Alexandria Marzano-Lesnevich

I'd never really given much thought to the death penalty, and while this book doesn't provide any easy answers, it certainly provokes plenty of thinking not just on the death penalty but also on the criminal justice and mental health systems in the US. In this memoir, the author intersperses her own family story with that of a murder case she dealt with as lawyer. The murder victim was a young boy and the murderer was a known child molester. The author, who had been sexually abused as a show more child, struggles with her own past and her growing empathy for the murderer as she explores this story, detailing the times when a killer sought help before he become a killer and his desire to understand himself. No easy answers come out of this book, but it certainly makes one think. show less

I thought this was a really excellent book. Beautifully written at times, with a beguiling mix of evocative descriptions and the thriller writer's knack of keeping you turning the pages. It's also often painfully honest and revealing and the subject matter makes it very hard to read at times, but the very human insights that the author pulls from the horrible events she describes are fascinating and resonant.
There's so much in here to admire, the book takes a simple starting point and spins show more it out into something really meaningful and rather wonderful.
I actually listened to the audiobook, which is narrated by the author, and found that heightened the emotional impact. show less

In The Fact of a Body, Alexandria Marzano-Lesnevich recounts the story of the death of six-year-old Jeremy Guillory at the hands of a paedophile in the early 1990s, while also exploring the sexual abuse inflicted on her by her own grandfather. Marzano-Lesnevich discovered the Guillory case while working as an intern at a Louisiana law firm that defends death row inmates, and found herself obsessed with the killer and his psychology, trying to find in it something that explains her own show more childhood experiences.

I'm deeply conflicted by this book, and have wavered for ages over what rating to give it. On the one hand, this is a beautifully written and unflinching engagement with a harrowing and nauseating topic. Marzano-Lesnevich's grapplings with issues of what some might call cause and effect, others destiny, are often thought-provoking. But on the other, well...

Marzano-Lesnevich's decision to fictionalise swathes of what happened during the murder of Jeremy Guillory and its aftermath—to layer her own imaginings of dress and dialogue and demeanour and "must have felts" over court transcripts and newspaper articles—is a deeply uncomfortable for me. Yes, writing true crime demands some degree of imaginative recovery, if only to connect one piece of evidence with another, and reading in the genre pretty much always involves some degree of voyeurism: here you are, gazing at someone else's horror.

But Marzano-Lesnevich chooses to foreground another family's suffering—to conjure up vivid images which may or may not be actually true, but which linger in the mind because, well, that's how the human brain works—while comparatively holding back on her own. Yes, she documents very precisely what her grandfather did to her, but gives her siblings pseudonyms and gives us little sense of how their relationships have been shaped by a knowledge of what went on during their childhood. There's no such restraint with the Guillorys or with the murderer's family. Marzano-Lesnevich spoke with none of them directly. (Right at the end of the book she tells us she spoke with the murderer once, but then discloses nothing of their conversation.)

I was left therefore with the very hinky feeling that here was an Ivy League-educated individual from a middle-class family in New Jersey using two poor families with far less social capital as abstract paper dolls through which she could process her own feelings. Here is someone's private therapy session in print form. For all that Marzano-Lesnevich spends a long time ruminating on the line between truth and fiction, many passages of The Fact of a Body are overwritten, the author straining for connections and profundity that aren't there—just horror, and pain, and, yes, the fact of a child's body. show less

The author tells the story of convicted murderer and pedophile Ricky Langley against the backdrop of her own story of molestation at the hands of her grandfather. When the author finds out that Langley has murdered six year old Jeremy Guillory after possibly molesting him she is filled with feelings of wanting him to die even though she is against the death penalty. Her feelings of revulsion are tied to the fact that she was a sexual abuse victim. As she lays out Langley's history and her show more own she comes to the conclusion that things are not always black and white. Langley is a murderer but he is also a son, brother, and a person who suffers from a mental illness. The more she learns about Langley the more she wants to know about the person who was the architect of her own abuse. He was not just her molester, he was a grandfather, husband, and father. Both Langley and the author's grandfather were defined by the worst things they had done but the reality is that isn't as simple as that. The more the author learns the more she becomes convinced that events are not just black and white and the people involved in them can have many feelings some of which are conflicting.

This book was extremely well written. The author is a Harvard graduate and lawyer and she has a gift for writing. The story is an interesting one even though the subject matter is uncomfortable. The story takes so many twists and turns that when you think it can't get any more bizarre the author uncovers a yearbook or a motorcycle slams into a train. I am sure this book will be on many best of lists at the end of year and it will be well deserved. show less