currently reading: Taking Care by David Smail
books bought
Stubborn Archivist by Yara Rodrigues-Fowler
Holy the Firm by Annie Dillard
Teaching a Stone to Talk by Annie Dillard
The Adventure Zone: Murder on the Rockport Limited by the McElroy family, illustrated by Carrie Pietsch
books received
When Death Takes Something from You Give it Back: Carl’s Book by Naja Marie Aidt, trans. Denise J. Newman (e-galley, out 9/3)
The Topeka School by Ben Lerner (e-galley, out 10/1)
My Time Among the Whites: Notes from an Unfinished Education by Jennine Capo-Crucet (out 9/3)
Temporary by Hilary Leichter (e-galley, out 3/2)
books finished
When Death Takes Something from You Give it Back by Naja Marie Aidt, trans. Denise J. Newman
The Topeka School by Ben Lerner
My Time Among the Whites by Jennine Capo-Crucet
Temporary by Hilary Leichter
Stubborn Archivist by Yara Rodrigues-Fowler
Hey you,
I’ve been thinking about Rachel Monroe’s forthcoming book, Savage Appetites: Four True Stories of Women, Crime, and Obsession since I finished it a couple of months ago. A little before I read it I saw Monroe had a piece in Bookforum that was ostensibly a review of the book by the My Favorite Murder people. (If you’re not familiar with My Favorite Murder, it’s a podcast where two women, Karen Kilgariff and Georgia Hardstark, basically read the Wikipedia pages of victims of various murders. But humorously! And with so many errors they had to institute a “corrections corner” at the start of their podcast! And the thing that makes it funny is………. well…………) I was excited, especially after I noticed so many people on twitter saying things like, “Rachel took on the My Favorite Murder ladies!!” or whatever—it sounded like it was going to be a bit of a hit piece, honestly. Which I think would be well deserved and frankly long overdue. (I’ve written before about why all of this matters so much to me and why I take it so personally. It’s for exactly the reason you’d expect!)
But really the analysis felt shallow and about as courageous as me hanging out with my friends and saying, “I think the president sucks!” I mean… yeah! Monroe observes that the podcast tends to focus on a specific kind of murder—in which a man kills a woman, usually a white woman—that might well leave readers with a mistaken impression about “who’s really vulnerable.” (Black men are statistically more likely to be murder victims than any other group.) This is a good, if relatively obvious, point. Similarly, Monroe writes, “By framing murder stories around self-empowerment and personal choice—in claiming that “Being ‘Polite’ Often Gets Women Killed,” as a Buzzfeed headline about the show proclaimed—MFM starts to seem like a macabre version of lean-in feminism.” A great line, and a great observation! But why not go anywhere with it? What is the larger point Monroe is trying to make?
Here’s how the piece ends:
“Baltimore has a murder rate higher than Chicago,” Kilgariff said at a recent live show in Baltimore. A portion of the audience erupted in boisterous hoots and applause. Kilgariff started over—this clearly wasn’t supposed to be a celebratory line—but the women in the audience cheered again, undaunted.
It’s a great kicker for this story. And yet the sentence before this, the sentence that starts the paragraph, reads, “Ultimately, murder is only ‘fun’ when regarded from a certain distance.” Which…………………………………. yeah……………………………! There are moments of real insight in the essay (macabre lean-in feminism!), but mostly it is full of “insights” such as the above.
Monroe’s book unfortunately suffers from a similar flaw: it raises a number of good points without diving deeply enough into any of them. The book is divided into the four archetypes that Monroe has decided (what is the difference between “deciding” and “determining,” anyway?) are representative of the reasons that women become interested in true crime: detective, victim, advocate, killer. Also there’s a bit of memoir and some pop psychology thrown on in there for good measure. (As a result it reads a bit like this dumb newsletter does, when I am just trying to get literally every single one of my thoughts on a topic down on paper, the connections between those thoughts be damned!) She sums up the pros and cons of each of these roles in the final chapter, in the kind of tidy summary one might’ve been instructed to end a high school persuasive essay with:
Detective stories satisfy our desire for tidy solutions. They make the seductive promise that we can tame the chaos of crime by breaking it down into small, comprehensible pieces. They allow us to inhabit the role of the objective observer, someone who exists outside and above the scene of the crime, scrutinizing the horror as if it were, well, a dollhouse. That objectivity is a fantasy; the forensic scandals that have sent so many innocent people to prison are an example of what can happen when we overestimate our capacity to understand. Stories that invite us to identify with victims let us in on the secret universe of someone else’s pain… But empathy has its blind spots. When only certain kinds of people—“the innocent”—are allowed to claim victimhood, we’re all diminished. Stories of staunch defenders are appealing for their acknowledgement of justice’s flaws; they stoke our sense of outrage while offering us a way to be of use, through exposing and correcting past errors. But when that sense of purpose is taken too far, it can slide into vigilantism; it can also subsume the self. In trying to understand the perpetrators of violence, we’re put in touch with our own unacceptable urges. But when we make killers into objects of fascination—when we can’t stop looking at them, even as we claim to revile them—we risk contributing to their mystique.
These conclusions feel—I’ll say understated. The advocate chapter is largely dedicated to the West Memphis Three, three men who were wrongly convicted of murdering three children. Monroe observes that after the convictions—I don’t really have another word to use here—“fans” of the innocent men, mostly members of the online community wm3 dot org, started suspecting one of the victim’s fathers. They shared their theories among each other and publicly accused the father of murder. After experts reexamined the case, however, the father was cleared in the court of public opinion (he was never actually tried because he was never actually a suspect!). Monroe writes, “The experts’ findings caused a reckoning in the wm3 dot org community.” One of the wrongfully-convicted men writes a letter of apology to the father and the founders of wm3 dot org showed up at the father’s house to apologize to him. Monroe says he forgave them. And then she moves on!
In what sense is this is a reckoning?
In high school, my history teacher told a story of how, when perusing a history textbook one day, he came across the line, “Suddenly, war broke out.” He thought it was laughable—of course it wasn’t so sudden, of course things were happening in the background the entire time. In class we would use it as a kind of shorthand for “time passed and things happened.” Our president was Abraham Lincoln; suddenly, war broke out; our president was no longer Abraham Lincoln. It feels like the same maneuver here, a way to gloss over reality. Three kids were murdered and we accused one of their fathers; suddenly, war broke out; now we’ve reckoned. Are you definitely sure??? It seems like you’re missing some steps!
I also think it’s telling that you might become a vigilante [and ruin someone’s life!] is on the same level of concern as and it might consume your personal life.
For the most part, I couldn’t figure out why Monroe chose to profile the people/cases she chose. The detective archetype is represented by Frances Glassner Lee, who was notably not a detective. She designed dollhouse-sized crime scenes meant to be used by police officers and detectives in their training; she’s a founding figure in the field of forensic science. (This chapter would have been better titled The Forensic Scientist, especially since much of the chapter was dedicated to bringing attention to the misguided faith we have in the field.) In the victim chapter, Monroe discussed Sharon Tate and a woman named Taylor Behl who was killed near where Monroe went to college. As for Tate, it’s obvious Monroe wanted some reason to talk about her mother, Doris Tate, who was an important figure in the victims’ rights movement a few decades ago. It seems she could’ve done so without detailing how Sharon was murdered and re-interviewing family members and—well, fans of the murder, basically—but fine. Monroe used Taylor Behl, on the other hand, exclusively as a prop—as an excuse to talk about, huh, it’s probably not great that I felt so bad for Taylor but didn’t feel anything for the victims of Hurricane Katrina who died around the same time. (There is this idea I’ve noticed more and more lately in nonfiction writing that simply acknowledging your fucked up-edness is the same as discussing it in a meaningful way or of dealing with it.) I don’t know. Certainly there is a point to be made here about empathy, but Monroe doesn’t make it successfully; instead it feels profoundly disrespectful, as if she brought up Taylor Behl only to talk about how meaningless Taylor Behl was in the grand scheme of things. Nothing in the chapter seemed enough to justify Monroe sticking her hands in all these wounds.
My favorite part of this book—the reason I kept reading—was at the very beginning, when Monroe is describing the explanations she’s come across regarding why women like true crime:
Sometimes the phenomenon was dismissed as trashy and voyeuristic (because women are vapid!). Sometimes it was unquestioningly celebrated as feminist (because if women like something, then it must be feminist!). And some argued that women read about serial killers to avoid becoming victims. This was the most flattering theory—and also, it seemed to me, the most incomplete. By presuming that women’s dark thoughts were merely pragmatic, those thoughts were drained of their menace. True crime wasn’t something we women at CrimeCon were consuming begrudgingly, for our own good. We found pleasure in these bleak accounts of kidnappings and assaults and torture chambers, and you could tell by how often we fell back on the language of appetite, of bingeing, of obsession. A different, more alarming hypothesis was the one I tended to prefer: perhaps we liked creepy stories because there was something creepy within us.
And yet she lost this thread quite quickly, and pivoted to: why are women interested in true crime, as opposed to: why do women find real pleasure in these stories? Women are interested in stories about advocates because they feel like they can make a difference. Women are interested in stories about detectives because they grant us omniscience. Women are interested in reading about murderers because we also have fucked up thoughts sometimes too. These are flattering, non-creepy explanations—and, again, supremely shallow explanations at that!
(Also, the parenthetical about women being vapid is disingenuous. Is it not possible people dismiss true crime as voyeuristic not because women like it but because it is by definition voyeuristic?)
Why do people like true crime? I don’t know. Why do we all—myself included—crane our necks to see the wreckage of a car accident we pass on the highway? I don’t know, but I have to imagine it is not as generalizable as any writer or storyteller would like it to be. (Nor are the reasons all as damning as I would like them to be.)
In the “Victims” chapter, Monroe writes that, after Sharon Tate was murdered, Tate’s sister Debra released a book about her called Sharon Tate: Recollection. The book “addresses Sharon’s death only obliquely—‘In 1969 my sister was involved in an event that changed the country in ways that still resonate,’ Debra writes—and instead features quotes and anecdotes from Sharon’s famous friends about how kind she was, and how funny. But mostly it’s a book of pictures,” Monroe writes. It’s almost funny—I thought of something very similar when someone once asked me about my “ideal” version of true crime. The nonviolent kind, obviously! But beyond that, my answer was actually very simple: if we are really interested in remembering these people, in honoring them, why not books, why not documentaries, why not podcasts about their lives that have nothing to do with their deaths? The answer, of course, is that no one would read/watch/listen to any of them. Which is the fucking point.
What I can’t stand about most true crime (thank you for asking) is its self-aggrandizingness, its insistence that not only is reading about a murder or looking at crime scene photos brave and empowering, it’s also some kind of moral imperative. “I’m looking into the darkness!” these people say, and when people like me say we feel gawked at instead, it doesn’t matter. They point to the money My Favorite Murder has raised for organizations like RAINN, as if Kilgariff and Hardstark are feminist heroes for donating a small portion of the money they literally earn off of human suffering. As if Monroe has done something groundbreaking by continuing the grand tradition of profiting off the deaths of murder victims. As if they have no vested financial interest in maintaining the true crime phenomenon or making sure we are as interested in gruesome details of cases as possible.
I believe—uncharitably—that when true crime fans claim to care about murder victims and their families it’s largely performative. I believe this because they wear shirts that say things like “murderino,” or “stay sexy don’t get murdered” which are really only things you could wear outside if you don’t spare a thought for anyone who might be triggered by them—you know, the people they are purporting to be showing support for somehow. I believe this because they cheer when their heroes mention increasing murder rates. I believe this because they are interested in the killers first and foremost and the victims only as a sort of byproduct, necessarily. I believe this because they say things like, “well, some family members want to tell their stories,” and yes that’s true, and I can’t even claim to speak for my family, let alone all victims’ families ever, but it’s weird that what’s never acknowledged is that so many families don’t feel they have much of a choice—if they want the police to pay attention they have to get the public to care and the way to get the public to care is not to tell them how much your loved one meant to you but to let them stick their hands into you, to let them ask you anything, and not to flinch when they salivate over the details (or do flinch, some of them like it). I believe this because fans don’t buy merch that says, for example, “stay sexy and don’t get raped!” because the thing about (some) rape victims is that they don’t get killed and they’re still alive and they wouldn’t be super pumped about seeing a reminder of the crime on your fun graphic tee, they’d probably kick up a real fuss about it. But the dead can’t fight back and so why not monetize, baybee?
Anyway.
Savage Appetites aims to illuminate something new for true crime readers, but if it is successful it’s only because the depth of analysis surrounding true crime to this point has been shallow enough to render “Murder is only fun when viewed at a distance” revelatory.
Your friend,
Smalls