Book Review: The Fact of a Body: A Murder and a Memoir by Alexandria Marzano-Lesnevich - Entrepreneur Generations

The most unusual read -- which was a listen, on Audible -- I had this summer was this one, a blending of true crime and memoir which was unlike anything I have ever read. My friend, Paula Gallagher, a Baltimore County librarian and book reviewer for the Dan Rodricks podcast, recommended it to me, knowing I was a fan of the podcast Serial, recommended it to me, and I found it just as engrossing as that podcast. Serial works so well not only because the story is so compelling, but because Sarah Koenig's open wonder at the investigation was a pleasure to experience.

This is different -- there's no mystery about who committed the crimes -- but it has some similarities in author Alexandria Marzano-Lesnevich's obsessive interest in child murderer Ricky Langley, who she encounters while in law school at Harvard while working on a defense against the death penalty for him. Her reaction to Langley -- she is passionately anti-death penalty but wants him dead -- rattles her, and she ends up examining her own childhood and realizing her reaction lies in the sexual abuse she suffered at the hands of her own long-dead grandfather, who often helped out with her and her sister. When she told her parents about the abuse, they didn't do anything about it except make sure their daughters were no longer alone with the grandfather.

That's the setup to this story, which examines in depth the death of 8-year old Jeremy Guillory at the hands of his neighbor Langley in 1992. And she doesn't just examine Guillory's murder, but also follows tracks the history of Langley: he is conceived while his mother is in a full body cast, after the family is in a car accident that killed his older brother and sister who he never meets. She looks into his upbringing and what led him to the spot where he killed young Jeremy, piecing together a narrative with court records, interviews, and plenty of conjecture, which she often introduces with phrases like "perhaps she is wearing..." or "I imagine it as...". This could be distracting, but I found it so intriguing. Part of what Marzano-Lesnevich is grappling with is the nature of fact: it's in the title of the memoir, in fact. Where does a story start? Who constructs a narrative and for what purpose?

Through it all, Marzano-Lesnevich is weaving in her own harrowing story of abuse unacknowledged by her family, making the connection between Langley's upbringing, and crimes, and her own life. Her writing is lyrical and beautiful, and she reads her book with a fluid poetry that adds to the pained nostalgia of the abuse scenes. I found the whole book thought-provoking and haunting, a masterpiece of true crime and memoir.

from Epiphany in Baltimore http://ift.tt/2xLqcDN Book Review: The Fact of a Body: A Murder and a Memoir by Alexandria Marzano-Lesnevich - Entrepreneur Generations

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