When Alexandria Marzano-Lesnevich was in law school, she did a summer internship at a Louisiana law firm. She was firmly against the death penalty, and then they asked if she would be prepared to work on the case of convicted child murderer Ricky Langley. Attempting to familiarize herself with the case, she was overwhelmed by memories of being molested by her grandfather—and though her career as a lawyer was pretty much over before it had even begun, her future as a writer was just beginning.
In The Fact of a Body, Marzano-Lesnevich writes about her efforts not just to confront what had happened to her and her sister, and how her family had suppressed it, but also to understand Rickey Langley—not to sympathize with him, as we discuss in this interview, but to understand what drove him to commit his crimes… and how his attempts to seek help before then had gone unanswered.
During our conversation, she also described one of the long-term effects of her grandfather’s molestation, how even as an adult her body would sometimes “freeze up” in a dissociative state—and how, since the writing of this memoir, that had stopped. It led us to discuss the clich&@33; about memoir writing, which is that it’s supposed to be cathartic, a notion she vigorously challenged:
“When I was working on this book, I can’t tell you how many people said to me, ‘Oh, you’re writing a memoir? That must be so therapeutic!’ And I would always want to bite back at them: ‘Not if you’re doing it right!’
Right? If you’re doing it right, you’re dredging up all this stuff, and you have to go into the complexity of it that maybe you didn’t force yourself to think about in the past. And that is not really therapeutic; in fact, it’s often deeply disturbing and unsettling—and there were times working on this book when I just could not be around other humans.”
We also talked a lot about the true crime genre, from the reasons writers choose to write about certain crimes to the creative effort that goes into developing a narrative rooted in the bare facts of a case.
Listen to Life Stories #98: Alexandria Marzano-Lesnevich (MP3 file); or download this file by right-clicking (Mac users, option-click). Or subscribe to Life Stories in iTunes, where you can catch up with earlier episodes and be alerted whenever a new one is released. (If you’re already an iTunes subscriber, please consider rating and reviewing the podcast!)
photo: Nina Subin
Life Stories #107: Chavisa Woods
Life Stories #106: Rick Moody
Life Stories #105: Glen David Gold
Life Stories #104: Minna Zallman Proctor
Life Stories #103: Michelle Stevens
Life Stories #102: Elizabeth W. Garber
Life Stories #101: David Hallberg
Life Stories #100: Kat Kinsman & Andrea Petersen
Life Stories #99: Lauren Marks
Life Stories #97: Andrew Forsthoefel
Life Stories #96: James Rhodes
Life Stories #95: Lauren Collins
Life Stories #94: Okey Ndibe
Life Stories #93: James Rebanks
Life Stories #92: Thomas Dolby
Life Stories #91: Danielle Trussoni
Life Stories #90: Barbara Schoichet
Life Stories #89: Jamie Brickhouse
Life Stories #88: John Kaag
Create your
podcast in
minutes
It is Free
Lit Society: Books and Drama
Ex Libris
Write The Book: Conversations on Craft
Frankenstein
Gulliver’s Travels
Fresh Air
Myths and Legends