Tag: USA

I’LL BE GONE IN THE DARK by Michelle McNamara

This book is about a journalist’s fixation with a particular serial killer, the Golden State Killer. A very prolific offender, he committed 13 murders and more than 50 rapes over about 15 years. Curiously, despite this, he was not especially famous. This journalist, Michelle McNamara, spent a large amount of time with people she met on internet message boards, and with the police, researching the case and trying to solve it, and this is her account of her fixation. In the end, he was not caught by any of this work, but by genealogical DNA. She was important not because she solved it but because she drove interest in it, even giving him the name the Golden State Killer.


Two things struck me about this book, the first being how awful it is that in fact serial murders are completely capable of stopping. This one did. Their crimes are not compulsions, but choices. This makes it much worse. In this case, as the offender was a police officer, they think he stopped when he became aware how powerful DNA was.


The second thing was that the book was not finished by McNamara. She died part way through, in her sleep, from an undiagnosed heart condition mixed with prescription medication. It was sad to see the second author trying to find a way to end the book from her scribbled notes. It reminds you you do not know the day or the hour. In any case, the Golden State Killer was caught a few months later.

BASTARD OUT OF CAROLINA by Dorothy Allison

This novel is about a girl born to a 14 year old waitress.  The waitress has a big family, who help her with child care, so it is a lot about that family.  It is kind of an uplifting story of small town life, until the waitress marries a man who starts sexually abusing the child.  The child eventually tells an aunt, so the mother removes them from the man; but then he ‘promises’ not to do it again, so they go back.  The mother tries to make sure they are never alone together.  Great solution!  Then he rapes her really brutally,  and the mother walks in on it.  The child goes to hospital, but her mother DECIDES TO MOVE TO CALIFORNIA WITH THE MAN (!?!).  

This just seems so awful as to not really be believable, but I’m sorry to tell you that apparently this is a lightly fictionalized version of the author’s life.  To be fair, her mother never actually left her, but she did make them all live together even once she was aware of the ongoing abuse.  He even gave her an STD, which left her permanently infertile.  Sounds like a gruelling read, and it sort of was, but it also wasn’t, because I guess of the courage of the author, who has rebuilt her life with amazing courage.  I learn from the Introduction that the book has been banned from schools on many occasions. I know that people who make sure bans like to claim they are protecting children, but I think we all know who this actually protects.  

There was an interestng line to a character recently bereaved: Now you look like a Boatwright.  Now you got the look.  You’re as old as you’re ever gonna get, girl.  This is the way you’ll look until you die.  

THE SINGULARITY IS NEARER by Ray Kurzweil

This book is a fantastically named sequel to his first, THE SINGULARITY IS NEAR. The Singularity is moment at which our brains are able to meld with a computer, so we will – according to him – be able to be fantastically more intelligent. A bit like the leap from Neanderthal to today.

It’s a book absolutely bristling with ideas – I highlighted lots of it. Like, for example, do you know the odds of the sperm and egg meeting to make you was 1 in 2 million trillion? And then go back through all the people who had to meet and mate to produce your parents, to see how lucky you are to be alive. Even wilder, he talks about how many things had to go right for life to have emerged on earth at all; apparently it is the same likelihood as a tornado blowing through a junkyard and assembling a Boeing 747.

He has lots of big ideas for the future – for example, for when nanotechnology will be able to print anything, because it will be able to assemble stuff at atom level. So lithium will no longer be precious; nor will diamonds. He believes the world is getting better (did you know deaths from war in prehistory were about 500/100K; now they are 4/100K, even counting nuclear weapons?), and will continue to get better quickly. He makes some good arguments, pointing out how unimaginable landing on the moon was in the early 1900s, when no one had even flown yet.

I struggled a lot with all this talk of the ‘one way march of progress.’ I see what he means, but on the other hand, I’m not sure I do. What about the fall of Rome? What about the dangers of AI? I hate to say it, but all this boundless optimism just said one thing to me, and that one thing was: boomer. I get it, your life has just been one long upward swing. Here’s fingers crossed for the rest of us.

PRIVATE CITIZENS by Tony Tulathimutte

This book is very more-ish and seethes with verbal energy. Try this:

“If you preferred the indoors, everyone assumed you were scared of life and emotionally stunted. That wasn’t it. . . . Sure, it was nice to have some fresh air while he smoked. But he was myopic, hard of hearing, congested – reality was lo-fi, slow and obstructing, too cold or too bright, filled with scrapes, sirens, hidden charges, long distances, pollen, and assholes”

It was also kind of hilarous; one character, we are told, has seen ‘most of’ the porn on the internet. Given that this is set in 2007, what is eerie is I guess this might just conceivably be possible. Today I suppose it would take several lifetimes. The book tells the story of four friends living in San Francisco a couple of years after they graduate from Stanford. About two-thirds of the way through, I started to get exhausted. Everyone was so self-harming! There was anorexia, self hatred based on race, failing to take your anti-psychotics, lying about rape, and that’s just the first few I can think of. And of course there was no redemption: it was just self-harm and self-harm some more. But weirdly I still enjoyed it.

DINNER WITH VAMPIRES by Bethany Joy Lenz

The sub-title of this book is ‘LIFE ON A CULT TV SHOW WHILE ALSO IN AN ACTUAL CULT,’ which pretty much sums it up.  If you watched ONE TREE HILL in the early 2000s, you will know this lady.  Her story of how she got sucked into the cult is very compelling, because she really talks you through how gradual it is.  I guess the point is, no one wakes up and decides ‘today I’ll join a cult.’  It really teaches you to be on your guard. I think the primary point they pushed was for her to not listen to herself, and her own judgement, but rather to god/the cult leader/her doubts.  Once you have conceded that your opinion is unimportant, you are basically 90% of the way there.  This poor woman had her life really wrecked.  She talks about how she decided to be public – not just in the book, but in daily life – about being in a cult, and about how embarrassed she is that hers was not even one of the big, weird cults.  She’s ashamed to have to say there was no KoolAid or judgement day.  It was just a small, Bible-based group. But it did the business anyway.  And it’s still out there in Idaho, ruining people’s lives.

TOM LAKE by Ann Pratchett

I wanted to like this book because Pratchett is a good writer and it’s about productions of OUR TOWN, a play I love.  I got about 200 pages in but I just had to quit.  The story is set on a cherry farm, and involves this woman telling her three grown daughters the story of her early life, in which she considered being an actress and dated someone who went on to be a movie star.  I don’t like books where we have to believe someone is telling someone else a book length anecdote, but okay, I was willing to get past it (see HEART OF DARKNESS and etc).  I even enjoyed the flashback parts where she was young and dumb.  But the current-day parts were so gruellingly annoying I just couldn’t.  It was a really creepy, the nuclear-family-is-all-there-is, the mother-wants-to-eat-her-young, kind of vibe.  At one point, the woman is saying how she allows her eldest daughter to have her phone on at the dinner table in case she has to go deal with an emergency, as she is a veterinarian.  However, she proudly tells us: “My husband and I turn off our phones because everyone we want to talk to is here.”

VOM! That was when I put it down.  My blog tells me I had an equally violent reaction to Pratchett’s BEL CANTO. I’m not sure if there is something wrong with me or with Pratchett.

WILD by Cheryl Strayed

For some reason I thought this was going to be kind of cheesy – maybe because it was made into a movie that was marketed as ‘inspiring’? – but in fact I did find it kind of inspiring.

It tells the true story of a woman in her 20s whose life has spiralled since her mother’s death, with divorce, heroin usage, and etc. She therefore decides to walk thousands of miles along the Pacific Crest Trail, which goes up the West Coast of the US, from Mexico to Canada. She is ill prepared; she does not try out her pack before she begins, and once there finds out she cannot even lift it off the floor. She gets stronger as she goes along, losing 6 of her 10 toenails to the trail. She comes across coyotes, elks, and bears multiple times. She is threatened with sexual assault, but only the once, which is I think surprisingly good going for 3 months on your own, even if it is in the wilderness.

I was especially struck by how distant the 1990s felt. She does not have a phone, which seemed to me incredibly and impossibly lonely. I don’t know this surprises me so much: I was an adult before I had a phone myself, and I don’t remember being lonely without it.

I guess there is some deep evolutionary drive behind the long walk, because so many human societies have sanctioned it with the idea of a pilgrimage. It was interesting to read this very personal, spontaneous version of this idea, and to see how, toenails aside, it helped this lady get a handle on her life.

THE MARS ROOM by Rachel Kushner

This is a very more-ish story about a woman serving a life sentence in an American jail. It was very absorbing, and very deeply researched.  Here, for example, is the recipe for prison alcohol “. . . juice boxes poured into a plastic bag and mixed with ketchup packets, as sugar.  A sock stuffed with bread, the yeast, was placed in the bag for several days of fermentation.”  Good to know. 

Somehow how though it left me curiously unmoved.  Maybe because I have recently read some really toe-curlingly magnificent memoirs from actual prisoners – e.g., SOLITARY by Albert Woodfox, which tells of his forty years in solitary confinement in Louisiana. It somehow made it hard for me to take this fictional version seriously, which is strange, because I usually find fiction much more compelling than fact.

LITTLE BASTARDS by Mildred Kadish

Here is a book about growing up on an Iowa farm in the Great Depression.  The New York Times put this on its notable books list of 2007 (I’m going in order from 2000 through those lists, truly I am desperate for something to read), but myself I had to quit half way through.  Essentially the author tells us about all the cooking and cleaning and farming stuff that happened on a farm in the 1930s. You’d think it would be interesting: but no.  Though I will include this snippet:

“When one of us kids received a scratch, cut, or puncture, we didn’t run to the house to be taken care of.  Nobody would have been interested.  We just went to the barn or the corncrib, found a spiderweb, and wrapped the stretchy filament around the wound.”

Yikes.  There’s given children independence and then there is germs.

TOWELHEAD by Alicia Erian

I was really impressed by this one.  It’s a coming-of-age story which, despite the title, is far more about sex than about race.  A woman decides her boyfriend is too interested in her 13 year old daughter.  Rather than dump the boyfriend, she sends the girl to live across the country with her ex-husband.  There, she gets very into masturbating and then SPOILER ALERT is raped by the 37 year old man next door.

What makes it successful is that nothing here is black-and-white.  For example, the father, despite he sometimes hits the girl, is somehow not portrayed as a monster.  The girl thinks she has a crush on the man next door, even after the assault.  It sounds bleak, and it is, but it is also not. You’d think this girl is a victim (because she is), but somehow, triumphantly, despite these very bad things that happen to her, she retains agency and energy.  I don’t quite know how to describe it, somehow it was a fundamentally hopeful book. I guess you’d have to read it.