The Crime Lady V2, #8: The Webs We Tangle
Dear TCL Readers,
So as I mentioned in my last dispatch, The Crime Lady is becoming a paid newsletter. In fact, I sent out my first one to those who have already pitched in a few dollars a month or paid the annual fee. From now on, original content — be it essays, or down the line, a reported story — will exist there, and be sent out on a monthly basis (this may change depending on how many more people subscribe.) Here, you’ll continue get updates as to what I’m up to, forthcoming events, what I’m reading and watching and listening to, and the like. So if you want to make the leap, the link is below:
EVENTS
On Thursday, February 7 at 7:30 PM, I’ll be in conversation with Caitlin Cruz at The Wild Detectives bookshop in Dallas as part of their ongoing True Crime Month series. Details here.
I’ll be at the Montclair Literary Festival in Montclair, NJ on Saturday, March 23; at Kenyon College on Wednesday, March 27; and at the Tennessee Williams Festival in New Orleans on March 29 and 30. More details on those events next month.
My next CrimeReads column should be posted mid-month, and March will see (I hope!) publication of a feature story I’m most excited about that has me engaging with my earlier, forensic science-studying self. More details soon.
MEDIA
I was on CBC Sunday Edition with Michael Enright last weekend to discuss Basic Black With Pearls by Helen Weinzweig, the 1980 novel I so adore (and wrote the afterword to the NYRB Classics edition published last year.)
Salon’s Mary Elizabeth Williams quoted me and Carolyn Murnick about the ethics of loving true crime in light of the recent Netflix series on Ted Bundy (and the upcoming film starring Zac Efron as the serial killer.) I am still hesitant to watch, and feel like boosting articles about those who survived his murderous intentions, like Kathy Kleiner Rubin.
Preti Taneja, author of When Are That Young, asked me what it was like to be on book tour while the Kavanaugh hearings were happening and included the result in this most excellent roundtable of writers for Five Dials.
READ/WATCH/LISTEN
The New Yorker dropped its Dan Mallory feature and if you’re reading my newsletter you probably already read the piece, and likely have an opinion. (Most of mine have to do with what ended up on the record versus what did not.) I also spent much of Monday thinking about my own past interactions with Mallory, which stretch back to about 2009, when he was at Oxford, I was still running my old blog and freelancing full-time, barely. There were entertaining “e.mails” about crime novels we’d read. Then nothing much until years later, when Mallory was at William Morrow, with a couple of lunches at Soho House. (The last time we corresponded was in 2016, when The Woman in the Window sold to the publishing house where he worked.)
He turned on the charm and flattery and I care for neither but it is easier to let a man think it lands, especially when the point is source cultivation. He could praise and then damn one of his authors in the same breath. He talked about going on European vacations when the dates and times didn’t add up. Mostly, I think about who we enable on their way to success they feel entitled to, and who we cast out because they didn’t know what the game was, let alone how to play it. Even if Mallory never writes another novel, the point seems clear: the joke was always on us.
Three of my most anticipated reads of the year exceeded my expectations. The Better Sister by Alafair Burke (April) is lean and tough and I am still thinking about the ending. Furious Hours by Casey Cep (May), on the crime story Harper Lee tried and failed to make her second book, is breathtaking in approach and gorgeously written. And Fleishman Is In Trouble by Taffy Brodesser-Akner (June) made me cringe and laugh and cry and reflect on all the ways that patriarchy exhausts us and who, in fact, should be telling the story, and who never has a chance.
Not only is Michael Koryta’s forthcoming thriller If She Wakes (May) terrific, he’s also written a stunner of a true crime feature on the unsolved 2017 murders of Libby German and Abby Williams.
2019 seems to be the year I learned how to binge-watch TV? So, kudos to Sex Education for marvelous acting and a premise that seems silly but actually showcases really tender and heartfelt explorations of adolescent feeling; and to Russian Doll for being created in a laboratory with all my weird interests and emerging with the best show possible (to say more would be to spoil, and it’s best to start watching without knowing much in advance.)
Finally, I turn forty next week. In truth I’ve been thinking of myself at that age for a few months — a longstanding habit — and whenever I run into a disparaging viewpoint about being a woman of that certain age, largely from books published around the mid-century, I’m puzzled. Those negative descriptions of decrepitude don’t compute. I don’t feel old or young or middle-aged, used up or past my prime or in crisis or whatever. I just feel like me. Alive, healthy, doing my work, being with people who matter a great deal. That’s all I aspire to and need and want.
Until next time, I remain,
The Crime Lady