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A review by honnari_hannya
The Fact of a Body: A Murder and a Memoir by Alexandria Marzano-Lesnevich
3.0
Like it says on the tin, a true crime story that is about a murder and is also a memoir.
Marzano-Lesnevich traces two different crimes that have followed her for much of her life: The first is the murder of a young boy by convicted pedophile, Ricky Langley. She lays out Ricky's family history and the series of experiences that led up to the night when he killed Jeremy Guillory in 1992, and then through the various appeals to overturn the death sentence. The second is her own experience of sexual abuse by her grandfather, who molested and raped her and her sisters throughout their childhood.
This story definitely took a lot of liberties with regards to the murder of Jeremy Guillory. Marzano-Lesnevich was first put onto the trail of this case when she interned at a firm that defended death row inmates, believing at the time that she wanted to be a criminal defense lawyer. However, being confronted with Langley's case and the intensity of her reaction to him (saying at some point that she wanted him to die for what he did), pushes her away from that path and towards the exploration of her own past trauma. In attempting to humanize Langley, it seems like Marzano-Lesnevich hopes to humanize her grandfather as well, trying to reconcile the fact that human beings can do monstrous things and that it is not always easy to hate them despite how much they hurt others.
While I liked the concept of this, I'm not actually sure that Marzano-Lesnevich pulled it off entirely (though that might just be a personal opinion, considering the popularity of this book). What this book really made me think of and question is the exploitative nature of true crime as a genre. Often, the focus of these stories are the criminals and not the victims—something that has been criticized in the way the media treats serial killers, domestic terrorists, etc. and certainly does apply to fans of true crime. While I do understand why Marzano-Lesnevich made this connection in her head between these two crimes, between Langley and her grandfather, between Jeremy Guillory's mother and her own parents, and between her trauma and various people in this novel, I don't know that it was the right approach to properly capture the tragedy of Jeremy Guillory's death—which felt, at times, like a footnote in the story rather than its centerpiece.
Marzano-Lesnevich traces two different crimes that have followed her for much of her life: The first is the murder of a young boy by convicted pedophile, Ricky Langley. She lays out Ricky's family history and the series of experiences that led up to the night when he killed Jeremy Guillory in 1992, and then through the various appeals to overturn the death sentence. The second is her own experience of sexual abuse by her grandfather, who molested and raped her and her sisters throughout their childhood.
This story definitely took a lot of liberties with regards to the murder of Jeremy Guillory. Marzano-Lesnevich was first put onto the trail of this case when she interned at a firm that defended death row inmates, believing at the time that she wanted to be a criminal defense lawyer. However, being confronted with Langley's case and the intensity of her reaction to him (saying at some point that she wanted him to die for what he did), pushes her away from that path and towards the exploration of her own past trauma. In attempting to humanize Langley, it seems like Marzano-Lesnevich hopes to humanize her grandfather as well, trying to reconcile the fact that human beings can do monstrous things and that it is not always easy to hate them despite how much they hurt others.
While I liked the concept of this, I'm not actually sure that Marzano-Lesnevich pulled it off entirely (though that might just be a personal opinion, considering the popularity of this book). What this book really made me think of and question is the exploitative nature of true crime as a genre. Often, the focus of these stories are the criminals and not the victims—something that has been criticized in the way the media treats serial killers, domestic terrorists, etc. and certainly does apply to fans of true crime. While I do understand why Marzano-Lesnevich made this connection in her head between these two crimes, between Langley and her grandfather, between Jeremy Guillory's mother and her own parents, and between her trauma and various people in this novel, I don't know that it was the right approach to properly capture the tragedy of Jeremy Guillory's death—which felt, at times, like a footnote in the story rather than its centerpiece.