The Fact of a Body: A Murder and a Memoir by Alexandria Marzano-Lesnevich
My rating: 2 of 5 stars
This is a hard book to rate/review. Fair warning, my thoughts may be disjointed and rambling….
It took me a longer time to read than it should have, because it got to be too much for me at time. (and I do enjoy True Crime as a genre, so it isn’t that part of it)
But it was something about how she described the events/personal thoughts/etc:
“…only the hard knot reaches her. Though the courtroom is the neutral temperature of still air, the stillness feels too hot and tight around her, and perhaps she feels a headache coming on….”
“…Jeremy. Maybe she lets herself imagine him. Jeremy at 17 like he would be now….Think of his smile. She transposes it. Grows it up. Subtracts the roundness of his jaw, makes stubble appear above his lip. Seventeen.”
The “perhaps” and “Maybe” above are her concession to the fact that she is being creative with the events as they might have happened.
Both of those are from the same page, but I didn’t have time to go through all the passages that made me feel similarly icky. It just seemed too -sensationalist? maybe? – I was just really uncomfortable with the liberties she took with what people thought, how people acted – this might be hypocritical, because I really enjoyed In Cold Blood.
I feel bad for her experience in her own family, and she is obviously a strong woman to have gotten out the other side and successful, but I didn’t like the juxtaposition of her personal life with Jeremy’s death and Ricky’s trials and incarceration.
I gave it 2 stars (and not less) because I wanted to finish the book, and only because I wanted to get to the end of the Jeremy/Ricky story. And, unfortunately, I felt dissatisfied with the ending (and so I gave it 2 stars and not more) but I honestly don’t know what she could have done that would have made me more satisfied with it.
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