From My Bookshelf: when "True Crime" gets personal
5 true crime books to read before HOME OF THE HAPPY
I never really considered myself a true crime fanatic.
But when I first set out to write this story in 2017, the very first advice I received was to read as much true crime as I could get my hands on—focusing in on true crime that had a personal/memoir bent, and especially true crime written by women.
Over the years, that list has expanded to occupy an entire section of my bookshelf, and a handful of those books wear the bruises of being my favorites—folded corners, ripping jackets, coffee stains; rotating from that shelf to my desk to the pile on the floor by my bed as I’ve returned to them again and again over the years, studying the way terrible stories are told well, taking notes on research techniques, snagging the details that imprint on the brain and meditating on the shapes those imprints leave behind.
So, in the year leading up to the publication of Home of the Happy, I thought I’d share and celebrate some of the books that have especially guided and inspired me throughout my writing and research process. Listed, in no particular order, with their bookshop.com links for anyone interested in purchasing (and supporting indie bookstores while you are at it):
The Red Parts: Autobiography of a Trial
by Maggie Nelson
This was the first “true crime” memoir I read to shake me, to make me realize “Wow, I want to create something like this.”
The Red Parts is a sequel of sorts to Nelson’s work of narrative verse Jane: A Murder, which was, as Nelson puts it “about how one might live—or, rather, how my family lived, how I lived—under the shadow of the death of a family member who had clearly died horribly and fearfully, but under circumstances that would always remain unknown, unknowable.” (While Jane was its own inspiration, and is well worth the read, The Red Parts stands just as well all on its own.) Nelson’s “trial autobiography” explores the reality of such circumstances suddenly becoming “knowable” when her Aunt Jane’s murder is unexpectedly solved, and her murderer brought to trial, thirty-five years later.
The book is short, and an easy read, but it holds so much. As Nelson carries us through the 2004 trial of Gary Leiterman, Nelson confronts the sin at the heart of so much true crime storytelling—a grotesque captivation with violence, especially when it is against women—and her own participation in that transgression. She slides back and forth between the past and the courtroom present, reflecting on her own losses and traumas while contemplating loss and trauma on a societal scale. All the while, she wonders if putting these stories to the page, attempting to articulate and organize them, makes any difference at all. She doesn’t ever really arrive at an answer, but she does it anyway.
Click here to purchase The Red Parts: Autobiography of a Trial at bookshop.org.
The Fact of a Body: A Murder and a Memoir
By Alex Marzano-Lesnevich
This book had me at its premise: a young law student who sets out to fight death penalty cases, who—when confronted with the case of Ricky Langley, a pedophile who murdered a six-year-old boy in Iowa, Louisiana in 1992—can’t help but want him to die.
In enthralling prose, The Fact of a Body juxtaposes Marzano-Lesnevich’s obsessive attempt to untangle Langley’s personal history beneath the specter of their own unspoken past as a victim of childhood sexual abuse. This book is both an act of staking claim over a story the author’s been forced to bury as a family secret, and a radical attempt to find a way forward through something like empathy, even probing at the idea of forgiveness.
Click here to purchase The Fact of a Body: A Murder and a Memoir at bookshop.org.
We Keep the Dead Close: A Murder at Harvard and a Half-Century of Silence
By Becky Cooper
Becky Cooper’s obsession with the 1969 Harvard University murder of Jane Britton begins with a wild rumor, and expands to almost a decade of extensive reporting, all of it culminating in the book We Keep the Dead Close: A Murder at Harvard and a Half-Century of Silence. Rather than simply untangling the myth to reveal the bare, cold truth—Cooper descends, with us, into what the story of Britton has come to represent at Harvard: an allegory for the sinister misogynistic forces within the insular, ivory towered world of one of America’s most esteemed academic institutions.
Cooper’s research is exhaustive—and the reader is made privy to much more of it than we often get in books like this: the newspaper articles; archival records; diary entries from Britton; letters she wrote to her friends, her presumed lovers, her presumed enemies. And many, many interviews. Cooper lays so much of it out on the page, carrying us with her as one account complicates another, as one suspect gets crossed out and another arises, as the leads reach dead ends, impossible to verify. And as characters writ larger-than-life in the half-century of whispers turn out to be merely human. It’s almost messy, the book—with its intricate cast of characters and a story that has been retold so many times it has become less history than folktale, all presented through the lens Cooper’s accumulated information, and the meanings she draws from it. In the thick of my own research, and all of its contradictions and loose ends and my meaning-making, I loved this book.
Click here to purchase We Keep the Dead Close: A Murder at Harvard and a Half-Century of Silence at bookshop.org.
Mississippi Mud: Southern Justice and the Dixie Mafia
By Edward Humes
Without giving away too many spoilers, I’ll say only this: I was recommended this book by a man who was once one of the most notorious jewel thieves in the South.
Mississippi Mud is one of the best modern references on the activities of the notorious Dixie Mafia, which operate across the American South as a collective of drug dealers, burglars, and hit men. Though lacking the formal structure of the better known La Cosa Nostra, the Dixie Mafia’s de facto homebase was Biloxi, Mississippi’s “Strip”—once a seedy underworld of casinos and strip clubs, known to fester with crime of all sorts.
The story that author Ed Humes tells, though, is of Lynne Sposito—the daughter of Vincent and Margaret Sherry, who were discovered executed in their home on September 16, 1987. Frustrated by the slow pace of local investigators in solving her parents’ murder, Sposito hired a private investigator and launched herself into the thick of the Dixie Mafia’s machinations—unveiling a murder-for-hire scheme tied to the infamous Kirksey Nix Lonely Hearts Scams at Angola, and incriminating Biloxi’s very own mayor (and Vincent Sherry’s law partner) in the process.
The book is a wild ride, delivered with meticulous reporting enriched by Humes’s close access to Sposito all the way through. Especially for those of us who live in the South—by the end, you’ll never look at the Gulf Coast quite the same way again.
Click here to purchase Mississippi Mud: Southern Justice and the Dixie Mafia at bookshop.org.
The Third Rainbow Girl: The Long Life of a Double Murder in Appalachia
By Emma Copley Eisenberg
Emma Copley Eisenberg did not grow up in West Virginia, but in The Third Rainbow Girl: The Long Life of a Double Murder in Appalachia, the time and thoughtfulness she has devoted to understanding the place she is writing about emerges as one of the most poignant parts of her writing. This is a story about a murder—the mysterious murder of two women hitchhiking to the 1980 Rainbow Gathering in Pocahontas County. But it is also a story about Pocahontas County, about small towns, and about Appalachia.
Shifting back and forth between her own experiences in West Virginia, where Eisenberg spent time volunteering at a summer camp for low-income girls, and her investigation of the decades-old murder—she meditates on how this event has lodged itself, and all its narratives, into the community’s psyche. And alternatively, how the community’s long-held culture—particularly its relationship with masculinity—contributed to this act of violence, and the many smaller acts of violence that shape women’s lives in Appalachia. By bringing her own relationships, to men and to Pocahontas County, into the story—Eisenberg manages to bring these questions beyond critique and beyond America’s clichéed perceptions of small Appalachian towns. She dives deeper, and she does it with a certain amount of affection for the place she’s found herself—aware all the while that there is more to this story.
Thank you! Excited to read your book