Jess Bravin

A somewhat surprising chronicle of Charles Manson’s most loyal disciple is genuine respectful biography covering her life beyond the True Crime headlines.

The story of her adolescence reads like an S.E. Hinton story, in which she’s the sensitive, troubled rebel showing up to school with bruises from her abusive father, seen through the eyes of people who knew her in high school (she went to school with Phil Hartman!). The author doesn’t go into how much of her behavior is mental show more illness, her abusive upbringing, the result of taking heroic amounts of LSD or a combination platter. She definitely had her mentals, but she wasn’t a monster.
The only weakness to the book is the exhaustive coverage of her 1975 trial. The author is a lawyer so it makes sense this would feature prominently but for this layperson it felt like it could’ve used some trimming. For that reason, I wouldn’t recommend it to someone not already interested in the subject but Helter-heads will find a lot of fascinating details. show less

One of my favorite books of all time. Anyone who has any interest in remarkably misunderstood women should read this book. It opened my eyes to a lot of things, and I now consider myself Squeaky obsessed.

[Text removed because it was a huge pile of embarrassing Livejournaly feelings-ramble, only tangentially related to the book under "review," which may have been appropriate when this Goodreads account was just a dumping ground for my miscellaneous personal wankery but is less so now that I'm trying to use the site as it was intended. Anyway, this is a good book, and I do recommend it to anyone who, like me, is fascinated by cults and the confusing ways they make us feel given our culturally show more instilled attitudes toward religion, faith, violence, power, etc.] show less