Reviews with content warning for Child death - The Fact of a Body: A Murder and a Memoir

A few weeks before I began reading The Fact of a Body for a class, I stumbled across an article book critic Laura Miller wrote for Slate, titled True Crime Gets Pretty. The byline says it all: "once trashy and compelling, true crime is now the realm of credentialed literary writers. Is that an improvement?"

While Miller is harsher than I'm inclined to be (at one point she compares memoirist Amy Butcher to the girl in "every high school stricken by a fatal senior-year automobile accident… eager to claim best-friend intimacy with the deceased," to which I can only say "oof"), I was compelled by her thesis; that some of the newer additions to the true crime genre, written by more serious literary types than the Ann Rules and Vincent Bugliosis of the past, kinda suck. Or, in her words, "the true crime memoir can ascend to heights of awfulness to which its humbler predecessor [the trashy true crime paperback] could never aspire… [since] true badness requires at least a soupçon of pretension." She particularly criticizes those authors who "fiddle with the facts," and cover genuinely interesting events with "self-absorption," "moony, brooding, overwrought prose," "a backstory that will justify their fascination with a particular crime or criminal," or some combination thereof.

The Fact of a Body is the first true crime memoir I've read, and possibly the first true crime book since In Cold Blood was assigned to me in high school. I didn't hate it. The rating, at least, should make that clear. But Miller's article was very much on my mind as I read, and I struggled to articulate my thoughts and feelings on the book to friends ("struggled to articulate" here meaning "sent them extremely lengthy text messages long past the point when anyone else was even mildly interested in the conservation"). Hence, this extremely lengthy review, which I could probably summarize by suggesting that you go read Miller's article, particularly if you're a fan of TFoaB or the true crime genre, since in addition to her critiques, she offers a few recommendations.

Anyway, to the point: TFoaB is not a bad book. It's actually very well-written. Marzano-Lesnevich's exploration of how silence itself can be traumatic, with the body bearing the scars (literal and otherwise) of abuse even when it isn't acknowledged aloud, is poignant. Using a murder case — the 1992 murder of six-year-old Jeremy Guillory at the hands of twenty-six-year-old Ricky Langley, a convicted pedophile who may or may not have molested Jeremy in addition to killing him — as a parallel, they consider the ways in which forgiveness and "moving on" are often falsely equated with a deliberate and self-protective forgetting. See Marzano-Lesnevich's family treating their abuse at the hands of their grandfather as one of many dirty secrets, not to be discussed, vs. Lorilei Guillory's choice to fight for the life of her son's murderer, even as she insisted she didn't forgive him for the act. I found the ending of the first section especially powerful:

Lorilei readies herself. These are the words she's practiced.
"Even though I can hear my child's death cry, I, too, can hear Ricky Langley cry for help."
It's Ricky she testifies for. She tries to keep him alive.
I read her words… and what I see is my father, as he folds his fingers around my grandfather's hand. He feels the weight of my grandfather's hand in his. He lifts, and helps hoist the old man into the car so he can bring him across the bridge. So he can bring him home to us.
I want—I need—to understand.

Despite that, I have two major problems with TFoaB. First, I agree with Miller's argument that Marzano-Lesnevich doesn't write true crime in an especially effective way. To quote Miller:

Marzano-Lesnevich’s inclination to fill up their narrative’s emptiness with the stuff of fiction—for example, a scene in which Jeremy’s mother is reminded by the condensation on a cold soda can of “the way the water crawls through the bushes of Henderson Swamp”—doesn't increase their book’s verisimilitude; rather, it subtracts from it, turning every character’s inner voice into a version of their own.

The beautiful descriptions and thoughtful interiority that work so well in the straight-memoir sections fall apart in the true crime sections, where Marzano-Lesnevich goes out of their way to imagine feelings they weren't privy to, and to needlessly put words in the mouths of characters who are more than capable of speaking for themselves. Marzano-Lesnevich also has a tendency to end chapters on a sort of Law and Order cut to commercial break one-liner, even when said one-liner doesn't make sense in context. See the end of chapter nineteen:

It's in this interview that Ricky says, "I got me a preference for blond boys. Maybe about six years old"... No one—not [Ricky's mother], not the parole officer, not even, by all accounts, Ricky—notes that just a few miles away from the trailer where Ricky will stay, a little blond boy lives. He is six years old…

Why on earth would anyone present in this scene know the name and appearance of every resident in a neighborhood Ricky isn't, at that time, even moving to? I found myself wishing that Marzano-Lesnevich had set out to write a straight memoir, and abandoned the true crime aspect entirely — despite that being the book's gimmick. I still think it would have made for a stronger read.

All of this is secondary, however, to my real issue with the book: I don't think it was written ethically. According to an interview with The Guardian, Marzano-Lesnevich never reached out to Lorilei Guillory while writing, either to pick her brain or to ask her permission before exploiting her loss for a memoir about Marzano-Lesnevich's own trauma. Though Marzano-Lesnevich has met Ricky Langley before (only once, in 2003) it doesn't seem like they sought his permission either. The result is a memoir that uses another person's tragedy — a stranger's tragedy — as a vehicle to talk about the author, without much concern for the privacy and feelings of others.

In addition, the case, in all its specificity, doesn't do much for the book. Marzano-Lesnevich was a law student when they heard about it, but they weren't involved in any of the trials. The story they construct comes solely from public records, not interviews or other primary source material, and most of it is boring, or seemingly irrelevant — Ricky Langley and the author's grandfather may both be child molesters, but understanding that Langley grew up poor in Louisiana with distant/alcoholic parents does nothing to help us understand how an elderly man in New England could molest his own granddaughters for years, threatening to "come for them" if they told. Neither does it excuse either man's actions.

Book critic William Skidelsky argued that Marzano-Lesnevich "has diminished the genuinely stirring story [they have] to tell by shackling it to Ricky Langley," and I have to agree with him. There's no reason, at the end of the day, that the case couldn't have been fictionalized, and the intimate details about Ricky and Lorilei's lives removed. We need to know only that the author quit law school because they saw a pedophile's confession and felt unable to advocate for him, even as the mother of the boy that pedophile killed did advocate for him. That's it. The names, the details, the "reality" of it doesn't matter. What matters is how Marzano-Lesnevich uses it as a foundation for exploring their own relationship to their past and to truth.

Worryingly, Marzano-Lesnevich seems completely oblivious to the issues with their approach. In multiple interviews, they've insisted that their intent in writing the book was to "give Jeremy a voice," or prevent his being forgotten. This is in contrast to the text itself, in which Jeremy occupies at most thirty pages, and far more attention is paid (as in most true crime) to his murderer. On this point in particular, Marzano-Lesnevich shows a disturbing lack of self-awareness: in the scene describing Jeremy's funeral, the narrative repeatedly draws attention to the journalists behaving like vultures, "scribbling down" private moments of grief expressed by the boy's family and classmates. Less than a page later, Marzano-Lesnevich spends a paragraph graphically describing the handling of his body by the coroner's office, how "red pin-pricks… bloomed across his neck from capillaries that burst from pressure, where he'd bled into his skin." How is this any less voyeuristic? Later, an officer who aided in the search for Jeremy bitterly thinks that too much attention is being given to Ricky, and Marzano-Lesnevich decides it’s time to get to know Jeremy outside of his school photo. This happens on page 257, less than fifty pages from the end of the book.

There's also the question of just how much of this story is, for lack of a better phrase, made up. At the end of the book, there's a "Sources Consulted" appendix, which explains where each bit of information from each chapter came from, be it trial records, news broadcasts, or the author's imagination. I began flipping to the back after each chapter out of curiosity, and as I read I became increasingly uncomfortable with what, and how much, Marzano-Lesnevich was inventing. It's more than just bits of dialogue or place descriptions; entire scenes are fabricated, such as a humanizing moment when a young Ricky Langley helps his father build the family house.

I'm glad the appendix was there, but I also know that many readers will see the "Sources Consulted" header and consider it unimportant supplemental material, like the "Acknowledgements" page. They just won't read it. Instead, they'll take Marzano-Lesnevich at their word when they describe Ricky's friend, and another pedophile, "Vincent," as a "boy" during a scene where he was actually in his thirties. They won't realize that certain details Marzano-Lesnevich stresses, as if they tell us something significant about the world or the characters, are fictional, such as the fact that Ricky felt out of place at the home of his wealthy and privileged California friend Ellen Smith (they write in the appendix, "I have imagined the socioeconomic status of her family").

I'm not condemning Marzano-Lesnevich for fictionalizing events they weren't present for, or that are blurred in their memory. I'm also not condemning them for simplifying, or inventing, details and events that make for a better and cleaner story. All creative nonfiction does this to some extent. But there's a difference between reworking the truth when it comes to your own life, and outright fabricating events that happened (or didn't) to somebody else. For example, why does Marzano-Lesnevich insist at the end of chapter twenty-five that Lorilei and Ricky "met along ago. Long before he killed her son," only to admit in the appendix that this is a supposition, based on the fact that they attended the same high school for a single year in 1981? That's not a simple shuffling of details; it's an outright lie.

Miller argues that "the best true crime writing… arises… from the places where the scrupulous writer cannot establish what happened but resists the urge to fill in the blanks. Of course the reader's imagination and presupposition slip in, and of course, if we keep ourselves honest, none of that ever finds solid footing in our understanding of what happened." That Ricky and Lorilei attended the same high school is an interesting connection, and one worth mentioning to a reader. But Marzano-Lesnevich leaps right over the facts they have, past supposition, into outright dishonesty, and I'm not sure why. What does this claim add to the story, other than to make me feel as though the author isn't to be trusted?

Throughout the book, as well as in interviews, Marzano-Lesnevich stresses that both the law and memoir-writing are more about storytelling than about finding the "truth," which can rarely be easily nailed down. This might mean "choosing" or creating "a neater narrative," or having circular arguments in a courtroom about "proximate cause," a legal concept with which the memoir is bookended. Proximate cause, as Marzano-Lesnevich explains it, is about assigning blame. Assigning blame often means deciding where a story begins and ends — whether a person is responsible for their own actions, or the person before them, who may have led them to it.

I don't object to this idea. I think many memoirists are, and should be, concerned with the difference between story and truth. I agree that we all tell ourselves stories in order to make sense of life, especially its ugliest, cruelest, and most random parts — such as the death of our child at the hands of a stranger. I just wish Marzano-Lesnevich also understood, or had considered, the question of ownership. We all tell ourselves stories about Jeremy's murder, but whose version gets to be told publicly? Who has the right to tell a dead child's — a dead stranger's — story? When you tell your version of the story, whose versions are silenced, and who is harmed by that silencing?

Late in the book, Marzano-Lesnevich argues that though they have changed some family members' names in respect for their privacy, they can't just pretend that the abuse didn't happen. They "won't do on the page what was done in life." I respect their courage in speaking out, and their commitment to honesty. But not speaking for others — not telling their stories for them — requires more than a mere changing of names. Marzano-Lesnevich has a personal relationship with those family members. Presumably privacy was discussed, and permission given. I wish they'd been as respectful of the Guillorys, and of Ricky Langley.

Content Warnings