THE STRANGER BESIDE ME by Ann Rule

Here is a story about a woman who is contracted to write a book about the police’s search for a serial killer, and ends up finding out that she is in fact friends with the serial killer. Astoundingly, this is non-fiction.

The serial killer starts off killing individual women, first by sneaking into their homes, and then by snatching them off the street. Then he starts to beserk, and in a single day abducts one woman and then a few hours later another one, from a busy park. He rapes and murders them both that day. This is a breakthrough, because he approaches many women that day so they get a name, and make of vehicle. That name is Ted and that car is a bronze VW bug.

Now this author, who is closely following the case, she volunteers at the Samaritans. There she has a friend, a caring young man named Ted, who owns a bronze VW. So confident is she that it cannot be him, that she does not even report him.

To cut a long story short indeed he is Ted Bundy, the famous serial killer. He was such a convincing sociopath that not only did he trick her, but also his jailers – he escaped TWICE. Most importantly though he tricked multiple women. His schtick was to pretend to have a broken arm, and need help putting something in the car, or to pretend to be the police, so LADIES let us be reminded: BE ON YOUR GUARD, EVEN FROM THE APPARENTLY SAFE ONES.

WE WHO ARE ABOUT TO DIE by Harry Sidebottom

This seemed like such a good idea: a piece of non-fiction about gladiators. I was all ready to emerge bristling with gladiator-related facts to tell people at parties. Also, who could not love this surname!

It was kind of interesting, but also boring. This is partly because he spent a lot of time telling us about his sources, which is in itself kind of boring. But it was I guess educational, because one main fact I learnt is that we really know very little about gladiators and a lot of it is very much cobbled together from like 3 murals.

Also I have to object to the opening of each chapter, which included a small piece of ‘fiction’ about the gladiator experience. Also to an entire chapter on how to interpret gladiators in dreams. Here I learnt that ancient Romans be talking as much nonsense as anyone else.

I did get this interesting fact: “In AD27 an ex-slave called Atilius put on a gladitorial show for profit at Fidenae, not far from Rome. The wooden ampitheatre he constructed lacked solid foundations and adequate materials. During the show it collapsed, killing 50,000 people.”

This is so a movie waiting to be written. Maybe we pitch it for Gladiator 3.

HALF HIS AGE by Jeanette McCurdy

I loved McCurdy’s memoir I’M GLAD MY MOM’S DEAD, so I thought I would give her fiction a whirl.  It wasn’t for me as good as her memoir, but I still enjoyed it.  She’s a sharp writer of uncomfortable topics.

In this novel, a seventeen year old girl pursues her English teacher.  He does not put up much of a fight.  They have lots of very explicit sex.  You will not be amazed to learn she does not have a very stable home life.  She gets very fixated on him, and eventually demands he leaves his wife.  I was surprised to feel rather sorry for him.  Here he is on how teaching is not his dream:

I wanted to be a writer.  A novelist.  But I couldn’t handle the lack of security required to be one.  I couldn’t tolerate the fluctuating, inconsequential strings of income.  The consistent rejection.  The scrutiny of my parent’s friends . . The uncertainty.  I chose being able to afford take-out from the Thai place on the corner over roughing it, living off ramen noodles. I chose going to the game with the guys over submitting my short stories to publicatins.  I chose catching up on my favourite TV show over finishing a draft.  I chose comfort over betting on myself.’

He leaves his wife for her, and once she has him she does not want him any more. 

MELINA RORKE told by herself

My family owns an amazing set of old books about Zimbabwe, and I read a few whenever I am home.  Here’s another one.  It is an autobiography and tells about a crazy life.  I think some of it may be a bit made up, but even if we take off like 50% it’s still crazy. 

She is in a convent school in South Africa at fifteen when she meets a man at the rugby.  She has a cup of tea with him, he proposes, and she ACCEPTS.  She runs away and marries him  – HE IS 23!  She is so young that he has to explain to her what is going on when she gets her period.  She almost immediately gets pregnant.  Her husband dies in a rugby match.  Her family takes her back in and she has a dreadful birth.   Her breasts are so full and painful that she  volunteers to feeds babies other than her own, and when there are no more babies to feed FEEDS PUPPIES. 

She moves to Bulawayo when it is just a few shacks, and eventually becomes a nurse, receiving an award for her work during the Boer War.  She is then swept up in what we would today call the first Chimurenga. 

Autobiographies are almost a mix of fact and fiction and I understand from the internet that this one leans a little heavily in the second direction.  Apparently the husband did not die but in fact abandoned her for western Australia.  I can see where you would need to lie about this in the late nineteenth century. But why would you put in the puppies unless it is true?! The Bulawayo bits and the nursing bits are true.  I have my doubts about the midnight escape from Lobengula’s forces.  But still damn, if its only 50% fact, what a life!

STAY UP WITH HUGO BEST by Erin Somers

It is never a good idea to like a book so much that you immediately buy another one by the same author. It never works out. I know this, but oh well.  This author wrote THE TEN YEAR AFFAIR, which I very much liked, and being desperate and on vacation I decided to read her other book, her first, STAY UP WITH HUGO BEST. 

I am utterly, utterly confused by the morality of this book.  It tells about a 30 year old aspiring comedian who is trapped doing a menial receptionist job at the late night talk show of an older comedian she very much admires.  The show gets cancelled, and he invites her to spend the weekend at his home.  Creepily, she agrees; but she seems weirdly checked out from the whole experience. Like, if you are going to sleep your way to the top, at least being enthusiastically trying to get to the top.  Or agonise about it. Or do something.  I really can’t stand these books where the protagonist does not care about their own life.  At the end she has generally transactional sex with the old guy, and he says: “was it everything you dreamed of?” Maybe I’m naïve but it was gross.  I think I’d rather be naïve than whatever this is.

However it did have fun parts.  How is this:

I watched a young woman shelve cough syrup for a while.  She seemed calm, sapced out, like she was on the cough syrup herself. It was the same look I’d seen on the face of the shopgirl the night before.  Boredom so total it delivered you to the astral plane.  I knew the feeling from my agent’s assistant days, my audience page days, my receptionist days.  You could function in that zone. Answer the phone or take an inventory of the supply closet . . . Meanwhile your brain made the connecting sound of the early internet and played a video of a dog you’d never laid eyes on running through a field.

God this takes me back to temping!

LILIANA’S INVINCIBLE SUMMER by Cristina Rivera Garza

This book is sub-titled ‘A Sister’s Search for Justice,’ and I’ll tell you right now she does not find it.  Her sister was murdered by her ex-boyfriend in the 1990s, and the Mexican state has made approximately zero headway in finding him.   In any case, I do not think that is what this book is about and I suspect it was sub-titled by the Marketing Dept.  What it really is, is the author with the distance of thirty years trying to re-create the last summer of her sister’s life. 

She goes through her letters and diaries, and she interviews her friends.  It is extremely beautiful, a close reconstruction of few months in the life of an ordinary university student thirty years ago.    In fact she focuses very little on the murderer.  I did note though how the relationship had all the hallmarks of domestic violence (suicide threats, stalking, etc); but I guess in the ‘90s no one had the language/structures to identify that .  No one helped her; she did not seem to think she needed help. I hope now the culture would do better at identifying early that she was in a dangerous pattern.  In any case, it’s too late now.  I found this epigraph very beautiful.

“They, like us, are alive in

hydrogen, in oxygen; in carbon,

in phosphrous, and iron; in sodium and chlorine”

(Christina Sharpe)

She won the Pulitzer. It’s a lovely tribute. She feels guilty it took her thirty years to do it, but I admire her courage; I can’t imagine opening those letters, even with many more years distance.