-Lesnevich: The prosecution and the defense each tell a different story, often out of the same facts. There may be a dispute about what the facts are. But even when you have the facts there’s disagreement about how to think of them. And how you think of them comes down to a story.

Rumpus: That makes sense. And your narrator’s voice often sounds like the voice of a lawyer addressing a jury, but the narrator is addressing us, the reader.

Marzano-Lesnevich: Yes. Starting to recognize that different approach in law school simultaneously made me more interested in the law but also less interested in being a lawyer. I became fascinated with the way we construct these stories, with what gets left in and what gets left out. I suppose, in the book, I’m trying to bring the reader along in that discovery.

Rumpus: Is crafting a memoir like crafting a legal narrative? We have to leave out much, much more than we put in, when we write a memoir.

Marzano-Lesnevich: I’ve been teaching memoir for a number of years and it always strikes me that you can take the same event in a person’s life and, depending on where you put it in the narrative, it acquires a different meaning. For example, the same events, even when they are put in chronological order, can take on different meanings depending on how quickly or slowly time unfolds in the chapter. And an event positioned as the inciting incident leads to a different meaning than the same event positioned, say, as the crisis. I think these choices—where you begin and end the story and how long you linger on particular events—affect how we understand a story and how we understand cause.

Rumpus: The longer you linger on an event, the more emphasis you’re giving it. If something comes first, it’s seen as the foundation for what comes after.

Marzano-Lesnevich: As a writer, one of the things that revelation meant for me was that I had to think about the meaning I was creating when I was structuring my book. For example, the book starts with Ricky Langley killing Jeremy Guillory. I thought quite intentionally about how I don’t want that murder to be in the climax of the book. I really don’t want the structure to indicate that that’s the meaning, that’s the point, the surprise of his death. That would seem cheap to me, somehow. And the same thing with the abuse in my family. I could have started with the abuse in my family and made it the inciting incident but in truth the inciting incident has to be larger than that. It has to be more about the silence and secrets in the family, or the way in which it’s a loving family but there’s still this undertow. Because I wanted my family narrative to be about more than just one thing, I thought a great deal about where to put each event in the memoir thread of my book.

Rumpus: And for the “murder” thread?

Marzano-Lesnevich: I had to carefully consider which events to start and end with. I knew, from reading 30,000 pages of records—

Rumpus: 30,000 pages?

Marzano-Lesnevich: That’s part of why this book took so long to write! So, I knew from the records of Ricky Langley’s trials that there was so much material that hadn’t made it into the trial. So much that had happened and, I think, was relevant to any understanding of the past, but hadn’t been admitted in court. I looked at the way Langley’s story was told in the files and the way it was told in each of the three trials—because it was told differently in each one—and the way it was told in different news accounts, the way the lawyers in the case have continued to tell the story to newspapers, the way that the story was told in a UK play that was based on the case—there were all these different tellings, and even in the records there are different tellings.

Rumpus: Like what?

Marzano-Lesnevich: For example, there was a 1964 car crash that was profoundly devastating to the Langley family and had far-reaching consequences in their lives. The newspaper accounts from 1964 report that it occurred in the middle of the day. But then when people told the story at the 2003 trial they said it occurred in the middle of the night. I think that was simultaneously more dramatic and more believable—the cover of night, darkness, all that. It made for a better story, and I don’t think people consciously chose to get the facts wrong; their subconscious just made a story. So the story is shaped and shaped and shaped and shaped and sometimes the facts are altered. But even more common was that the facts were stable but the way people interpreted them was different—and then those different interpretations got written into, and ended up shaping, future tellings of the story. After reviewing all this material, I realized that what I wanted to do was tell a story that would also be about the construction of all these stories.

Rumpus: And you do. Another difficult thing you make look easy is filling in details for scenes you weren’t present for. The memoir part of the book you were a witness to. But the murder part is often constructed from court transcripts. To keep our attention, you need to turn those transcripts into stories, give us characters we can see and hear. You signal when you’re adding something from your imagination or experience, and you tell us why you choose the details you do. Can you talk about the process? The technical and ethical issues you had to wrestle with and how you made them work?

Marzano-Lesnevich: I don’t think of it as filling in the gaps with my imagination. I think it’s really important to note that I didn’t invent events. It was more that, as I was reading these records—as happens to all of us I think when we read anything incredibly vivid—the scene would come to life in my mind. And so when I would read, for example, about this car crash, I would see these people in my mind. And then I would read that when Ricky Langley was an adult he told stories about having a dream about the car crash to a roomful of corrections officers, and that those corrections officers, they all gave affidavits afterwards in which they said what they recalled and the dream that he told comes through so vividly in these people’s retellings. So what I tried to do was bring that experience to life for the reader. At the same time, because I want to be straightforward about this process, I acknowledge that even as I was writing about how other people were making stories out of the murder, I, too, was necessarily making stories out of it.

Rumpus: Your narrator addresses the reader.

Marzano-Lesnevich: It was really important to me to have an active narrator voice so the reader would always know when I was telling myself a story from these records. My goal is for the reader to feel the presence of a single mind piecing together a story from all the information. And so it was essential for me to note where the facts were quite solid and where they had come from, and that’s why I have twelve pages of source notes at the end of the book.

Rumpus: I think you’re crystal clear about what your sources are and where the facts come from. By using an active narrator as our guide, you show us that we all make pictures when people are telling us stories. I appreciate how you make that process transparent. Did you always know this was the right approach for your book?

Marzano-Lesnevich: Oh man, I tried so many different approaches. So, so many. And that’s another reason why this book took so long to write, just the challenge of figuring out how to tell this story. How could I tell it in as complex a way as I needed to but still keep the pages turning quickly? As a reader, I really like page turners. So I knew I wanted to tell a story that would envelop the reader, make the reader feel as immersed in it as I felt when thinking about these stories. I tried at one point to tell it in a more straightforwardly memoir way. I tried at another point to tell it in a more straightforwardly journalistic way. I then realized that this element of storytelling that we’ve been discussing was too crucial to this book not to highlight it so I felt that I had to do a construction with a more active narrator. But then, since I have two threads, I had to figure out how to weave them. And the way I did that was I actually wrote a couple hundred-page condensed versions of the book.

Rumpus: Sounds like a lot of work.

Marzano-Lesnevich: Yeah, and then I threw the pages away! But the exercise helped me understand how the two stories were layered. I restarted this book many times. After getting the NEA grant, I again jettisoned everything except twenty-five pages and started all over again, basically. But all that work with the layering helped me trust where the meaningful connections were. And also learn which connections weren’t as meaningful. So despite the fact that the book has taken me years to write, about half of the actual pages were written in the last year before turning it in to my editor.

Rumpus: Interesting. Half the book took nine years, and the other half took one.

Marzano-Lesnevich: Yes—because I think when you finally find the voice of the book, the pages flow much more easily. But to find that, I’m someone who has to write, throw away. Write, throw away. This story took a long time to figure out how to tell, but one thing about that process was that it helped me trust my own sense of the story. It was only in the rewriting, frankly, that I became structurally braver. And also emotionally braver. Because as the structure of the book solidified I began to realize that I could go deeper into the rawer emotions without losing that structure, because I knew enough about the structure and how to keep it going. It’s notable to me that two of the most emotionally intense moments in this book—moments that now think are vital—weren’t there with that intensity until about two weeks before I turned the manuscript in.

Rumpus: Fascinating. Why do you think it happened that way?

Marzano-Lesnevich: If the structure hadn’t been solidly in place it would have felt too risky to delve into the rawer stuff because there would be the danger that the emotion would overwhelm the structure. Which is something I think you have to worry about all the time with memoir.

Rumpus: That it would take you into a detour, a digression that’s so powerful that you leave behind the thread of the story you meant to continue.

Marzano-Lesnevich: Exactly. I’d been working with the structure for so long that I understood how it was going to work, which structural signals I needed to put in, and what the logic of the book was. I think of that phrase a lot when I’m teaching.

Rumpus: The logic of the book. That’s a great phrase.

Marzano-Lesnevich: What I mean by it is, How is the structure tied to the angle of vision of the narrator and tied to the voice? What’s the interior logic to why this book works the way it does? What’s it trying to say about the world? And I think the reason I spend so much time thinking about that is it felt so crucial to this book. Because if there weren’t a narrative reason the teller of this story is so interested in storytelling, there wouldn’t be a narrative reason for how much it moves backward and forward in time.

Rumpus: The structure has to mirror the content.

Marzano-Lesnevich: I really think so. Ideally, the structure itself will reveal something about the meaning of the story.

Rumpus: When I teach memoir, structure is one of the things students struggle with the most. It’s helpful to have examples of different kinds of structures, and I’m sure I’ll be using your book as a great model.

Marzano-Lesnevich: Thank you.

Rumpus: You’ve described writing this book as an exercise in empathy. How did your empathy change as you found out more about Ricky Langley and your grandfather?

Marzano-Lesnevich: When I started first reading these records I had no empathy for Ricky Langley. How could I possibly have any empathy for him? He was a pedophile and a murderer.

Rumpus: Of course.

Marzano-Lesnevich: He wasn’t a person to me. He was what he had done. So when I started, the records were difficult for me because I didn’t have empathy for him. I was reading his therapy notes from when he was an older teenager and it was terrible for me to read them because he was so problematic to me. I mean he still is problematic to me, obviously, but at that point he just seemed evil. But I kept reading. And then slowly it became even harder—because as I read, I started to realize that here he was as a teenager arguably trying to get help, but at the same time being trapped by who he was. My understanding of him became more complicated, and more empathetic.

And then that was really hard for me! And really problematic in its own way, because then was impossible for me to escape the same questions about my grandfather. Who was he, when he climbed the stairs of my childhood bedroom? What was he thinking? What was that like for him? That’s such a terrible question, in a way, to have to ask as someone who was abused by him.

There’s something strange that happens when you write about real people. The real people become characters, which means that you have to have a fully rounded idea of them. I started to see Langley in this somewhat empathetic way—never losing sight of what he’d done, the terrible harm he’d caused, that he’d killed Jeremy Guillory and abused children—but also understanding that he was a person at the same time. Somehow that’s the most terrible, and most necessary, realization to me. And of course it made me think about my own life.

When we write fiction or creative nonfiction, we have to try to see our characters are rounded, and we have to try to understand what their motivations were and what the story they were telling themselves about their actions was even if we don’t agree with it, we have to at least understand it for the characters to be three-dimensional. That drove me to figure out why my parents made the choices they did and who they were as people and what they were struggling with that led them to make those choices. And then there was my grandfather. The realization that I was going to have to engage in that kind of empathy for everyone in this memoir was difficult but also probably life altering

Rumpus: Life altering?

Marzano-Lesnevich: Sure. It fundamentally changed how I saw things. It also forced me to look at my younger self in an empathetic way. Some of the moments in the book that I struggled with writing the most were the ones of me as a young adult and struggling with eating disorders and other problems. I had to look back at her and see how young she was and how much she was trying to handle and have empathy for her.

Rumpus: And yet it’s also possible to have too much empathy, right?

Marzano-Lesnevich: Oh, yes. I don’t want to give anything away, but there’s a girl in the records who Langley abused and I thought she was fourteen. I think, had I not been reading very empathetically, I might have stopped short when I was thinking she was fourteen and thought wait, that doesn’t match with everything else I know about who this man is. Is there a hidden story here? But instead, I had been spending so much time with him as a character in a book and as a person through the records that I was trying to see a way to understand him and in trying to think the girl was fourteen, I wrote a story in my head and thought, Maybe this was the one time it was different. Of course it would have been terrible if she was fourteen, too, but to when I found out she was five—at that moment I realized the danger of too much empathy.

Rumpus: It can turn into wishful thinking and denial and cover up.

Marzano-Lesnevich: Absolutely. And I think with my family, part of the reason they made the decisions they did was out of empathy for my grandmother. Out of empathy for her they tried to pretend that the abuse never happened. And that did a great deal of damage. And so with the book, one of the choices I made was to write about my mistaking a five-year-old girl for a fourteen-year-old girl because I wanted to call myself out on the danger of empathy, and to show that what’s important is to come back to the body, back to Jeremy Guillory’s murdered body, and back to the secrets my body held. I wanted to show that we empathize because we’re trying to understand, but at the same time, no matter how many times you tell the story you’re going to come back to the fact of the body.

Rumpus: The body is proof.

Marzano-Lesnevich: We tell stories and there are differences in how we interpret the facts, but there are still facts. In this case, there are many things that will never be known but there is still the fact of the body. And that’s true in my life, too. And so I wanted to show the many ways of holding that duality.

Rumpus: What response are you hoping to get from your book?

Marzano-Lesnevich: The most meaningful thing to come out of this book, for me, has been the conversations. It’s so profoundly moving for me when people read my book and then share their own stories about what they carry in their own lives.

Rumpus: The things we carry.

Marzano-Lesnevich: The other thing I hope people take from the book—and they seem to so far—is the awareness of its complexity. My deep hope was that in reading this story about how we make stories in this one case and also in my life that people might move forth into the world and question how other stories around them were constructed. Or see that construction in their own past. And that also seems to be happening, from what I’ve been hearing from readers, and I’m grateful.

I started this book well before the November election, an election which turned out to be a contest between stories on the national level. And I think there seems to be more awareness now about how we make stories out of facts. And if there’s something I’m hoping for concretely out of the book it’s that people pay attention to that complexity around them. In their lives and in the criminal justice system. And in the political sphere.

Rumpus: That we separate “alternative facts” from real facts.

Marzano-Lesnevich: Yes, on two levels. Certainly when the “alternative facts” are, as we often see now in the national discourse, just plain wrong. Just plain lies. Like moving the time of the crash, because to move it suited a narrative the person wanted to tell. But also to understand that the way we interpret facts often has to do with fitting them into a story we’re telling ourselves.

Rumpus: So even though you started your book in a whole different political climate, The Fact of a Body couldn’t be more relevant to what’s happening right now.

***

Author photograph © Nina Subin.

Sharon Harrigan is the author of Playing with Dynamite: A Memoir, forthcoming from Truman State University Press on October 1. Her work has also appeared in The New York Times (Modern Love), Virginia Quarterly Review, Narrative /em>, and elsewhere. She teaches memoir writing at WriterHouse in Charlottesville, Virginia. More from this author →

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THE LOGIC OF THE BOOK: TALKING WITH ALEXANDRIA MARZANO-LESNEVICH
BY SHARON HARRIGAN
September 13th, 2017

The Fact of a Body: A Murder and a Memoir is the culmination of ten years work by an NEA and Rona Jaffe award-winning writer and Harvard-trained legal expert on the death penalty. As the subtitle suggests, the book is a braided narrative, a combination of memory and true-crime reporting. In alternating chapters, it follows the story of the murder of a six-year-old boy and the story of Alexandria’s own past, which the murderer’s testimony forces her to revisit and try to understand.

I met Alexandria several years ago at the Virginia Center for Creative Arts when we were fellows at the same time. I was working on my memoir, and her memoir proposal had recently sold to Flatiron Books, and was on submission to international publishers. I was writing about events I had witnessed and those I hadn’t seen but had to figure out how to put in scene. At the heart of my story were acts of violence, but I wanted to present them in a way that was not emotionally manipulative. When I heard Alexandria read excerpts from her book, I was stunned. She had figured out how to handle all the technical and ethical issues I was struggling with, and she did so with the elegance and grace of a master stylist. Her work has been compared to the podcast Serial, and the TV show True Detective. It’s also been likened to books by Wally Lamb and Truman Capote. I would agree but go further. Her finely chiseled prose has the resonance and intellectual heft of a writer like Joan Didion.

While we were at VCCA, the book sold in the UK. It was an exciting moment that I enjoyed experiencing vicariously through her. I wasn’t surprised there was so much interest in her story. It has everything a reader could want: a plot as compelling as a legal thriller; fully rounded characters; a perceptive and insightful narrator who guides us through the story, as we discover the facts at the same time she does; and a myriad of dilemmas that couldn’t be more relevant and topical.

I wish that I had read this memoir before I wrote my own. There’s so much technique to learn from it as a writer. There’s also a lot we can learn, as citizens advocating for justice in a world that seems less fair and predictable every day. In my interview, I asked Alexandria about both big social issues and questions of craft.

***

The Rumpus: Let’s start with the big social issues. How did you get interested in the death penalty?

Alexandria Marzano-Lesnevich: As a child, I was on vacation with my family when my twin brother told a joke with a punch line that included “the electric chair.” I had never heard of the electric chair. So I asked him what it was, and he explained. From that moment on I knew I was an opponent of the death penalty. I had a visceral response to the idea that as a society we would decide to kill somebody in a methodical, intentional way and that we had built a system to execute people. I am the daughter of two lawyers. I grew up idealizing the law as a philosophical record of our commitment to society, and I thought of it as something that pursued justice. The idea that the law would take someone’s life seemed immediately to violate that. So even as a child I had a strong response. Then I went to law school to try to understand why the courts found the death penalty constitutional. I thought there must be an explanation, something I was missing. Because to me, it had always seemed like it would be considered cruel and unusual, certainly. I didn’t understand yet that I might just disagree with the courts. So I went to law school to try to study that. Before I went I really thought of the law as this truth-seeking mechanism, where we have a trial and that trial is designed to elicit truth. I think until very recently in society we still pretty much thought of it that way. We still thought that when somebody was adjudicated of a crime, for example, that the truth was that they were guilty of that crime. Now I think we question that assumption. We understand more that a trial is a competition between two stories.

Rumpus: That’s an interesting way to put it.

Marzano-Lesnevich: The prosecution and the defense each tell a different story, often out of the same facts. There may be a dispute about what the facts are. But even when you have the facts there’s disagreement about how to think of them. And how you think of them comes down to a story.

Rumpus: That makes sense. And your narrator’s voice often sounds like the voice of a lawyer addressing a jury, but the narrator is addressing us, the reader.

Marzano-Lesnevich: Yes. Starting to recognize that different approach in law school simultaneously made me more interested in the law but also less interested in being a lawyer. I became fascinated with the way we construct these stories, with what gets left in and what gets left out. I suppose, in the book, I’m trying to bring the reader along in that discovery.

Rumpus: Is crafting a memoir like crafting a legal narrative? We have to leave out much, much more than we put in, when we write a memoir.

Marzano-Lesnevich: I’ve been teaching memoir for a number of years and it always strikes me that you can take the same event in a person’s life and, depending on where you put it in the narrative, it acquires a different meaning. For example, the same events, even when they are put in chronological order, can take on different meanings depending on how quickly or slowly time unfolds in the chapter. And an event positioned as the inciting incident leads to a different meaning than the same event positioned, say, as the crisis. I think these choices—where you begin and end the story and how long you linger on particular events—affect how we understand a story and how we understand cause.

Rumpus: The longer you linger on an event, the more emphasis you’re giving it. If something comes first, it’s seen as the foundation for what comes after.

Marzano-Lesnevich: As a writer, one of the things that revelation meant for me was that I had to think about the meaning I was creating when I was structuring my book. For example, the book starts with Ricky Langley killing Jeremy Guillory. I thought quite intentionally about how I don’t want that murder to be in the climax of the book. I really don’t want the structure to indicate that that’s the meaning, that’s the point, the surprise of his death. That would seem cheap to me, somehow. And the same thing with the abuse in my family. I could have started with the abuse in my family and made it the inciting incident but in truth the inciting incident has to be larger than that. It has to be more about the silence and secrets in the family, or the way in which it’s a loving family but there’s still this undertow. Because I wanted my family narrative to be about more than just one thing, I thought a great deal about where to put each event in the memoir thread of my book.

Rumpus: And for the “murder” thread?

Marzano-Lesnevich: I had to carefully consider which events to start and end with. I knew, from reading 30,000 pages of records—

Rumpus: 30,000 pages?

Marzano-Lesnevich: That’s part of why this book took so long to write! So, I knew from the records of Ricky Langley’s trials that there was so much material that hadn’t made it into the trial. So much that had happened and, I think, was relevant to any understanding of the past, but hadn’t been admitted in court. I looked at the way Langley’s story was told in the files and the way it was told in each of the three trials—because it was told differently in each one—and the way it was told in different news accounts, the way the lawyers in the case have continued to tell the story to newspapers, the way that the story was told in a UK play that was based on the case—there were all these different tellings, and even in the records there are different tellings.

Rumpus: Like what?

Marzano-Lesnevich: For example, there was a 1964 car crash that was profoundly devastating to the Langley family and had far-reaching consequences in their lives. The newspaper accounts from 1964 report that it occurred in the middle of the day. But then when people told the story at the 2003 trial they said it occurred in the middle of the night. I think that was simultaneously more dramatic and more believable—the cover of night, darkness, all that. It made for a better story, and I don’t think people consciously chose to get the facts wrong; their subconscious just made a story. So the story is shaped and shaped and shaped and shaped and sometimes the facts are altered. But even more common was that the facts were stable but the way people interpreted them was different—and then those different interpretations got written into, and ended up shaping, future tellings of the story. After reviewing all this material, I realized that what I wanted to do was tell a story that would also be about the construction of all these stories.

Rumpus: And you do. Another difficult thing you make look easy is filling in details for scenes you weren’t present for. The memoir part of the book you were a witness to. But the murder part is often constructed from court transcripts. To keep our attention, you need to turn those transcripts into stories, give us characters we can see and hear. You signal when you’re adding something from your imagination or experience, and you tell us why you choose the details you do. Can you talk about the process? The technical and ethical issues you had to wrestle with and how you made them work?

Marzano-Lesnevich: I don’t think of it as filling in the gaps with my imagination. I think it’s really important to note that I didn’t invent events. It was more that, as I was reading these records—as happens to all of us I think when we read anything incredibly vivid—the scene would come to life in my mind. And so when I would read, for example, about this car crash, I would see these people in my mind. And then I would read that when Ricky Langley was an adult he told stories about having a dream about the car crash to a roomful of corrections officers, and that those corrections officers, they all gave affidavits afterwards in which they said what they recalled and the dream that he told comes through so vividly in these people’s retellings. So what I tried to do was bring that experience to life for the reader. At the same time, because I want to be straightforward about this process, I acknowledge that even as I was writing about how other people were making stories out of the murder, I, too, was necessarily making stories out of it.

Rumpus: Your narrator addresses the reader.

Marzano-Lesnevich: It was really important to me to have an active narrator voice so the reader would always know when I was telling myself a story from these records. My goal is for the reader to feel the presence of a single mind piecing together a story from all the information. And so it was essential for me to note where the facts were quite solid and where they had come from, and that’s why I have twelve pages of source notes at the end of the book.

Rumpus: I think you’re crystal clear about what your sources are and where the facts come from. By using an active narrator as our guide, you show us that we all make pictures when people are telling us stories. I appreciate how you make that process transparent. Did you always know this was the right approach for your book?

Marzano-Lesnevich: Oh man, I tried so many different approaches. So, so many. And that’s another reason why this book took so long to write, just the challenge of figuring out how to tell this story. How could I tell it in as complex a way as I needed to but still keep the pages turning quickly? As a reader, I really like page turners. So I knew I wanted to tell a story that would envelop the reader, make the reader feel as immersed in it as I felt when thinking about these stories. I tried at one point to tell it in a more straightforwardly memoir way. I tried at another point to tell it in a more straightforwardly journalistic way. I then realized that this element of storytelling that we’ve been discussing was too crucial to this book not to highlight it so I felt that I had to do a construction with a more active narrator. But then, since I have two threads, I had to figure out how to weave them. And the way I did that was I actually wrote a couple hundred-page condensed versions of the book.

Rumpus: Sounds like a lot of work.

Marzano-Lesnevich: Yeah, and then I threw the pages away! But the exercise helped me understand how the two stories were layered. I restarted this book many times. After getting the NEA grant, I again jettisoned everything except twenty-five pages and started all over again, basically. But all that work with the layering helped me trust where the meaningful connections were. And also learn which connections weren’t as meaningful. So despite the fact that the book has taken me years to write, about half of the actual pages were written in the last year before turning it in to my editor.

Rumpus: Interesting. Half the book took nine years, and the other half took one.

Marzano-Lesnevich: Yes—because I think when you finally find the voice of the book, the pages flow much more easily. But to find that, I’m someone who has to write, throw away. Write, throw away. This story took a long time to figure out how to tell, but one thing about that process was that it helped me trust my own sense of the story. It was only in the rewriting, frankly, that I became structurally braver. And also emotionally braver. Because as the structure of the book solidified I began to realize that I could go deeper into the rawer emotions without losing that structure, because I knew enough about the structure and how to keep it going. It’s notable to me that two of the most emotionally intense moments in this book—moments that now think are vital—weren’t there with that intensity until about two weeks before I turned the manuscript in.

Rumpus: Fascinating. Why do you think it happened that way?

Marzano-Lesnevich: If the structure hadn’t been solidly in place it would have felt too risky to delve into the rawer stuff because there would be the danger that the emotion would overwhelm the structure. Which is something I think you have to worry about all the time with memoir.

Rumpus: That it would take you into a detour, a digression that’s so powerful that you leave behind the thread of the story you meant to continue.

Marzano-Lesnevich: Exactly. I’d been working with the structure for so long that I understood how it was going to work, which structural signals I needed to put in, and what the logic of the book was. I think of that phrase a lot when I’m teaching.

Rumpus: The logic of the book. That’s a great phrase.

Marzano-Lesnevich: What I mean by it is, How is the structure tied to the angle of vision of the narrator and tied to the voice? What’s the interior logic to why this book works the way it does? What’s it trying to say about the world? And I think the reason I spend so much time thinking about that is it felt so crucial to this book. Because if there weren’t a narrative reason the teller of this story is so interested in storytelling, there wouldn’t be a narrative reason for how much it moves backward and forward in time.

Rumpus: The structure has to mirror the content.

Marzano-Lesnevich: I really think so. Ideally, the structure itself will reveal something about the meaning of the story.

Rumpus: When I teach memoir, structure is one of the things students struggle with the most. It’s helpful to have examples of different kinds of structures, and I’m sure I’ll be using your book as a great model.

Marzano-Lesnevich: Thank you.

Rumpus: You’ve described writing this book as an exercise in empathy. How did your empathy change as you found out more about Ricky Langley and your grandfather?

Marzano-Lesnevich: When I started first reading these records I had no empathy for Ricky Langley. How could I possibly have any empathy for him? He was a pedophile and a murderer.

Rumpus: Of course.

Marzano-Lesnevich: He wasn’t a person to me. He was what he had done. So when I started, the records were difficult for me because I didn’t have empathy for him. I was reading his therapy notes from when he was an older teenager and it was terrible for me to read them because he was so problematic to me. I mean he still is problematic to me, obviously, but at that point he just seemed evil. But I kept reading. And then slowly it became even harder—because as I read, I started to realize that here he was as a teenager arguably trying to get help, but at the same time being trapped by who he was. My understanding of him became more complicated, and more empathetic.

And then that was really hard for me! And really problematic in its own way, because then was impossible for me to escape the same questions about my grandfather. Who was he, when he climbed the stairs of my childhood bedroom? What was he thinking? What was that like for him? That’s such a terrible question, in a way, to have to ask as someone who was abused by him.

There’s something strange that happens when you write about real people. The real people become characters, which means that you have to have a fully rounded idea of them. I started to see Langley in this somewhat empathetic way—never losing sight of what he’d done, the terrible harm he’d caused, that he’d killed Jeremy Guillory and abused children—but also understanding that he was a person at the same time. Somehow that’s the most terrible, and most necessary, realization to me. And of course it made me think about my own life.

When we write fiction or creative nonfiction, we have to try to see our characters are rounded, and we have to try to understand what their motivations were and what the story they were telling themselves about their actions was even if we don’t agree with it, we have to at least understand it for the characters to be three-dimensional. That drove me to figure out why my parents made the choices they did and who they were as people and what they were struggling with that led them to make those choices. And then there was my grandfather. The realization that I was going to have to engage in that kind of empathy for everyone in this memoir was difficult but also probably life altering

Rumpus: Life altering?

Marzano-Lesnevich: Sure. It fundamentally changed how I saw things. It also forced me to look at my younger self in an empathetic way. Some of the moments in the book that I struggled with writing the most were the ones of me as a young adult and struggling with eating disorders and other problems. I had to look back at her and see how young she was and how much she was trying to handle and have empathy for her.

Rumpus: And yet it’s also possible to have too much empathy, right?

Marzano-Lesnevich: Oh, yes. I don’t want to give anything away, but there’s a girl in the records who Langley abused and I thought she was fourteen. I think, had I not been reading very empathetically, I might have stopped short when I was thinking she was fourteen and thought wait, that doesn’t match with everything else I know about who this man is. Is there a hidden story here? But instead, I had been spending so much time with him as a character in a book and as a person through the records that I was trying to see a way to understand him and in trying to think the girl was fourteen, I wrote a story in my head and thought, Maybe this was the one time it was different. Of course it would have been terrible if she was fourteen, too, but to when I found out she was five—at that moment I realized the danger of too much empathy.

Rumpus: It can turn into wishful thinking and denial and cover up.

Marzano-Lesnevich: Absolutely. And I think with my family, part of the reason they made the decisions they did was out of empathy for my grandmother. Out of empathy for her they tried to pretend that the abuse never happened. And that did a great deal of damage. And so with the book, one of the choices I made was to write about my mistaking a five-year-old girl for a fourteen-year-old girl because I wanted to call myself out on the danger of empathy, and to show that what’s important is to come back to the body, back to Jeremy Guillory’s murdered body, and back to the secrets my body held. I wanted to show that we empathize because we’re trying to understand, but at the same time, no matter how many times you tell the story you’re going to come back to the fact of the body.

Rumpus: The body is proof.

Marzano-Lesnevich: We tell stories and there are differences in how we interpret the facts, but there are still facts. In this case, there are many things that will never be known but there is still the fact of the body. And that’s true in my life, too. And so I wanted to show the many ways of holding that duality.

Rumpus: What response are you hoping to get from your book?

Marzano-Lesnevich: The most meaningful thing to come out of this book, for me, has been the conversations. It’s so profoundly moving for me when people read my book and then share their own stories about what they carry in their own lives.

Rumpus: The things we carry.

Marzano-Lesnevich: The other thing I hope people take from the book—and they seem to so far—is the awareness of its complexity. My deep hope was that in reading this story about how we make stories in this one case and also in my life that people might move forth into the world and question how other stories around them were constructed. Or see that construction in their own past. And that also seems to be happening, from what I’ve been hearing from readers, and I’m grateful.

I started this book well before the November election, an election which turned out to be a contest between stories on the national level. And I think there seems to be more awareness now about how we make stories out of facts. And if there’s something I’m hoping for concretely out of the book it’s that people pay attention to that complexity around them. In their lives and in the criminal justice system. And in the political sphere.

Rumpus: That we separate “alternative facts” from real facts.

Marzano-Lesnevich: Yes, on two levels. Certainly when the “alternative facts” are, as we often see now in the national discourse, just plain wrong. Just plain lies. Like moving the time of the crash, because to move it suited a narrative the person wanted to tell. But also to understand that the way we interpret facts often has to do with fitting them into a story we’re telling ourselves.

Rumpus: So even though you started your book in a whole different political climate, The Fact of a Body couldn’t be more relevant to what’s happening right now.

***

Author photograph © Nina Subin.

Sharon Harrigan is the author of Playing with Dynamite: A Memoir, forthcoming from Truman State University Press on October 1. Her work has also appeared in The New York Times (Modern Love), Virginia Quarterly Review, Narrative /em>, and elsewhere. She teaches memoir writing at WriterHouse in Charlottesville, Virginia. More from this author →

Filed Under: BOOKS, RUMPUS ORIGINAL

RELATED POSTS
Say Everything: The Fact of a Body by Alexandria Marzano-Lesnevich
How The Keepers Reframes Confession as a Feminist Act
Finding the Finally: Alice Anderson Discusses Some Bright Morning, I’ll Fly Away
Conversations with Writers Braver Than Me: Jessica Berger Gross
The Rumpus Interview with Melissa Febos

OTHER COOL STUFF

A Hinging Thing: Talking with Maggie Smith
Voices on Addiction: Travels with My Daughter
R.I.P. #9: Who Died in This House?
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Both Outsider and Participant: Thousand Star Hotel by Bao Phi
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ShareThis Copy and Paste:) We moved your cheese. Twitter Facebook Tumblr Feed THE DAILY RUMPUS GET OUR OVERLY PERSONAL EMAIL NEWSLETTER TOPICS COLUMNS LETTERS IN THE MAIL LETTERS FOR KIDS BOOK CLUB POETRY BOOK CLUB STORE THE LOGIC OF THE BOOK: TALKING WITH ALEXANDRIA MARZANO-LESNEVICH BY SHARON HARRIGAN September 13th, 2017 The Fact of a Body: A Murder and a Memoir is the culmination of ten years work by an NEA and Rona Jaffe award-winning writer and Harvard-trained legal expert on the death penalty. As the subtitle suggests, the book is a braided narrative, a combination of memory and true-crime reporting. In alternating chapters, it follows the story of the murder of a six-year-old boy and the story of Alexandria’s own past, which the murderer’s testimony forces her to revisit and try to understand. I met Alexandria several years ago at the Virginia Center for Creative Arts when we were fellows at the same time. I was working on my memoir, and her memoir proposal had recently sold to Flatiron Books, and was on submission to international publishers. I was writing about events I had witnessed and those I hadn’t seen but had to figure out how to put in scene. At the heart of my story were acts of violence, but I wanted to present them in a way that was not emotionally manipulative. When I heard Alexandria read excerpts from her book, I was stunned. She had figured out how to handle all the technical and ethical issues I was struggling with, and she did so with the elegance and grace of a master stylist. Her work has been compared to the podcast Serial, and the TV show True Detective. It’s also been likened to books by Wally Lamb and Truman Capote. I would agree but go further. Her finely chiseled prose has the resonance and intellectual heft of a writer like Joan Didion. While we were at VCCA, the book sold in the UK. It was an exciting moment that I enjoyed experiencing vicariously through her. I wasn’t surprised there was so much interest in her story. It has everything a reader could want: a plot as compelling as a legal thriller; fully rounded characters; a perceptive and insightful narrator who guides us through the story, as we discover the facts at the same time she does; and a myriad of dilemmas that couldn’t be more relevant and topical. I wish that I had read this memoir before I wrote my own. There’s so much technique to learn from it as a writer. There’s also a lot we can learn, as citizens advocating for justice in a world that seems less fair and predictable every day. In my interview, I asked Alexandria about both big social issues and questions of craft. *** The Rumpus: Let’s start with the big social issues. How did you get interested in the death penalty? Alexandria Marzano-Lesnevich: As a child, I was on vacation with my family when my twin brother told a joke with a punch line that included “the electric chair.” I had never heard of the electric chair. So I asked him what it was, and he explained. From that moment on I knew I was an opponent of the death penalty. I had a visceral response to the idea that as a society we would decide to kill somebody in a methodical, intentional way and that we had built a system to execute people. I am the daughter of two lawyers. I grew up idealizing the law as a philosophical record of our commitment to society, and I thought of it as something that pursued justice. The idea that the law would take someone’s life seemed immediately to violate that. So even as a child I had a strong response. Then I went to law school to try to understand why the courts found the death penalty constitutional. I thought there must be an explanation, something I was missing. Because to me, it had always seemed like it would be considered cruel and unusual, certainly. I didn’t understand yet that I might just disagree with the courts. So I went to law school to try to study that. Before I went I really thought of the law as this truth-seeking mechanism, where we have a trial and that trial is designed to elicit truth. I think until very recently in society we still pretty much thought of it that way. We still thought that when somebody was adjudicated of a crime, for example, that the truth was that they were guilty of that crime. Now I think we question that assumption. We understand more that a trial is a competition between two stories. Rumpus: That’s an interesting way to put it. Marzano-Lesnevich: The prosecution and the defense each tell a different story, often out of the same facts. There may be a dispute about what the facts are. But even when you have the facts there’s disagreement about how to think of them. And how you think of them comes down to a story. Rumpus: That makes sense. And your narrator’s voice often sounds like the voice of a lawyer addressing a jury, but the narrator is addressing us, the reader. Marzano-Lesnevich: Yes. Starting to recognize that different approach in law school simultaneously made me more interested in the law but also less interested in being a lawyer. I became fascinated with the way we construct these stories, with what gets left in and what gets left out. I suppose, in the book, I’m trying to bring the reader along in that discovery. Rumpus: Is crafting a memoir like crafting a legal narrative? We have to leave out much, much more than we put in, when we write a memoir. Marzano-Lesnevich: I’ve been teaching memoir for a number of years and it always strikes me that you can take the same event in a person’s life and, depending on where you put it in the narrative, it acquires a different meaning. For example, the same events, even when they are put in chronological order, can take on different meanings depending on how quickly or slowly time unfolds in the chapter. And an event positioned as the inciting incident leads to a different meaning than the same event positioned, say, as the crisis. I think these choices—where you begin and end the story and how long you linger on particular events—affect how we understand a story and how we understand cause. Rumpus: The longer you linger on an event, the more emphasis you’re giving it. If something comes first, it’s seen as the foundation for what comes after. Marzano-Lesnevich: As a writer, one of the things that revelation meant for me was that I had to think about the meaning I was creating when I was structuring my book. For example, the book starts with Ricky Langley killing Jeremy Guillory. I thought quite intentionally about how I don’t want that murder to be in the climax of the book. I really don’t want the structure to indicate that that’s the meaning, that’s the point, the surprise of his death. That would seem cheap to me, somehow. And the same thing with the abuse in my family. I could have started with the abuse in my family and made it the inciting incident but in truth the inciting incident has to be larger than that. It has to be more about the silence and secrets in the family, or the way in which it’s a loving family but there’s still this undertow. Because I wanted my family narrative to be about more than just one thing, I thought a great deal about where to put each event in the memoir thread of my book. Rumpus: And for the “murder” thread? Marzano-Lesnevich: I had to carefully consider which events to start and end with. I knew, from reading 30,000 pages of records— Rumpus: 30,000 pages? Marzano-Lesnevich: That’s part of why this book took so long to write! So, I knew from the records of Ricky Langley’s trials that there was so much material that hadn’t made it into the trial. So much that had happened and, I think, was relevant to any understanding of the past, but hadn’t been admitted in court. I looked at the way Langley’s story was told in the files and the way it was told in each of the three trials—because it was told differently in each one—and the way it was told in different news accounts, the way the lawyers in the case have continued to tell the story to newspapers, the way that the story was told in a UK play that was based on the case—there were all these different tellings, and even in the records there are different tellings. Rumpus: Like what? Marzano-Lesnevich: For example, there was a 1964 car crash that was profoundly devastating to the Langley family and had far-reaching consequences in their lives. The newspaper accounts from 1964 report that it occurred in the middle of the day. But then when people told the story at the 2003 trial they said it occurred in the middle of the night. I think that was simultaneously more dramatic and more believable—the cover of night, darkness, all that. It made for a better story, and I don’t think people consciously chose to get the facts wrong; their subconscious just made a story. So the story is shaped and shaped and shaped and shaped and sometimes the facts are altered. But even more common was that the facts were stable but the way people interpreted them was different—and then those different interpretations got written into, and ended up shaping, future tellings of the story. After reviewing all this material, I realized that what I wanted to do was tell a story that would also be about the construction of all these stories. Rumpus: And you do. Another difficult thing you make look easy is filling in details for scenes you weren’t present for. The memoir part of the book you were a witness to. But the murder part is often constructed from court transcripts. To keep our attention, you need to turn those transcripts into stories, give us characters we can see and hear. You signal when you’re adding something from your imagination or experience, and you tell us why you choose the details you do. Can you talk about the process? The technical and ethical issues you had to wrestle with and how you made them work? Marzano-Lesnevich: I don’t think of it as filling in the gaps with my imagination. I think it’s really important to note that I didn’t invent events. It was more that, as I was reading these records—as happens to all of us I think when we read anything incredibly vivid—the scene would come to life in my mind. And so when I would read, for example, about this car crash, I would see these people in my mind. And then I would read that when Ricky Langley was an adult he told stories about having a dream about the car crash to a roomful of corrections officers, and that those corrections officers, they all gave affidavits afterwards in which they said what they recalled and the dream that he told comes through so vividly in these people’s retellings. So what I tried to do was bring that experience to life for the reader. At the same time, because I want to be straightforward about this process, I acknowledge that even as I was writing about how other people were making stories out of the murder, I, too, was necessarily making stories out of it. Rumpus: Your narrator addresses the reader. Marzano-Lesnevich: It was really important to me to have an active narrator voice so the reader would always know when I was telling myself a story from these records. My goal is for the reader to feel the presence of a single mind piecing together a story from all the information. And so it was essential for me to note where the facts were quite solid and where they had come from, and that’s why I have twelve pages of source notes at the end of the book. Rumpus: I think you’re crystal clear about what your sources are and where the facts come from. By using an active narrator as our guide, you show us that we all make pictures when people are telling us stories. I appreciate how you make that process transparent. Did you always know this was the right approach for your book? Marzano-Lesnevich: Oh man, I tried so many different approaches. So, so many. And that’s another reason why this book took so long to write, just the challenge of figuring out how to tell this story. How could I tell it in as complex a way as I needed to but still keep the pages turning quickly? As a reader, I really like page turners. So I knew I wanted to tell a story that would envelop the reader, make the reader feel as immersed in it as I felt when thinking about these stories. I tried at one point to tell it in a more straightforwardly memoir way. I tried at another point to tell it in a more straightforwardly journalistic way. I then realized that this element of storytelling that we’ve been discussing was too crucial to this book not to highlight it so I felt that I had to do a construction with a more active narrator. But then, since I have two threads, I had to figure out how to weave them. And the way I did that was I actually wrote a couple hundred-page condensed versions of the book. Rumpus: Sounds like a lot of work. Marzano-Lesnevich: Yeah, and then I threw the pages away! But the exercise helped me understand how the two stories were layered. I restarted this book many times. After getting the NEA grant, I again jettisoned everything except twenty-five pages and started all over again, basically. But all that work with the layering helped me trust where the meaningful connections were. And also learn which connections weren’t as meaningful. So despite the fact that the book has taken me years to write, about half of the actual pages were written in the last year before turning it in to my editor. Rumpus: Interesting. Half the book took nine years, and the other half took one. Marzano-Lesnevich: Yes—because I think when you finally find the voice of the book, the pages flow much more easily. But to find that, I’m someone who has to write, throw away. Write, throw away. This story took a long time to figure out how to tell, but one thing about that process was that it helped me trust my own sense of the story. It was only in the rewriting, frankly, that I became structurally braver. And also emotionally braver. Because as the structure of the book solidified I began to realize that I could go deeper into the rawer emotions without losing that structure, because I knew enough about the structure and how to keep it going. It’s notable to me that two of the most emotionally intense moments in this book—moments that now think are vital—weren’t there with that intensity until about two weeks before I turned the manuscript in. Rumpus: Fascinating. Why do you think it happened that way? Marzano-Lesnevich: If the structure hadn’t been solidly in place it would have felt too risky to delve into the rawer stuff because there would be the danger that the emotion would overwhelm the structure. Which is something I think you have to worry about all the time with memoir. Rumpus: That it would take you into a detour, a digression that’s so powerful that you leave behind the thread of the story you meant to continue. Marzano-Lesnevich: Exactly. I’d been working with the structure for so long that I understood how it was going to work, which structural signals I needed to put in, and what the logic of the book was. I think of that phrase a lot when I’m teaching. Rumpus: The logic of the book. That’s a great phrase. Marzano-Lesnevich: What I mean by it is, How is the structure tied to the angle of vision of the narrator and tied to the voice? What’s the interior logic to why this book works the way it does? What’s it trying to say about the world? And I think the reason I spend so much time thinking about that is it felt so crucial to this book. Because if there weren’t a narrative reason the teller of this story is so interested in storytelling, there wouldn’t be a narrative reason for how much it moves backward and forward in time. Rumpus: The structure has to mirror the content. Marzano-Lesnevich: I really think so. Ideally, the structure itself will reveal something about the meaning of the story. Rumpus: When I teach memoir, structure is one of the things students struggle with the most. It’s helpful to have examples of different kinds of structures, and I’m sure I’ll be using your book as a great model. Marzano-Lesnevich: Thank you. Rumpus: You’ve described writing this book as an exercise in empathy. How did your empathy change as you found out more about Ricky Langley and your grandfather? Marzano-Lesnevich: When I started first reading these records I had no empathy for Ricky Langley. How could I possibly have any empathy for him? He was a pedophile and a murderer. Rumpus: Of course. Marzano-Lesnevich: He wasn’t a person to me. He was what he had done. So when I started, the records were difficult for me because I didn’t have empathy for him. I was reading his therapy notes from when he was an older teenager and it was terrible for me to read them because he was so problematic to me. I mean he still is problematic to me, obviously, but at that point he just seemed evil. But I kept reading. And then slowly it became even harder—because as I read, I started to realize that here he was as a teenager arguably trying to get help, but at the same time being trapped by who he was. My understanding of him became more complicated, and more empathetic. And then that was really hard for me! And really problematic in its own way, because then was impossible for me to escape the same questions about my grandfather. Who was he, when he climbed the stairs of my childhood bedroom? What was he thinking? What was that like for him? That’s such a terrible question, in a way, to have to ask as someone who was abused by him. There’s something strange that happens when you write about real people. The real people become characters, which means that you have to have a fully rounded idea of them. I started to see Langley in this somewhat empathetic way—never losing sight of what he’d done, the terrible harm he’d caused, that he’d killed Jeremy Guillory and abused children—but also understanding that he was a person at the same time. Somehow that’s the most terrible, and most necessary, realization to me. And of course it made me think about my own life. When we write fiction or creative nonfiction, we have to try to see our characters are rounded, and we have to try to understand what their motivations were and what the story they were telling themselves about their actions was even if we don’t agree with it, we have to at least understand it for the characters to be three-dimensional. That drove me to figure out why my parents made the choices they did and who they were as people and what they were struggling with that led them to make those choices. And then there was my grandfather. The realization that I was going to have to engage in that kind of empathy for everyone in this memoir was difficult but also probably life altering Rumpus: Life altering? Marzano-Lesnevich: Sure. It fundamentally changed how I saw things. It also forced me to look at my younger self in an empathetic way. Some of the moments in the book that I struggled with writing the most were the ones of me as a young adult and struggling with eating disorders and other problems. I had to look back at her and see how young she was and how much she was trying to handle and have empathy for her. Rumpus: And yet it’s also possible to have too much empathy, right? Marzano-Lesnevich: Oh, yes. I don’t want to give anything away, but there’s a girl in the records who Langley abused and I thought she was fourteen. I think, had I not been reading very empathetically, I might have stopped short when I was thinking she was fourteen and thought wait, that doesn’t match with everything else I know about who this man is. Is there a hidden story here? But instead, I had been spending so much time with him as a character in a book and as a person through the records that I was trying to see a way to understand him and in trying to think the girl was fourteen, I wrote a story in my head and thought, Maybe this was the one time it was different. Of course it would have been terrible if she was fourteen, too, but to when I found out she was five—at that moment I realized the danger of too much empathy. Rumpus: It can turn into wishful thinking and denial and cover up. Marzano-Lesnevich: Absolutely. And I think with my family, part of the reason they made the decisions they did was out of empathy for my grandmother. Out of empathy for her they tried to pretend that the abuse never happened. And that did a great deal of damage. And so with the book, one of the choices I made was to write about my mistaking a five-year-old girl for a fourteen-year-old girl because I wanted to call myself out on the danger of empathy, and to show that what’s important is to come back to the body, back to Jeremy Guillory’s murdered body, and back to the secrets my body held. I wanted to show that we empathize because we’re trying to understand, but at the same time, no matter how many times you tell the story you’re going to come back to the fact of the body. Rumpus: The body is proof. Marzano-Lesnevich: We tell stories and there are differences in how we interpret the facts, but there are still facts. In this case, there are many things that will never be known but there is still the fact of the body. And that’s true in my life, too. And so I wanted to show the many ways of holding that duality. Rumpus: What response are you hoping to get from your book? Marzano-Lesnevich: The most meaningful thing to come out of this book, for me, has been the conversations. It’s so profoundly moving for me when people read my book and then share their own stories about what they carry in their own lives. Rumpus: The things we carry. Marzano-Lesnevich: The other thing I hope people take from the book—and they seem to so far—is the awareness of its complexity. My deep hope was that in reading this story about how we make stories in this one case and also in my life that people might move forth into the world and question how other stories around them were constructed. Or see that construction in their own past. And that also seems to be happening, from what I’ve been hearing from readers, and I’m grateful. I started this book well before the November election, an election which turned out to be a contest between stories on the national level. And I think there seems to be more awareness now about how we make stories out of facts. And if there’s something I’m hoping for concretely out of the book it’s that people pay attention to that complexity around them. In their lives and in the criminal justice system. And in the political sphere. Rumpus: That we separate “alternative facts” from real facts. Marzano-Lesnevich: Yes, on two levels. Certainly when the “alternative facts” are, as we often see now in the national discourse, just plain wrong. Just plain lies. Like moving the time of the crash, because to move it suited a narrative the person wanted to tell. But also to understand that the way we interpret facts often has to do with fitting them into a story we’re telling ourselves. Rumpus: So even though you started your book in a whole different political climate, The Fact of a Body couldn’t be more relevant to what’s happening right now. *** Author photograph © Nina Subin. Sharon Harrigan is the author of Playing with Dynamite: A Memoir, forthcoming from Truman State University Press on October 1. Her work has also appeared in The New York Times (Modern Love), Virginia Quarterly Review, Narrative /em>, and elsewhere. She teaches memoir writing at WriterHouse in Charlottesville, Virginia. More from this author → Filed Under: BOOKS, RUMPUS ORIGINAL RELATED POSTS Say Everything: The Fact of a Body by Alexandria Marzano-Lesnevich How The Keepers Reframes Confession as a Feminist Act Finding the Finally: Alice Anderson Discusses Some Bright Morning, I’ll Fly Away Conversations with Writers Braver Than Me: Jessica Berger Gross The Rumpus Interview with Melissa Febos OTHER COOL STUFF A Hinging Thing: Talking with Maggie Smith Voices on Addiction: Travels with My Daughter R.I.P. #9: Who Died in This House? Chewing Rocks: A Conversation with David Biespiel Both Outsider and Participant: Thousand Star Hotel by Bao Phi You May Like These Zinus 12 Inch Deluxe Wood Platform Bed… $123.00 (512) Zinus Essential Upholstered Platform … $109.48 (542) AZT Plus Luxury Organic Bamboo Bathtub, C… $25.99 (115) ROYAL CRAFT WOOD Luxury Bathtub Ca… $39.97$74.99 (424) Ads by Amazon HELLO Welcome to The Rumpus! We’re thrilled you’re here. At The Rumpus, we’ve got essays, reviews, interviews, music, film, fiction, and poetry—along with kick-ass comics. We know how easy it is to find pop culture on the Internet, so we’re here to give you something more challenging, to show you how beautiful things are when you step off the beaten path. The Rumpus is a place where people come to be themselves through their writing, to tell their stories or speak their minds in the most artful and authentic way they know how, and to invite each of you to do the same. We strive to be a platform for marginalized voices and writing that wouldn't find a home elsewhere. We want to shine a light on stories that build bridges, tear down walls, and speak truth to power. What we have in common is a passion for fantastic writing that’s brave, passionate, and true (and sometimes very, very funny). © 2017 THE RUMPUS NAVIGATION Home Art Books Comics Film Rumpus Originals Media Music Politics Sex Television Your support is critical to our existence. Who We Are Writer’s Guidelines Contact Us The Daily Rumpus FAQ Advertise We moved your cheese. Twitter Facebook Tumblr Feed THE DAILY RUMPUS GET OUR OVERLY PERSONAL EMAIL NEWSLETTER TOPICS COLUMNS LETTERS IN THE MAIL LETTERS FOR KIDS BOOK CLUB POETRY BOOK CLUB STORE THE LOGIC OF THE BOOK: TALKING WITH ALEXANDRIA MARZANO-LESNEVICH BY SHARON HARRIGAN September 13th, 2017 The Fact of a Body: A Murder and a Memoir is the culmination of ten years work by an NEA and Rona Jaffe award-winning writer and Harvard-trained legal expert on the death penalty. As the subtitle suggests, the book is a braided narrative, a combination of memory and true-crime reporting. In alternating chapters, it follows the story of the murder of a six-year-old boy and the story of Alexandria’s own past, which the murderer’s testimony forces her to revisit and try to understand. I met Alexandria several years ago at the Virginia Center for Creative Arts when we were fellows at the same time. I was working on my memoir, and her memoir proposal had recently sold to Flatiron Books, and was on submission to international publishers. I was writing about events I had witnessed and those I hadn’t seen but had to figure out how to put in scene. At the heart of my story were acts of violence, but I wanted to present them in a way that was not emotionally manipulative. When I heard Alexandria read excerpts from her book, I was stunned. She had figured out how to handle all the technical and ethical issues I was struggling with, and she did so with the elegance and grace of a master stylist. Her work has been compared to the podcast Serial, and the TV show True Detective. It’s also been likened to books by Wally Lamb and Truman Capote. I would agree but go further. Her finely chiseled prose has the resonance and intellectual heft of a writer like Joan Didion. While we were at VCCA, the book sold in the UK. It was an exciting moment that I enjoyed experiencing vicariously through her. I wasn’t surprised there was so much interest in her story. It has everything a reader could want: a plot as compelling as a legal thriller; fully rounded characters; a perceptive and insightful narrator who guides us through the story, as we discover the facts at the same time she does; and a myriad of dilemmas that couldn’t be more relevant and topical. I wish that I had read this memoir before I wrote my own. There’s so much technique to learn from it as a writer. There’s also a lot we can learn, as citizens advocating for justice in a world that seems less fair and predictable every day. In my interview, I asked Alexandria about both big social issues and questions of craft. *** The Rumpus: Let’s start with the big social issues. How did you get interested in the death penalty? Alexandria Marzano-Lesnevich: As a child, I was on vacation with my family when my twin brother told a joke with a punch line that included “the electric chair.” I had never heard of the electric chair. So I asked him what it was, and he explained. From that moment on I knew I was an opponent of the death penalty. I had a visceral response to the idea that as a society we would decide to kill somebody in a methodical, intentional way and that we had built a system to execute people. I am the daughter of two lawyers. I grew up idealizing the law as a philosophical record of our commitment to society, and I thought of it as something that pursued justice. The idea that the law would take someone’s life seemed immediately to violate that. So even as a child I had a strong response. Then I went to law school to try to understand why the courts found the death penalty constitutional. I thought there must be an explanation, something I was missing. Because to me, it had always seemed like it would be considered cruel and unusual, certainly. I didn’t understand yet that I might just disagree with the courts. So I went to law school to try to study that. Before I went I really thought of the law as this truth-seeking mechanism, where we have a trial and that trial is designed to elicit truth. I think until very recently in society we still pretty much thought of it that way. We still thought that when somebody was adjudicated of a crime, for example, that the truth was that they were guilty of that crime. Now I think we question that assumption. We understand more that a trial is a competition between two stories. Rumpus: That’s an interesting way to put it. Marzano-Lesnevich: The prosecution and the defense each tell a different story, often out of the same facts. There may be a dispute about what the facts are. But even when you have the facts there’s disagreement about how to think of them. And how you think of them comes down to a story. Rumpus: That makes sense. And your narrator’s voice often sounds like the voice of a lawyer addressing a jury, but the narrator is addressing us, the reader. Marzano-Lesnevich: Yes. Starting to recognize that different approach in law school simultaneously made me more interested in the law but also less interested in being a lawyer. I became fascinated with the way we construct these stories, with what gets left in and what gets left out. I suppose, in the book, I’m trying to bring the reader along in that discovery. Rumpus: Is crafting a memoir like crafting a legal narrative? We have to leave out much, much more than we put in, when we write a memoir. Marzano-Lesnevich: I’ve been teaching memoir for a number of years and it always strikes me that you can take the same event in a person’s life and, depending on where you put it in the narrative, it acquires a different meaning. For example, the same events, even when they are put in chronological order, can take on different meanings depending on how quickly or slowly time unfolds in the chapter. And an event positioned as the inciting incident leads to a different meaning than the same event positioned, say, as the crisis. I think these choices—where you begin and end the story and how long you linger on particular events—affect how we understand a story and how we understand cause. Rumpus: The longer you linger on an event, the more emphasis you’re giving it. If something comes first, it’s seen as the foundation for what comes after. Marzano-Lesnevich: As a writer, one of the things that revelation meant for me was that I had to think about the meaning I was creating when I was structuring my book. For example, the book starts with Ricky Langley killing Jeremy Guillory. I thought quite intentionally about how I don’t want that murder to be in the climax of the book. I really don’t want the structure to indicate that that’s the meaning, that’s the point, the surprise of his death. That would seem cheap to me, somehow. And the same thing with the abuse in my family. I could have started with the abuse in my family and made it the inciting incident but in truth the inciting incident has to be larger than that. It has to be more about the silence and secrets in the family, or the way in which it’s a loving family but there’s still this undertow. Because I wanted my family narrative to be about more than just one thing, I thought a great deal about where to put each event in the memoir thread of my book. Rumpus: And for the “murder” thread? Marzano-Lesnevich: I had to carefully consider which events to start and end with. I knew, from reading 30,000 pages of records— Rumpus: 30,000 pages? Marzano-Lesnevich: That’s part of why this book took so long to write! So, I knew from the records of Ricky Langley’s trials that there was so much material that hadn’t made it into the trial. So much that had happened and, I think, was relevant to any understanding of the past, but hadn’t been admitted in court. I looked at the way Langley’s story was told in the files and the way it was told in each of the three trials—because it was told differently in each one—and the way it was told in different news accounts, the way the lawyers in the case have continued to tell the story to newspapers, the way that the story was told in a UK play that was based on the case—there were all these different tellings, and even in the records there are different tellings. Rumpus: Like what? Marzano-Lesnevich: For example, there was a 1964 car crash that was profoundly devastating to the Langley family and had far-reaching consequences in their lives. The newspaper accounts from 1964 report that it occurred in the middle of the day. But then when people told the story at the 2003 trial they said it occurred in the middle of the night. I think that was simultaneously more dramatic and more believable—the cover of night, darkness, all that. It made for a better story, and I don’t think people consciously chose to get the facts wrong; their subconscious just made a story. So the story is shaped and shaped and shaped and shaped and sometimes the facts are altered. But even more common was that the facts were stable but the way people interpreted them was different—and then those different interpretations got written into, and ended up shaping, future tellings of the story. After reviewing all this material, I realized that what I wanted to do was tell a story that would also be about the construction of all these stories. Rumpus: And you do. Another difficult thing you make look easy is filling in details for scenes you weren’t present for. The memoir part of the book you were a witness to. But the murder part is often constructed from court transcripts. To keep our attention, you need to turn those transcripts into stories, give us characters we can see and hear. You signal when you’re adding something from your imagination or experience, and you tell us why you choose the details you do. Can you talk about the process? The technical and ethical issues you had to wrestle with and how you made them work? Marzano-Lesnevich: I don’t think of it as filling in the gaps with my imagination. I think it’s really important to note that I didn’t invent events. It was more that, as I was reading these records—as happens to all of us I think when we read anything incredibly vivid—the scene would come to life in my mind. And so when I would read, for example, about this car crash, I would see these people in my mind. And then I would read that when Ricky Langley was an adult he told stories about having a dream about the car crash to a roomful of corrections officers, and that those corrections officers, they all gave affidavits afterwards in which they said what they recalled and the dream that he told comes through so vividly in these people’s retellings. So what I tried to do was bring that experience to life for the reader. At the same time, because I want to be straightforward about this process, I acknowledge that even as I was writing about how other people were making stories out of the murder, I, too, was necessarily making stories out of it. Rumpus: Your narrator addresses the reader. Marzano-Lesnevich: It was really important to me to have an active narrator voice so the reader would always know when I was telling myself a story from these records. My goal is for the reader to feel the presence of a single mind piecing together a story from all the information. And so it was essential for me to note where the facts were quite solid and where they had come from, and that’s why I have twelve pages of source notes at the end of the book. Rumpus: I think you’re crystal clear about what your sources are and where the facts come from. By using an active narrator as our guide, you show us that we all make pictures when people are telling us stories. I appreciate how you make that process transparent. Did you always know this was the right approach for your book? Marzano-Lesnevich: Oh man, I tried so many different approaches. So, so many. And that’s another reason why this book took so long to write, just the challenge of figuring out how to tell this story. How could I tell it in as complex a way as I needed to but still keep the pages turning quickly? As a reader, I really like page turners. So I knew I wanted to tell a story that would envelop the reader, make the reader feel as immersed in it as I felt when thinking about these stories. I tried at one point to tell it in a more straightforwardly memoir way. I tried at another point to tell it in a more straightforwardly journalistic way. I then realized that this element of storytelling that we’ve been discussing was too crucial to this book not to highlight it so I felt that I had to do a construction with a more active narrator. But then, since I have two threads, I had to figure out how to weave them. And the way I did that was I actually wrote a couple hundred-page condensed versions of the book. Rumpus: Sounds like a lot of work. Marzano-Lesnevich: Yeah, and then I threw the pages away! But the exercise helped me understand how the two stories were layered. I restarted this book many times. After getting the NEA grant, I again jettisoned everything except twenty-five pages and started all over again, basically. But all that work with the layering helped me trust where the meaningful connections were. And also learn which connections weren’t as meaningful. So despite the fact that the book has taken me years to write, about half of the actual pages were written in the last year before turning it in to my editor. Rumpus: Interesting. Half the book took nine years, and the other half took one. Marzano-Lesnevich: Yes—because I think when you finally find the voice of the book, the pages flow much more easily. But to find that, I’m someone who has to write, throw away. Write, throw away. This story took a long time to figure out how to tell, but one thing about that process was that it helped me trust my own sense of the story. It was only in the rewriting, frankly, that I became structurally braver. And also emotionally braver. Because as the structure of the book solidified I began to realize that I could go deeper into the rawer emotions without losing that structure, because I knew enough about the structure and how to keep it going. It’s notable to me that two of the most emotionally intense moments in this book—moments that now think are vital—weren’t there with that intensity until about two weeks before I turned the manuscript in. Rumpus: Fascinating. Why do you think it happened that way? Marzano-Lesnevich: If the structure hadn’t been solidly in place it would have felt too risky to delve into the rawer stuff because there would be the danger that the emotion would overwhelm the structure. Which is something I think you have to worry about all the time with memoir. Rumpus: That it would take you into a detour, a digression that’s so powerful that you leave behind the thread of the story you meant to continue. Marzano-Lesnevich: Exactly. I’d been working with the structure for so long that I understood how it was going to work, which structural signals I needed to put in, and what the logic of the book was. I think of that phrase a lot when I’m teaching. Rumpus: The logic of the book. That’s a great phrase. Marzano-Lesnevich: What I mean by it is, How is the structure tied to the angle of vision of the narrator and tied to the voice? What’s the interior logic to why this book works the way it does? What’s it trying to say about the world? And I think the reason I spend so much time thinking about that is it felt so crucial to this book. Because if there weren’t a narrative reason the teller of this story is so interested in storytelling, there wouldn’t be a narrative reason for how much it moves backward and forward in time. Rumpus: The structure has to mirror the content. Marzano-Lesnevich: I really think so. Ideally, the structure itself will reveal something about the meaning of the story. Rumpus: When I teach memoir, structure is one of the things students struggle with the most. It’s helpful to have examples of different kinds of structures, and I’m sure I’ll be using your book as a great model. Marzano-Lesnevich: Thank you. Rumpus: You’ve described writing this book as an exercise in empathy. How did your empathy change as you found out more about Ricky Langley and your grandfather? Marzano-Lesnevich: When I started first reading these records I had no empathy for Ricky Langley. How could I possibly have any empathy for him? He was a pedophile and a murderer. Rumpus: Of course. Marzano-Lesnevich: He wasn’t a person to me. He was what he had done. So when I started, the records were difficult for me because I didn’t have empathy for him. I was reading his therapy notes from when he was an older teenager and it was terrible for me to read them because he was so problematic to me. I mean he still is problematic to me, obviously, but at that point he just seemed evil. But I kept reading. And then slowly it became even harder—because as I read, I started to realize that here he was as a teenager arguably trying to get help, but at the same time being trapped by who he was. My understanding of him became more complicated, and more empathetic. And then that was really hard for me! And really problematic in its own way, because then was impossible for me to escape the same questions about my grandfather. Who was he, when he climbed the stairs of my childhood bedroom? What was he thinking? What was that like for him? That’s such a terrible question, in a way, to have to ask as someone who was abused by him. There’s something strange that happens when you write about real people. The real people become characters, which means that you have to have a fully rounded idea of them. I started to see Langley in this somewhat empathetic way—never losing sight of what he’d done, the terrible harm he’d caused, that he’d killed Jeremy Guillory and abused children—but also understanding that he was a person at the same time. Somehow that’s the most terrible, and most necessary, realization to me. And of course it made me think about my own life. When we write fiction or creative nonfiction, we have to try to see our characters are rounded, and we have to try to understand what their motivations were and what the story they were telling themselves about their actions was even if we don’t agree with it, we have to at least understand it for the characters to be three-dimensional. That drove me to figure out why my parents made the choices they did and who they were as people and what they were struggling with that led them to make those choices. And then there was my grandfather. The realization that I was going to have to engage in that kind of empathy for everyone in this memoir was difficult but also probably life altering Rumpus: Life altering? Marzano-Lesnevich: Sure. It fundamentally changed how I saw things. It also forced me to look at my younger self in an empathetic way. Some of the moments in the book that I struggled with writing the most were the ones of me as a young adult and struggling with eating disorders and other problems. I had to look back at her and see how young she was and how much she was trying to handle and have empathy for her. Rumpus: And yet it’s also possible to have too much empathy, right? Marzano-Lesnevich: Oh, yes. I don’t want to give anything away, but there’s a girl in the records who Langley abused and I thought she was fourteen. I think, had I not been reading very empathetically, I might have stopped short when I was thinking she was fourteen and thought wait, that doesn’t match with everything else I know about who this man is. Is there a hidden story here? But instead, I had been spending so much time with him as a character in a book and as a person through the records that I was trying to see a way to understand him and in trying to think the girl was fourteen, I wrote a story in my head and thought, Maybe this was the one time it was different. Of course it would have been terrible if she was fourteen, too, but to when I found out she was five—at that moment I realized the danger of too much empathy. Rumpus: It can turn into wishful thinking and denial and cover up. Marzano-Lesnevich: Absolutely. And I think with my family, part of the reason they made the decisions they did was out of empathy for my grandmother. Out of empathy for her they tried to pretend that the abuse never happened. And that did a great deal of damage. And so with the book, one of the choices I made was to write about my mistaking a five-year-old girl for a fourteen-year-old girl because I wanted to call myself out on the danger of empathy, and to show that what’s important is to come back to the body, back to Jeremy Guillory’s murdered body, and back to the secrets my body held. I wanted to show that we empathize because we’re trying to understand, but at the same time, no matter how many times you tell the story you’re going to come back to the fact of the body. Rumpus: The body is proof. Marzano-Lesnevich: We tell stories and there are differences in how we interpret the facts, but there are still facts. In this case, there are many things that will never be known but there is still the fact of the body. And that’s true in my life, too. And so I wanted to show the many ways of holding that duality. Rumpus: What response are you hoping to get from your book? Marzano-Lesnevich: The most meaningful thing to come out of this book, for me, has been the conversations. It’s so profoundly moving for me when people read my book and then share their own stories about what they carry in their own lives. Rumpus: The things we carry. Marzano-Lesnevich: The other thing I hope people take from the book—and they seem to so far—is the awareness of its complexity. My deep hope was that in reading this story about how we make stories in this one case and also in my life that people might move forth into the world and question how other stories around them were constructed. Or see that construction in their own past. And that also seems to be happening, from what I’ve been hearing from readers, and I’m grateful. I started this book well before the November election, an election which turned out to be a contest between stories on the national level. And I think there seems to be more awareness now about how we make stories out of facts. And if there’s something I’m hoping for concretely out of the book it’s that people pay attention to that complexity around them. In their lives and in the criminal justice system. And in the political sphere. Rumpus: That we separate “alternative facts” from real facts. Marzano-Lesnevich: Yes, on two levels. Certainly when the “alternative facts” are, as we often see now in the national discourse, just plain wrong. Just plain lies. Like moving the time of the crash, because to move it suited a narrative the person wanted to tell. But also to understand that the way we interpret facts often has to do with fitting them into a story we’re telling ourselves. Rumpus: So even though you started your book in a whole different political climate, The Fact of a Body couldn’t be more relevant to what’s happening right now. *** Author photograph © Nina Subin. Sharon Harrigan is the author of Playing with Dynamite: A Memoir, forthcoming from Truman State University Press on October 1. Her work has also appeared in The New York Times (Modern Love), Virginia Quarterly Review, Narrative /em>, and elsewhere. She teaches memoir writing at WriterHouse in Charlottesville, Virginia. More from this author → Filed Under: BOOKS, RUMPUS ORIGINAL RELATED POSTS Say Everything: The Fact of a Body by Alexandria Marzano-Lesnevich How The Keepers Reframes Confession as a Feminist Act Finding the Finally: Alice Anderson Discusses Some Bright Morning, I’ll Fly Away Conversations with Writers Braver Than Me: Jessica Berger Gross The Rumpus Interview with Melissa Febos OTHER COOL STUFF A Hinging Thing: Talking with Maggie Smith Voices on Addiction: Travels with My Daughter R.I.P. #9: Who Died in This House? Chewing Rocks: A Conversation with David Biespiel Both Outsider and Participant: Thousand Star Hotel by Bao Phi You May Like These Zinus 12 Inch Deluxe Wood Platform Bed… $123.00 (512) Zinus Essential Upholstered Platform … $109.48 (542) AZT Plus Luxury Organic Bamboo Bathtub, C… $25.99 (115) ROYAL CRAFT WOOD Luxury Bathtub Ca… $39.97$74.99 (424) Ads by Amazon HELLO Welcome to The Rumpus! We’re thrilled you’re here. At The Rumpus, we’ve got essays, reviews, interviews, music, film, fiction, and poetry—along with kick-ass comics. We know how easy it is to find pop culture on the Internet, so we’re here to give you something more challenging, to show you how beautiful things are when you step off the beaten path. The Rumpus is a place where people come to be themselves through their writing, to tell their stories or speak their minds in the most artful and authentic way they know how, and to invite each of you to do the same. We strive to be a platform for marginalized voices and writing that wouldn't find a home elsewhere. We want to shine a light on stories that build bridges, tear down walls, and speak truth to power. What we have in common is a passion for fantastic writing that’s brave, passionate, and true (and sometimes very, very funny). © 2017 THE RUMPUS NAVIGATION Home Art Books Comics Film Rumpus Originals Media Music Politics Sex Television Your support is critical to our existence. Who We Are Writer’s Guidelines Contact Us The Daily Rumpus FAQ Advertise ShareThis Copy and Paste:)

Shelf Awareness for Friday, May 26, 2017

Shadow Mountain: Lies Jane Austen Told Me by Julie Wright
DK Publishing: Remarkable Books: The World's Most Beautiful and Historic Works

Instant Help Publications: Effective self-help for teens and young adults

Little, Brown Books for Young Readers: Nevermoor: The Trials of Morrigan Crow by Jessica Townsend

Knopf Publishing Group: Only Child by Rhiannon Navin

Balzer + Bray: Supergifted by Gordon Korman

Editors' Note

Memorial Day Weekend

In honor of Memorial Day, we will be stepping away from the computers on Monday. We'll see you again Tuesday, May 30.
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Orbit: Senlin Ascends by Josiah Bancroft

Quotation of the Day

'I Really Found My People' in Indie Bookstore Community

"The indie bookstore community was the first place in the book world that I really found my people. I started working at a bookstore when I was in grad school, and I thought it would be a retail job I'd work until I had my MFA and got an office job. Instead, I found a career in bookstores, and really came into my own as both a reader and writer. Being a bookseller keeps me excited about writing because I am surrounded by other booksellers who are so passionate about what they read, and customers who are so hungry to talk books and find new favorites. Getting to interact firsthand with consumers and see their passion for the subject energizes me as a writer, especially when the business of publishing has me down."

--Mackenzi Lee, author of The Gentleman's Guide to Vice and Virtue (#1 Summer Kids' Indie Next List Pick) in a q&a with Bookselling This Week. Lee, whose given name is MacKenzie Van Engelenhoven, is the events coordinator at Trident Booksellers & Café in Boston, Mass. (See our story about her here.)
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G.P. Putnam's Sons: White Chrysanthemum by Mary Lynn Bracht

News

Denver's BookBar Is Expanding, Celebrating & Donating

BookBar in Denver, Colo., is adding a 1,400-square-foot events and gallery space. "As the store continues to grow and thrive, there is an increasing need for a dedicated event space to serve our growing literary community," BookBar noted. The new space will include a mini bar/cafe and serve as a book art gallery during non-event hours, featuring local artists "specializing in art created from and about books as informative literary showcases." The space will also be available for community events and meeting reservations.

In addition, BookBar is marking its fourth anniversary with a celebration tomorrow and, in partnership with the Society of Children's Book Writers and Illustrators, will be donating more than 2,500 children's books by local authors to local schools. These donations will be delivered to Northwest Denver schools the week of May 28 "to ensure that children can take a book home for summer break." This is part of a program that BookBar and SCBWI hope to expand upon in order to connect Colorado students with Colorado authors.

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Shelf Awareness Sign-up Giveaway: Everything is Awful by Matt Bellassai

Banned Books Week Coalition Adds International Member

Index on Censorship, a nonprofit freedom of expression organization based in London, has joined the Banned Books Week Coalition as its first international member. Index plans to host a number of events in the U.K.--as well as participating in events in the U.S.--during this year's Banned Books Week, which will take place September 24-30.

"Index is excited to be joining the coalition as the first non-U.S. member," said CEO Jodie Ginsberg. "We have been publishing work by censored writers from around the world for 45 years and--given all that is happening on the global political stage--it feels more important than ever to be highlighting censorship and demonstrating just what it means when books are banned."

Charles Brownstein, chair of the Banned Books Week Coalition and executive director of the Comic Book Legal Defense Fund, said: "We are very excited to have the Index on Censorship join the coalition. Their work not only aligns with our mission, but will bring an international perspective and awareness to our annual celebration of the freedom to read."

Other members of the coalition include American Booksellers for Free Expression, American Society of Journalists and Authors, Association of American Publishers, Association of American University Presses, Authors' Guild, Dramatist Legal Defense Fund, Freedom to Read Foundation, National Coalition Against Censorship, National Council of Teachers of English, People for the American Way, PEN America and Project Censored.

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Politics & Prose Phasing Out Bookselling in Busboys and Poets

Politics & Prose, which has maintained bookselling operations in three of Busboys and Poets' six restaurants and community centers in Washington, D.C., for the past two years, is phasing out that involvement because Busboys and Poets has "decided to expand its book operations and move toward staffing and running its own bookstores at all locations over the next few weeks."

Writing in the store's newsletter, owners Bradley Graham and Lissa Muscatine called it "a great collaboration between two D.C. businesses deeply committed to building community and promoting public discussion of ideas, cultural issues, and current events."

They noted that the program with Busboys and Poets was Politics & Prose's "first foray into retail locations beyond the main bookstore on Connecticut Avenue NW. This experience underscored for us the interest that many have in seeing more bookstores in a city that loves to read. We remain committed to bringing more books, authors, and literary events to the Washington region and plan to announce some other initiatives soon."

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BookExpo: Facebook Live Lounge

BookExpo and BookCon will feature exclusive live streaming interviews with celebrities and author interviews on Facebook Live, with fans having the opportunity to participate by asking questions via Facebook comments. Attendees can also take advantage of the livestreamed content.

"We know that every year there are thousands of people who wish they could be at BookExpo & BookCon, and the Facebook Live Lounge will help us bring them the content they crave right on their own devices," said Brien McDonald, event director for BookCon & BookExpo at ReedPOP. "We are leveraging the increasing popularity of livestreaming to provide readers around the world with exclusive live content, so they can be part of the action and spark a global conversation about their favorite authors."

Rosanne Romanello, associate director of publicity at HarperCollins Children's Books, commented: "We're thrilled to leverage Facebook Live to give Epic Reads & YA fans access to the excitement of BookCon. Festivals and Cons are where readers get to meet their favorite authors and experience fandom to the maximum degree; it's great to bring the same all-access, community-first spirit of these events to our digital audience."

Interviews from BookExpo will be streamed via Facebook at facebook.com/books/ as well as on the Facebook pages of the featured authors. Interviews from BookCon will be streamed via Facebook Live on the Epic Reads Facebook page--Facebook.com/EpicReads--as well as on the Facebook pages of the featured authors.

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'Influencers' Asked to Host Book-Themed House Parties

Pan Macmillan "is inviting online 'influencers' and 'brand advocates' to host hundreds of house parties simultaneously across the U.K. to help promote books," the Bookseller reported. Each "event" will be themed around a key Pan Macmillan title or imprint and consist of about 100 parties with 5-10 people, all united by social media. According to the publisher, the goal is to drive engagement with the Pan Macmillan brand through "powerful in-home experiences," with hopes to generate "authentic word of mouth, measurable awareness, shareable content, product reviews and consumer insight."

Pan Macmillan has partnered with marketing agency Come Round to cover four main events, along with the opportunity to participate in other Come Round campaigns as official book partner to its other clients across consumer electronics and entertainment sectors. Come Round founder Giles Harris said, "Insight tells us that consumers are far more likely to recommend and purchase books that have been recommended to them by someone they know and trust. Our mechanic brings those people together and gives them the most informal and conversation-starting environment possible--house parties with their friends."

Sara Lloyd, director of communications and digital at Pan Macmillan, added: "We met with Giles and his team and immediately loved their approach to engagement and their approach to peer-to-peer discussions. It matched our longstanding conversations about audience and engagement; we know that a novel finds its best and widest audience through personal recommendation. Working with Come Round will help us reach more readers and enable us to introduce them to great stories, but we will also have the opportunity to get to know our readers better."

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Cengage CFO Leahy to Step Down

John Leahy, CFO at the textbook and education firm Cengage, will step down at the end of the year, the Bookseller reported. The company said the planned departure will come "after helping to ensure a smooth transition of his responsibilities to his successor," with the recruitment process set to commence shortly. Cengage, which was originally Thomson Learning and is owned by private equity funds, emerged from Chapter 11 bankruptcy in 2014.

Cengage noted that the CFO transition "is aligned with the company's strategic focus on executing a digital business transformation. Mr. Leahy has served as the company's chief financial officer since December 2014, during which time Mr. Leahy transformed the company's finance organization, created significant savings for the company, and spearheaded the re-financing of the company's debt on favorable terms."

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Are you ready to make a move? The best publishers and
bookstores tell us whom they want to hire. It could be you!
Here are 10 of 21 active listings.
Director, Gift & Special Sales, Baker & Taylor Publisher Services, Westchester, IL
Children's Manager, WORD , Brooklyn, NY
Gift Rep Sales Manager, Special Sales, Abrams Books, New York, NY
Marketing Manager, Adult Trade, Abrams Books, New York, NY
Executive Director, New England Independent Booksellers Association, Cambridge, MA
Sales & Support Representative (Special Markets), Ingram Content Group, Boston, MA
Associate Editor, Hachette Book Group, New York, NY
Sales Representative, Rovers LLC, Metro New York,
Marketing & Publicity Associate, JIMMY/James Patterson Books , Hachette Book Group, New York, NY
Sales & Marketing Assistant, Sasquatch Books, Seattle, WA
Click here to view our job board.
Notes

Image of the Day: Book Launch at Maria's

Maria's Bookshop in Durango, Colo., hosted local authors Nasha Winters and Jess Higgins Kelley for the launch of their book, The Metabolic Approach to Cancer (Chelsea Green). The first-time authors spoke to a standing-room-only crowd at local restaurant Eolus, followed by a signing at the store. Pictured: Jess Kelley; Roger Cottingham, Maria's community relations manager; and Nasha Winters.
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Happy 10th Birthday, Booktowne!

Congratulations to Booktowne, Manasquan, N.J., which is celebrating its 10th anniversary "all summer long with some spectacular events--starting this weekend." Tomorrow through Monday there will be refreshments, 10% off selected merchandise and a raffle of "some great books" as well as giveaways from the "free book cart." Author events include a Saturday story time with Ladybug Girl authors David Soman and Jacky Davis (with an appearance by Ladybug Girl); Monica Fritz, author of Graduate Your Beercraft: A Poor College Kid's Guide to Craft Beer, on Sunday at 1; and makeup artist and bestselling author Bobbi Brown, whose new book is Beauty from the Inside Out, on Sunday at 3:30.

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Cool Idea of the Day: Titcomb's High School Literature Prize

On June 1, the first Ralph and Nancy Titcomb Prize in Literature, honoring the founders of Titcomb's Bookshop, East Sandwich, Mass., will be given to a student with a passion for literature chosen by teachers in Sandwich High School's English department, the Cape News reported. The award includes a $250 cash prize, a certificate and a personalized book bound by donation from Talin Bookbindery.

The goal is to personalize the experience by placing those who know the students best at the head of the selection process, said Vicky Titcomb, store manager and daughter of Ralph and Nancy Titcomb.

"A lot of attention is paid to athletics and STEM but, unfortunately, not a lot of attention is paid to humanities," English department head Martha Martin added. "We hope it sends a message to the community that we value a love and passion for reading and writing."

"Ralph and Nancy Titcomb are splendid people, the kind of people who love their town and care about the good intellectual, mental, and artistic health of its people," said Joseph E. Foote, co-scholarship planner and former chairman of the Men's Book Club at Titcomb's. "It seemed to me appropriate that these two citizens of Sandwich should be commemorated annually by a gift welcoming a young scholar from Sandwich High School into the community of those who appreciate literature."

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Personnel Changes at HMH Books for Young Readers

Amanda Acevedo and Alia Almeida have been promoted to marketing specialists at HMH Books for Young Readers.

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Book Trailer of the Day: The Captain Class

The Captain Class: The Hidden Force that Creates the World's Greatest Teams by Sam Walker (Random House).

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Media and Movies

Media Heat: Sally Mott Freeman on Face the Nation

Sunday:
CBS Sunday Morning: Kevin Hart, author of I Can't Make This Up: Life Lessons (Atria/37 INK, $26.99, 9781501155567).

CBS Face the Nation: Sally Mott Freeman, author of The Jersey Brothers: A Missing Naval Officer in the Pacific and His Family's Quest to Bring Him Home (Simon & Schuster, $28, 9781501104145). She will also be on All Things Considered on Monday.

Monday:
Ellen repeat: Sheryl Sandberg, co-author of Option B: Facing Adversity, Building Resilence, and Finding Joy (Knopf, $25.95, 9781524732684).

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Movies: The Best of Adam Sharp; Colette

Toni Collette has optioned Graeme Simsion's The Best of Adam Sharp and will star in a film adaptation of the novel. Deadline reported that the project, "which is kind of a High Fidelity for 40-somethings, is one of the first that Collette has brought to her newly formed production company Vocab Films. Her producing partner is Jen Turner." Collette would play the lead female role, Angelina.

Simsion's book The Rosie Project "was snapped up by Tri-Star and has had some major talent circling it--at one point Ryan Reynolds and Jennifer Lawrence--and top directors as well," Deadline noted.

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Denise Gough, Fiona Shaw, Robert Pugh and Rebecca Root have joined Keira Knightley and Dominic West for upcoming production Colette, which is set to begin shooting this week in the U.K., Hungary and France, Deadline reported. Directed by Wash Westmoreland (Still Alice), the project about the French novelist was written by Westmoreland and the late Richard Glatzer, with revisions by Rebecca Lenkiewicz. Killer Films' Pamela Koffler, Number 9 Films' Elizabeth Karlsen and Stephen Woolley produce with Killer Films' Christine Vachon and Bold Films' Michel Litvak and Gary Michael Walters.

"We're delighted to reunite Killer Films after the phenomenal global success of Patricia Highsmith's unofficial autobiography Carol, on another story of a female twentieth century literary icon, the fabulously talented Colette," said Karlsen. "Colette's struggles with finding her voice in an exciting turn of the century belle époque Paris, draws instant parallels with female artists today and is a tailor-made role for one of the world's leading actors, Keira Knightley."

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Books & Authors

Awards: Leacock Shortlist; CWA Dagger Longlists

Three authors have been named to the shortlist of the 70th annual CA$15,000 (about US$11,145) Leacock Medal, honoring Canadian literary humor, Quillblog reported. The finalists are Gary Barwin for his Scotiabank Giller Prize–nominated Yiddish for Pirates; Amy Jones for her debut novel We're All in This Together; and Drew Hayden Taylor for his short fiction collection Take Us to Your Chief. The winner will be announced June 10.

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The Crime Writers Association announced the longlists in 10 categories for its annual Dagger awards. The Diamond Dagger, for a career's outstanding contribution to crime fiction as nominated by CWA members, was announced earlier in the year and has been awarded to bestselling author Ann Cleeves. Shortlists for the Daggers will be revealed later in the summer and the winners announced at the Dagger Awards dinner in London October 26.

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Reading with... Alexandria Marzano-Lesnevich

photo: Nina Subin
Alexandria Marzano-Lesnevich is the author of The Fact of a Body: A Murder and a Memoir (Flatiron, May 16, 2017). A 2014 National Endowment for the Arts fellow, she has received a Rona Jaffe Award and has been a fellow at both MacDowell and Yaddo. Her essays appear in the New York Times, the Oxford American and the anthologies True Crime and Waveform: Twenty-first Century Essays by Women. She received her JD from Harvard, her MFA at Emerson College, and her BA from Columbia University. She now lives in Boston, where she teaches at Grub Street and in the graduate public policy program at Harvard's Kennedy School of Government.

On your nightstand now:

I just bought a new nightstand last week--I needed a larger one, to hold more books! So I can happily say that these are indeed on (and in) the nightstand, rather than the floor. In the "just read" pile, there's Agota Kristof's one-volume trilogy (The Notebook, The Proof, The Third Lie), which a bookseller at the Spotty Dog in Hudson, N.Y., introduced me to. It's as disturbing as it is compulsively readable, and deeply strange. Also Hannah Tinti's The Twelve Lives of Samuel Hawley, which took me forever to finish--I kept slowing down because I didn't want it to end. Then two books by friends, totally different from each other but both amazing: The Brand New Catastrophe by Mike Scalise, a memoir that's acerbic and funny and wise, and Touch by Courtney Maum, social satire we sorely need in this smartphone-addicted moment. In the "to be read" pile, I've got Elif Batuman's The Idiot and The Best We Could Do by Thi Bui. There's also an empty spot that's just waiting for David Grann's Killers of the Flower Moon to arrive.

Favorite book when you were a child:

The Unbearable Lightness of Being by Milan Kundera. My parents had lots of books everywhere, and I preferred their bookshelves to my own. I was far too young to actually understand Kundera, but I fell in love with his voice on the page. When I was kid, we spent summers on the Massachusetts island of Nantucket--which was then still an island of five-and-dime shops, old fishermen's bars and beach dogs let loose from their collars. Each day or so I would go to Nantucket Bookworks and ask them if he'd released a new novel yet. They were always very kind to me and smiled and said not that day, maybe tomorrow. Then they pointed me to other books--and introduced me to a lot of wonderful reading that way. But I remember thinking it was terribly unfair of Kundera to keep his readers waiting. He had to have notebooks, didn't he? Why couldn't he just publish the notebooks, I thought? I would have happily read them. (I think now that, basically, what I was waiting for was the Internet!)

Your top five authors:

Well, Milan Kundera, obviously. But also: Maggie Nelson, Michael Ondaatje, the poet Adam Zagajewski, and right now--because I love everything he's done, including his new one, Exit West--Mohsin Hamid.

Book you've faked reading:

Proust's Swann's Way rearranged my heart and mind, and meant everything to me when I was in my first year of college--but I never made it through the rest of the volumes.

Book you're an evangelist for:

Nothing Holds Back the Night by the French writer Delphine de Vigan. It's a memoir that's actually about how unknowable we are to each other. It stretches the boundaries of the genre by containing tons of openly imagined scenes, and it's somehow both stark and lush at the same time, and devastating in all the important ways. It is also, inexplicably, pretty much unknown in the U.S.

Book you've bought for the cover:

Two, bought as a teenager the same afternoon, at a tiny bookshop in California that I wish I could remember the name of: a battered copy of Tennessee Williams's The Rose Tattoo, which had a torn cover that seemed tremendously romantic to me; and a shiny, nearly holographic silver hardcover of Timothy Leary's Design for Dying, mostly because I wanted to be cool enough to want to read it. I wasn't--it scared the heck out of me--but I still have it, and looking at that cover now always returns me to my teenage self.

Book you hid from your parents:

The Bible, amazingly enough! Both my parents had left the Christianity of their upbringing, and they had complicated feelings about the role the Bible had played in their childhoods. Maybe as a result, I was fascinated by religion as a kid--the allure of anything unknown. I borrowed a Bible from a friend, snuck it home--and oh, the storytelling! I knew that them seeing me read it would lead to lots of discussions I wasn't ready to have, though, so I hid it under the covers. The only other book I ever hid that way was Ken Follett's Pillars of the Earth, for the sex scenes.

Book that changed your life:

Two that I discovered at the same time in law school, that reminded me of the power of story and made it completely impossible for me to continue to avoid writing: Martha Cooley's The Archivist and Anthony Doerr's short story collection The Shell Collector.

Favorite line from a book:

This changes nearly daily, there's so much amazingness out there. Yesterday what spoke to me was Ondaatje: "The first sentence of every novel should be: 'Trust me, this will take time but there is order here, very faint, very human.' " But now you've got me thinking of Martha Cooley, so let's go, too, with this line from The Archivist, which underscores everything I write, and perhaps even why I write the way I do, always with multiple strands and layered associations: "With a little effort, anything can be shown to connect with anything else: existence is infinitely cross-referenced."

Five books you'll never part with:

First: a little poetry treasury my mother gave me when I was a child, which she had when she was a child. It contains Edna St. Vincent Millay's poem "Dirge Without Music," which was the first time I felt the shock of recognition in reading. I think that shock made me into a writer.

Then, Bluets by Maggie Nelson--no one's taking this away from me. I don't even lend it out. I started it late one night, standing in my kitchen, my stomach rumbling, overdue for dinner. The only food I had in the house was a box of frozen lima beans; I was supposed to go out for food. Instead I spent the night curled in an armchair, eating the still-frozen lima beans by letting them thaw one by one in my mouth, completely enthralled by the book. It was over too soon and it was over at the perfect moment for the story. That's one of my fondest reading memories.

Shot in the Heart by Mikal Gilmore--his memoir of his brother Gary Gilmore, the first person executed when the U.S. reinstated the death penalty in the 1970s. Mikal's trying to understand why his brother would ask to be shot in the heart by a firing squad, and to do that he decides he has to go into the history of Utah and the mythology of his family and even the ghostly realm. It blew open my idea of what memoir could accomplish, and it's beautiful and terrible and true.

A Fanatic Heart: Selected Stories by Edna O'Brien--I kept this on my nightstand for years, so much do I love every story in it.

Lastly, The Journalist and the Murderer by Janet Malcolm. Every time I reread this, I'm reminded that so many of the issues I encounter in my work and feel compelled to grapple with anew, she already has.

Book you most want to read again for the first time:

I wish I could rediscover Colum McCann's Let the Great World Spin. That book ruined me on novels for a good two months. I couldn't read any other, because I just wanted to be in the world of that novel again.

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Book Review

Review: Sweet Spot: An Ice Cream Binge Across America

Sweet Spot: An Ice Cream Binge Across America by Amy Ettinger (Dutton, $26 hardcover, 320p., 9781101984192, June 27, 2017)

Journalist Amy Ettinger dishes up ice cream in Sweet Spot, an adventurous, thoroughly researched exploration into the U.S. love affair with frozen sweet treats. Ettinger is a self-proclaimed ice cream connoisseur turned ice cream snob and addict: "Ice cream is more like a drug than any other food... the more ice cream you eat, the more you have to eat it to regain that 'high.' " Ettinger consumes ice cream almost daily and stocks between $15 and $30 worth in her freezer at all times. She also "likes" numerous ice cream parlors on Facebook so she can track new, exciting flavors. Ettinger believes her taste buds and brain were "forever altered by the introduction of 'gourmet' Ben & Jerry's flavors in the 1980s." This inspired her coast-to-coast quest to learn everything she could about ice cream. Her richly entertaining, easy-to-read narrative is infused with history, recipes and the science behind what makes for delicious--and sometimes not-so-delicious--flavors. She also looks at innovators and imitators, and how the ice cream business continues to evolve.

Sprinkled among stories from Ettinger's life and travels are anecdotes about Americana, starting with the Founding Fathers. George Washington invested in ice cream annually, allotting a $200 allowance in 1790, which equates to a whopping $3,000 today! Jefferson is credited for writing the first American ice cream recipe, a French-inspired vanilla, and he even built an icehouse at his Monticello estate. In 1861, Bassetts in Philadelphia launched the first ice cream company. But William Breyer, delivering his ice cream by horse-drawn wagon in Philly, ultimately overpowered the popularity of Bassetts, making Breyers a bestseller for generations. All this paved the way for a host of future ice cream makers, both independents and mass producers: Edy's, Baskin-Robbins, Häagen-Dazs, Tom Carvel and his often ruthless business practices, Mister Softee, Good Humor and their once-ubiquitous trucks, and a host of local, quirky artisans, some of whom create offbeat flavors like sushi, French toast, oyster and foie gras.

The philosophy and wisdom of past and present ice cream makers--along with segues into soda shops and fountains, sundaes and floats, ice cream sandwiches, cones, frozen yogurt and the gelato craze--are swirled into Ettinger's tasty quest. What rises to the fore, however, are sections devoted to Ettinger working alongside fellow ice cream aficionados and business people--and her enrolling in "the world's most famous ice cream making class" at Penn State. There, she learned the fascinating ins and outs of pasteurization, flavoring, potential hazards, short cuts and tricks of the trade--both good and bad. Ettinger piles on double and triple scoops of fun information that offers literary deliciousness for ice cream lovers everywhere. --Kathleen Gerard, blogger at Reading Between the Lines.

Shelf Talker: A passionate ice cream lover explores the history, business, science and sheer deliciousness of American ice cream culture.

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Deeper Understanding

Robert Gray: Yet Another BEA Loomed. What Was I Thinking?

BookExpo is about anticipation as well as participation. I've been writing pre-BEA columns since 2005, initially as a bookseller/blogger and then as an editor at Shelf Awareness. Year after year, yet another BEA loomed. What was I thinking?

2005: "Ladies and Gentlemen! Boys and Girls! Children of All Ages! You are just a few short days away from a weekend of thrills! A weekend of gasps! A weekend of giggles! A weekend at BookExpo America in New York City!

"This year's edition of BEA, the publishing world's annual bigtop extravaganza, will happen at the Jacob K. Javits Convention Center ('Marketplace to the World'), perched upon the glittering waters of the Hudson River. But unlike Ringling Brothers, our circus won't be limited to three rings. In fact, we'll have dozens, maybe hundreds, of rings.... Business mixes seamlessly with pleasure, so the work day runs, or feels like it runs, from the dawn to dawn. Welcome, my friends, to the show that never ends."

2006: "Mostly, however, I'll enjoy the spectacle of books that is BookExpo. Big publishers and small publishers looking for business; self-published authors looking for an audience and a few unpublished authors looking for publishers. Everybody talking books. Thousands of people talking books and nothing but books, day and night, for the better part of a week. Maybe somebody is still reading out there. You'd think so at BookExpo."

2007: "But the future is more than just idle speculation in our business; it is the water in which we swim. We routinely read in the future--manuscripts, catalogs, ARCs--and at BookExpo, the full utopian vision is on display. Books that will be published next fall have not failed yet; first-time authors are always promising; any book might grow up to be a bestseller."

2009: "As you walk through the airport concourse upon arrival, you can spot the 'book people.' Just as you think you're imagining this, you see another one coming your way. It turns out to be somebody you know. And when you look in the rest room mirror to check on your own post-flight status, a book person stares back at you bleary-eyed. You're not surprised. Or disappointed."

2010: " I'll be on the lookout for indie booksellers at BEA. I used to be one of them. No, in many ways I'm still one of them. Former booksellers just don't fade away.... And now we're headed back to BookExpo. Handselling and handwringing will continue unabated, and we'll talk it all out once again with our eyes on the digital horizon. Enjoy the ride anyway. How can we possibly resist the temptation to yell 'Woooooooo-hooooooo,' whether we're plummeting like Icarus, or just skydiving while waiting for the parachutes to deploy?"

2011: "When some of us gather in New York next week for BookExpo America, we'll once again discuss the future of reading and its potential effects on books (print and digital), bookstores (chain and indie; online and bricks & mortar), publishers, writers, readers and anyone or anything else connected to our wordy world. We will, for the most part, be anxiously, if politely, asking each other: What's going to happen to us?

2012: "In a few days, we'll gather in New York to talk about the future of books. 'Well, what if there is no tomorrow? There wasn't one today,' Bill Murray said in Groundhog Day. Don't worry. Tomorrow starts next week, once again. It's a paradox we've been living with for a while. You get used to it."

2013: "We will, of course, need our stinkin' badges when we descend upon the Javits Center next week for BookExpo America. We'll need them to get in, get around and get acquainted. Identity is everything.... Although my trusty Shelf Awareness holder still has last year's badge tucked inside at the moment, it seems anxious to acquire the updated version I'll pick up next week. Hope to see you at BEA. My stinking badge will say Robert, but you can call me Bob."

2014: "If you've observed BEA attendees before in their unnatural habitat (aka the Javits Center), you may have noticed a wide range of walking styles negotiating their way through the bookish throngs. Since Sibley hasn't yet published a field guide to identify all of these varieties, I tried to assemble a sampling here to illustrate just a few of the walkers you're likely to encounter--or become--during your #BEA14 pilgrimage."

2015: "Next week, we bookish folk will infiltrate New York City for BookExpo America, each of us covertly bringing our own home library identity with us, along with our book trade identity (bookseller, publisher, author, etc.).... This year, however, I've been reminded... of something that struck me during my first book trade show, at the moment I walked into the Miami Beach Convention Center in 1993 for ABA's annual event. I'd been a bookseller for less than a year, but knew at once I belonged there. Maybe that was just my home library identity overcompensating, but it was a useful survival tool nonetheless."

For some reason, I didn't write a pre-BEA column last year, so I'll end with something from a 2005 blog post, when I was still a frontline bookseller: "My prime directive at BEA is to find the unexpected book, the one that might never cross my desk otherwise. Everything else is just work. Finding the unexpected book is pleasure. Well, finding the unexpected book when it is buried under the number of books on display at BEA is also work. But I ain't complaining."

The anticipation grows. See you at BookExpo. --Robert Gray, contributing editor (Column archives available at Fresh Eyes Now.)

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CONTENTS

Editors' Note

Memorial Day Weekend
Quotation of the Day

'I Really Found My People' in Indie Bookstore Community
News

Denver's BookBar Is Expanding, Celebrating & Donating
Banned Books Week Coalition Adds International Member
Politics & Prose Phasing Out Bookselling in Busboys and Poets
BookExpo: Facebook Live Lounge
'Influencers' Asked to Host Book-Themed House Parties
Cengage CFO Leahy to Step Down
Notes

Image of the Day: Book Launch at Maria's
Happy 10th Birthday, Booktowne!
Cool Idea of the Day: Titcomb's High School Literature Prize
Personnel Changes at HMH Books for Young Readers
Book Trailer of the Day: The Captain Class
Media and Movies

Media Heat: Sally Mott Freeman on Face the Nation
Movies: The Best of Adam Sharp; Colette
Books & Authors

Awards: Leacock Shortlist; CWA Dagger Longlists
Reading with... Alexandria Marzano-Lesnevich
Book Review

Review: Sweet Spot: An Ice Cream Binge Across America
Deeper Understanding

Robert Gray: Yet Another BEA Loomed. What Was I Thinking?
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Alexandria Marzano-Lesnevich on Writing Her True Crime Novel
by Sarah Fonseca
July 26, 2017

“THERE IS A TENDENCY TO SIMPLIFY THINGS [….] THE TRUTH IS IN THE CONTRADICTION AND JUXTAPOSITION.”
“All of these possible causes are causes in fact. The causes in fact are endless,” Alexandria Marzano-Lesnevich writes of Palsgraf v. Long Island Railroad Co. in her debut book, The Fact of a Body. Nearing a century old, the case illustrates the series of events which purportedly led to a train platform injury in New York. The law loves its answers and this instance was no different: accountability, even in the face of much ambiguity, is ideal. It is on this note that we are introduced to Ricky Langley, an accused sex offender and murderer whom the author was once tasked with defending as a young legal intern in New Orleans. Ricky’s unthinkable actions are depicted in unflinching prose, as are those which were inflicted upon him.

As the lesbian-identified Marzano-Lesnevich dives into Ricky’s biography, beginning with the tragedies preceding his birth and ending with a face-to-face encounter, she introduces another pressing story for which the causes in fact are endless: that of familial secrets, including that of her molestation by a grandfather. The text flawlessly associates hedges in suburban New Jersey with the razor wire of Angola State Prison, the furious hunt for a Southern home where Ricky committed the crime with a search through a parent’s private file cabinet, and strong mothers with other strong mothers. The Fact of a Body effortlessly pushes beyond the timeline of its two primary narratives, causing the most self-aware of readers to interrogate their own personal history, visceral memory, and deep-seated convictions.

On a Tuesday falling during Pride Month, Alexandria, and I spoke about the daunting nature of research, the docuseries’ media renaissance, and the queering of literary architectures.

At what point did you realize that The Fact of a Body would contain two narrative threads? Or was the story of your family always inextricable from that of the Langley case?

When I acquired the first set of Ricky Langley’s court records––he was tried three times over twenty years and that amounted to about 30,000 pages in court records––I began with 8,000 pages from the middle trial. I didn’t think I was going to write about it. I really was getting the records to try to lay to rest inside me the way I felt haunted by the case. All I’d done by that point was watch Ricky’s confession videotape and words from that kept coming back to me in this way that made me realize: it had something to do with my own past.

By the time I really began to write about it, I had acknowledged to myself that the stories were inextricable from each other. Part of my challenge in the book became trying to show the reader that they were inextricable. I had to show the reader how connected they were to me and why.

The Fact of a Body is incredibly ambitious, spanning two lifelines and five decades––or nine, if you factor in your use of Palsgraf v. Long Island Railroad Co. as prologue and epilogue. How did you approach condensing insurmountable material and memory archives into an initial manuscript outline?

The funny thing is, I never did a proper outline! I did try to do a traditional outline or book proposal, but it collapsed pretty quickly. The book works on the accumulation and accretion of images and in order to understand the emphasis or to feel connected to the narrator, you have to have the images from earlier in the book.

Instead, I realized what I had to do was write in a way that would allow me to see structure and the images at the same time. I ended up writing several condensed, 100-page versions of the book to try to understand how the images should be layered and where the threads should be tying together.

At one point, I drew a map of boxes and arrows to try to put down on paper how I understood the connections. That was sort-of an outline, but I did it without looking at any materials. I wanted to capture the conscious links in the way that I understood them subconsciously. It wasn’t a workable structure because it was all over the place. Yet I could say, ‘Okay, this connection actually seems potent and this connection really doesn’t. Can I write into the one that seems potent?’ Eventually, years later, I was able to ask myself, ‘Can I build a structure that captures the potent overlaps that still has an anterior logic for the reader to follow?’

The Fact of a Body is in three parts. The first part tells the murder, the second part tells the story of a broader context and Ricky’s full life, and third part tries to make sense of it all. Which, in retrospect, I realized was the structure of a trial. However, if I had set out to structure the book like a trial, it wouldn’t have worked. It would have seemed gimmicky. Instead, it happened as a consequence of thinking about storytelling.

Your focus on images is uncanny. In the final five chapters of The Fact of a Body there are moments where you are describing the crime scene images and quite literally writing about the challenge of describing them. Because of this, I found it logical that there weren’t any pictures within the book. However, given the sheer density of the material that you started out with, were there any details that, due to lack of source information or the inherent constraints of book-writing, that you opted to omit?

I always knew that I would put more pictures up on my website because I wanted them to be available to readers, but I didn’t want to actually put the images in front of them while reading. So much of the book is about how we read our lives through the lens of other people and how we read other people’s lives through our own. I needed readers to see the characters for themselves, however they were going to imagine them. However much of that was going to be informed by their own past––I wanted that to happen. So much of the book is about that that happens. In the book, I am giving the reader my past so they can see how I did that. But certainly everyone who came to the case saw it through the lens of their own history.

There are potential jurors whose responses during voir dire (jury selection) I wish I could’ve included. Those were cut because they weren’t relevant, since the jurors didn’t end up serving—in general, I cut down jury selection from twenty pages in one draft to I think about two in the book—but to me they illustrate how idiosyncratic and personal justice can be.

What you say about images is reminding me of Scott McCloud’s nonfiction work on comic book theory and the challenge encounter where the drawings cannot be too specific because they stifle the imaginations of the readers––they must be just abstract enough. That’s effectively what the words and descriptions of photos do within The Fact of the Body.

In your opinion, whom or what was responsible for sealing Ricky Langley’s fate?

I don’t know if any one thing is responsible; many things went into it. There’s even the question of when his fate was sealed, right? What was responsible and when was there no turning back? There are so many different ways that one can tell this story and they’ll all be true and they’ll all be incomplete. The way you tell the story has a deep impact on your understanding of him, as the book explores. I could point to anything and everything.

Near the end of The Fact of a Body, you revisit your first meeting with Ricky at Angola State Prison. This moment is immaculately juxtaposed with your confronting your grandfather about your childhood abuse. You had no recollection of how that phone conversation with your grandfather ended. Do you remember how that conversation with Ricky went? (If so, why did you elect to omit it?)

I do, absolutely. I remember it deeply. That’s part of what drove me to write the book and to put that scene where it is within it––or rather, the gesture towards the conversation. When it happened, I had no way to make sense of how it impacted me emotionally, period. In many ways, the book is me trying to make sense of the impact of meeting him. So it could only go at the end. As I say in the book, that moment was, in a way, both the beginning of the story and its only possible end.

Why didn’t you divulge the content of that formative conversation in The Fact of a Body?

I can’t talk about what we spoke about because of the circumstances under which the meeting happened. But it also became a very intentional choice to not include that. In terms of what the book is getting at, it’s actually not about the words we said to one another; it is about the narrator—me—coming face to face with him. In some ways, the resolution of the book is that Ricky will always be a man––a person––and a murderer and a pedophile; the resolution with my grandfather is that he will also always be both a pedophile and my grandfather. There is a tendency to simplify things. We try to make people one or the other. The truth is in the contradiction and juxtaposition. It felt like the right thing to do, to have the book end with me sitting down with Ricky and him sitting down with me.

As a reader, I felt very satiated by that moment. I didn’t need to know what followed.

It felt very risky writing it. I remember the moment when I wrote that scene. It was the last one in the book that I wrote. I don’t usually work chronologically, but I couldn’t figure out how to induce a resolution that felt true and real to me. I struggled to integrate that moment earlier into the book but it didn’t make any emotional sense despite that being where the meeting occurred chronologically.

I was at the MacDowell Colony. I had two days left and that was it; I knew I still didn’t know how to finish the book. Completely by coincidence, they had given me the New Jersey studio. A lot of significant scenes in the book take place in New Jersey. So the idea that I was going to finish the book in a residency named after my home state was so resonant! I invited some friends to visit my studio for the last day. That became a deadline. The clock was ticking, I was sitting in New Jersey totally stuck, feeling deeply inside the emotions of the book—and all of a sudden, it occurred to me: that meeting was the end.

When writing that, it felt so right. But I also wondered, ‘Is my editor going to let me get away with this?’

In 2006, Hilton Als sat down with Joan Didion for the very first Paris Review Art of Nonfiction interview to discuss her recently published The Year of Magical Thinking. I’d like to borrow a question from it for you: The Fact of a Body moves quickly, empathetically but unflinchingly. Did you think about how your readers would read it?

I thought a lot about the need to turn the pages. I always imagine the reader reading a physical book. I’m a little old-fashioned that way. So I thought about the motion of turning the pages—about what was making the reader do that. I also thought, ‘Oh god. All these awful and emotionally complicated things are going to happen and I am going to use them to ask the reader to think deeply about them. So if I’m asking the reader to go to hard places with me, how am I going to keep them turning the pages?’ That’s the way I read. I need some suspense to make me turn the pages. I did think very mechanically about what was going to satisfy yet induce a question, and what is the question keeping a reader reading at any point. I think about the ends of chapters as places where the reader could exit the book and, if I didn’t want them to, I had to keep them moving.

I also thought a lot about the relationship that I had to the reader. If I was going to ask you to read about these intimate things, I was basically asking you to care. And if I was going to ask you to care about these things in Ricky Langley’s life, knowing that this is my interpretation of his life, I needed to be really honest. I had to disclose things that I was uncomfortable disclosing; everything had to serve what I was trying to give the reader.

A big example: The scar moment in part three. It never even occurred to me that would be in the book. I was so uncomfortable even thinking about it. That blows my mind now, because acknowledging the scar feels like one of the things that makes the book come together, and certainly fits in with the title. Before I added it, readers I’d given the book to hadn’t quite gotten why this question of irresolvability was so important to me; and why the scenes of me searching for the house where the murder took place would even be in the book. I realized I hadn’t given them what they needed to make sense of it the way I do. I hadn’t yet been intimate enough, or honest enough. So I added the scar.

The past few months have been rich with documentary serial debuts, from Netflix’s The Keepers to This American Life’s Sh*t Town, that are thematically similar to The Fact of a Body. Have you been indulging?

Oh, I have! I just watched The Keepers. I’m grateful that these stories are out there and I’m also interested in the dangers of them. I’m interested in the question of who’s doing the storytelling. That’s a question I engage with deeply in this book. I’m happy that we’re talking about this culturally.

I’ve been following a bit of the criticism over the past few months concerning Sh*t Town and journalistic responsibility to the spaces they’re inhabiting and what it means to leave, amplify the story, and be safe from the wrath that it causes within that community. Those are interesting conversations and I don’t know if there are clear answers yet.

I don’t think they do yet. For me, with Iowa, pronounced Io-way, the history and sound of that name resonated with me so deeply. If the town hadn’t been named that, would it have stuck with me so intensely? Had John McLemore not left a voicemail calling Woodstock, Alabama Sh*t Town, would Brian Reed have gone there ?

Have you started to consider your next project? Would you like to share with our readers?

I’ve been spending as much time as I can in Cambodia. I’m continually drawn to the question of how we make stories out of the past. I don’t think I’m done with that.

Your book is a fusion of two genres––memoir and true crime––which have been deemed, much to one’s chagrin––conventionally feminine and masculine, respectively. You also write of the Langley verdict’s shirking of the legal normality: “The law the jurors were presented with didn’t have room for middle ground. They created it, as though they opened up space in the law, inventing a category that doesn’t exist. Ricky.” Were you ever conscious of the The Fact of a Body’s subversive or queer elements?

I absolutely attributed it to a queer aesthetic. Anyone who has had to construct their own category because the existing categories don’t fit—a common experience of queerness, I think, and certainly my own experience—maybe finds it easier to recognize that act of construction in other forms. It shows that one can do that construction with other forms—in my case, both how I viewed these stories and how I constructed this book. I borrowed a structural element from here, I borrowed a structural element from another book. Out of that came something new—something that was and is truer to my experience of the world than any one category could be.

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ABOUT : SARAH FONSECA

A Southern state expatriate, Sarah Fonseca reconciles her fraught heritage by living in the same Brooklyn neighborhood that birthed Stonewall Jackson. A Lambda Literary Foundation Fellow and Ally Harbuck Scholar, Sarah's work can be found at Autostraddle, Buzzfeed, Medium, Posture Magazine, and A Quiet Courage. She also blogs and obsesses over Eartha Kitt at girlsinmitsouko.tumblr.com.

Tags: Alexandria Marzano-Lesnevich, Bio/Memoir, documentary, Interview, secondary, The Fact of a Body, True Crime
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