Carrie Carolyn Coco isn't a conventional crimoir
the true crime that's worth your time
[SDB’s full review of Sarah Gerard’s new book is here, or you can get a paid subscription and see it, and all our other content, in full in your inbox!]
The crime
"On the night of September 28, 2016, twenty-five-year-old Carolyn Bush was brutally stabbed to death in her New York City apartment by her roommate Render Stetson-Shanahan, leaving friends and family of both reeling. In life, Carolyn was a gregarious, smart-mouthed aspiring poet, who had seemingly gotten along well with Render, a reserved art handler. Where had it gone so terribly wrong?"
The story
According to Stetson-Shanahan's legal team, it's when Stetson-Shanahan smoked pot with his brother earlier that evening, and subsequently suffered a psychotic episode – not the first time something like that had happened when he smoked pot, but: also not really the question novelist Sarah Gerard is seeking an answer to in Carrie Carolyn Coco: My Friend, Her Murder, and an Obsession with the Unthinkable, out July 9 from Zando.
Gerard is maybe not looking for any answers at all, but rather to establish a catalog of remembrances of Carolyn Bush. Gerard herself explains that she and Bush
had only just begun to form a friendship. I liked her and was intimidated by her, and there was potential for so much more and then she was suddenly gone, and I regretted the time we didn't have. We had planned to hang out again but didn't have the opportunity. Life got in the way and then death did. There were so many ways to keep knowing her. One was through the people we both knew. Once I began talking to them, I feared the stories they told me would be lost, so I started recording them. I cared very much what happened to them.
CCC, 87
What a beautifully direct, unvarnished mission statement, one I wish had showed up earlier in Carrie Carolyn Coco, and had guided the book more firmly. Looking at the text through the lens of it – that however it's marketed, whichever genre titling or design conventions the publisher is using, CCC isn't exactly true crime, or even a crimoir, but a memorial to Bush – a lot of CCC's bugs look like features instead. Through that lens, lengthy disquisitions on the victim's and perpetrator's grandparents, or sidebars on #MeToo in a writers' space, don't land like an author's valiant attempt to include every jot of research, but like a curator's to give the full breadth of an artist. It also underlines the idea that a murder has many more victims than just the dead, leaves many more spaces and scars than we might see.
And not looking at CCC through this lens could make for a somewhat frustrating read. Until page 87, it's somewhat unclear what authorial stance Gerard is taking, or how well she even knew Bush. This is almost entirely down to the subtitle, which is AI-ishly vague and only "well, technically" correct, and implies a highly personal account of a killing. It's not that CCC isn't that, but there's a feeling of an acquaintance "pushing herself forward," in the Whartonian sense, into the story – when Gerard is probably aiming more for a biographical collection. Plus, Gerard compiles so much elegiac detail and weaves in so many threads that if you go in expecting a more traditional crimoir, CCC might seem unfocused and cautious.
Gerard also comes off as reluctant to engage with the story as true crime, although she goes to court proceedings, refers to missing white-woman syndrome, interviews an ADA about a plea deal and its limits, etc. and so on. I don't blame her; if I'd set out to create a codex of a dead friend, I too would find the true-crime genre limiting, while at the same time needing the genre's lane markers to get the project sold. But here again, if readers don't look at CCC as, like, The Sarah Gerard Library's Carolyn Bush Reading Collection, they might wonder why Gerard spends so much time indicting Bard College leadership for supervisory lapses, or why Bush's stalker is mentioned if Gerard isn't going to connect more dots vis-a-vis the system's dysfunctional approach to mental illness, or why we need quite so much chronologically zig-zagged detail about Bush's adolescence, which sounded…like most of them. Drinkin' crappy booze, cuttin' up old clothes, waitin' for the main event.
But: that's why. It's what we have of Bush's life: Facebook messages; shared memories of repurposing pillowcases as tube tops. A more formally informal structure might have served Gerard better – headings with friends' and family members' names, or years; "33 ⅓ Short Chapters About Carrie Carolyn Coco," something like that. As it is, the chronological shifts and astrological notes won't work for everyone, but taken as a whole, CCC does get at something about how our dead don't always fit neatly into the spaces they left behind.
Gerard is very skilled at conveying the fragmented vibe of a crisis or unexpected death; the opening sequence in particular initially gets into impatience-making detail, but combined with knowing what's coming, the ensuing cross-cutting among Stetson-Shanahan, his girlfriend, his brother, and eyewitnesses is a well-executed distillation of the anxious confusion of these situations.
Given a choice, Gerard stays out of the stories' way, leaving threads hanging off of quotes, letting each speaker have their own rhythm, and she doesn't explain everything. A friend of Bush's talks about the "shift" she felt hearing of Bush's murder, then describes the tragedy as "a Gothamist-level thing"; the ellipsis is perfect.
Bush herself occasionally sounds exhausting, but I too once roamed the streets of NYC listening to music and feeling dramatic about praxis and poetics; this isn't just someone I knew, this is someone I was – and Gerard's gathering of recollections is generous to Bush's quirks without sanding off the edges.
I still have questions about what happened that night, or why. I still feel like things went unsaid about Bush's parents' divorce or her departure from college that I should have caught, but didn't. Carrie Carolyn Coco gathers as much information as it can, but Gerard seems to understand that there are things we can't know; that those things are often what draw us to true-crime stories; and that the research and the interviews are what we get, sometimes, instead of answers. It isn't a conventional genre narrative, and it shouldn't have had to pose as one, but if I'm right about what Gerard's doing, CCC does that quite well.
Carrie Carolyn Coco is out today (July 9, 2024) from Zando Projects. I reviewed a non-final proof from NetGalley.