BOOK 187: I'LL BE GONE IN THE DARK

BOOK 187: I'LL BE GONE IN THE DARK: ONE WOMAN'S OBSESSIVE SEARCH FOR THE GOLDEN STATE KILLER: MICHELLE MCNAMARA

A masterful true crime account of the Golden State Killer—the elusive serial rapist turned murderer who terrorized California for over a decade—from Michelle McNamara, the gifted journalist who died tragically while investigating the case.

"You’ll be silent forever, and I’ll be gone in the dark."

For more than ten years, a mysterious and violent predator committed fifty sexual assaults in Northern California before moving south, where he perpetrated ten sadistic murders. Then he disappeared, eluding capture by multiple police forces and some of the best detectives in the area.

Three decades later, Michelle McNamara, a true crime journalist who created the popular website TrueCrimeDiary.com, was determined to find the violent psychopath she called "the Golden State Killer." Michelle pored over police reports, interviewed victims, and embedded herself in the online communities that were as obsessed with the case as she was.

At the time of the crimes, the Golden State Killer was between the ages of eighteen and thirty, Caucasian, and athletic—capable of vaulting tall fences. He always wore a mask. After choosing a victim—he favored suburban couples—he often entered their home when no one was there, studying family pictures, mastering the layout. He attacked while they slept, using a flashlight to awaken and blind them. Though they could not recognize him, his victims recalled his voice: a guttural whisper through clenched teeth, abrupt and threatening.

I’ll Be Gone in the Dark—the masterpiece McNamara was writing at the time of her sudden death—offers an atmospheric snapshot of a moment in American history and a chilling account of a criminal mastermind and the wreckage he left behind. It is also a portrait of a woman’s obsession and her unflagging pursuit of the truth. Framed by an introduction by Gillian Flynn and an afterword by her husband, Patton Oswalt, the book was completed by Michelle’s lead researcher and a close colleague. Utterly original and compelling, it is destined to become a true crime classic—and may at last unmask the Golden State Killer. 

(information from https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/35068432-i-ll-be-gone-in-the-dark)

MY VERDICT:

This is a tragic book, tragic in so many ways. Firstly it is tragic because of the awful accounts of rape and murder perpetrated by a true monster, but also tragic because of Michelle McNamara’s tragic death partway through it’s writing, and almost most tragic of all is that McNamara never got to see the Golden State Killer finally caught.

The book is superbly written, and amazingly researched, you feel like you’re travelling through time and witnessing the investigation. This book cements McNamara as a true crime legend. 

I did hear, before reading this book, some accounts of sleepless nights due to the content. As someone who has read a lot of true crime and watched a lot of horror, I skeptical, I thought maybe I was immune to this way of thinking. However, there were a few nights after spending hours reading the book that I heard a noise in the dark in the night time and wondered how easily someone could gain access to my home, did someone know that there were no men in the house and that I was an easy target? I quickly started mentally making weapons out of the everyday objects in my room and planning where to hide if that noise became louder or I heard footsteps. I think it’s a testament to McNamara’s writing that even the most hardcore true crime fanatics are irked when they feel like they are for a moment placed in a real victim’s shoes.

Michelle McNamara’s investigation techniques are like none I’ve ever been privy to before.  The amount of work that McNamara put in was phenomenal. I was in a privileged position of knowing who the Golden State Killer was eventually found out to be while reading this and, it turns out, she was along the right lines. Because so many avenues were explored, the rules of averages would predict that something would turn out to be right. They guessed he could have been a cop, and they proposed that he would be found using DNA ancestry, that’s the place where McNamara abruptly ended, the last thing she was looking at, and from reading the book, you knew it was only a matter of time before he was caught. 

I wonder if he read this book? Nothing he could have done could have avoided his capture at this point because they had his DNA. I hope somehow, somewhere, Michelle McNamara got to hear the cell door slam behind him.

BOOK 186: FAREWELL, MY LOVELY: RAYMOND CHANDLER

Farewell, My Lovely is a novel by Raymond Chandler, published in 1940, the second novel he wrote featuring the Los Angeles private eye Philip Marlowe. It was adapted for the screen three times and was also adapted for the stage and radio.

CULTURAL REFERENCES

In the first shot after the opening titles of Get Carter, the character played by Michael Caine is seen reading a paperback copy of the book.

In the opening episode of the television series Bored to Death, the character Jonathan Ames, played by Jason Schwartzman, is inspired to become a private detective after reading the book.

BOOK 177: GIRL IN A BAND: A MEMOIR: KIM GORDON

Kim Gordon, founding member of Sonic Youth, fashion icon, and role model for a generation of women, now tells her story—a memoir of life as an artist, of music, marriage, motherhood, independence, and as one of the first women of rock and roll, written with the lyricism and haunting beauty of Patti Smith's Just Kids.

Often described as aloof, Kim Gordon opens up as never before in Girl in a Band. Telling the story of her family, growing up in California in the '60s and '70s, her life in visual art, her move to New York City, the men in her life, her marriage, her relationship with her daughter, her music, and her band, Girl in a Band is a rich and beautifully written memoir.

Gordon takes us back to the lost New York of the 1980s and '90s that gave rise to Sonic Youth, and the Alternative revolution in popular music. The band helped build a vocabulary of music—paving the way for Nirvana, Hole, Smashing Pumpkins and many other acts. But at its core, Girl in a Band examines the route from girl to woman in uncharted territory, music, art career, what partnership means—and what happens when that identity dissolves.

Evocative and edgy, filled with the sights and sounds of a changing world and a transformative life, Girl in a Band is the fascinating chronicle of a remarkable journey and an extraordinary artist.

MY VERDICT: I loved reading this book.  I was not reading as a fan of Sonic Youth (I don’t dislike them, I’ve just never really listened to their music), but rather as someone who was interested in what it was like to be a girl in a band and the scene in New York in the 1980s onwards.

I was not disappointed, there were so many people that Kim Gordon got to hang out with that I would love to meet, people from the art world and the world of the Punk Rock, No Wave and Grunge scenes. She got to tour with Nirvana and REM, she lived with Cindy Sherman, made a music video with Spike Jonze and a skateboarding Jason Lee and designed clothes with Sophia Coppola.

It’s safe to say, I envy her life.

Kim is very open and honest, she doesn’t hold back, but also this isn’t a sensationalist piece. She is clear on whom she likes and doesn’t like and gives us reasons rather than talking in gossipy tones. 

And this book’s greatest legacy, one that makes me hold certain texts in even higher esteem, it made me want to be more creative, a big bonus for any great book.

BOOK 170: UNABROW: MISADVENTURES OF A LATE BLOOMER: UNA LAMARCHE

As a girl, Una LaMarche was as smart as she was awkward. She was blessed with a precocious intellect, a love of all things pop culture, and eyebrows bushier than Frida Kahlo’s. Adversity made her stronger...and funnier. In Unabrow, Una shares the cringe-inducing lessons she’s learned from a life as a late bloomer, including the seven deadly sins of DIY bangs, how not to make your own jorts, and how to handle pregnancy, plucking, and the rites of passage during which your own body is your worst frenemy.

Una LaMarche is the author of two young adult novels, FIVE SUMMERS and LIKE NO OTHER, and UNABROW: MISADVENTURES OF A LATE BLOOMER, a collection of humor essays based on some of her more questionable life choices. She is also a contributing writer for The New York Observer and The Huffington Post, and blogs at The Sassy Curmudgeon. Una lives in Brooklyn with her husband and son. You can follow her on Twitter @sassycurmudgeon.

REVIEW: I have to say I was a little disappointed by this book, not because it was terrible, because it was not, but because I had such high expectations of it.

I was expecting a truly humiliating journey through the childhood and teen years of an awkward female, who I believed to be much like myself. What I wasn’t expecting, and quite frankly got bored of, were the many details of childbirth and parenting.  Although Una (I feel like we’re on first name terms now, as I know so much about her, like the size of her stretched vagina and drop crotch pants) tells these stories with humour and wit, I found myself turning off and feeling somewhat conned. 

If you read the marketing material above you can see where I got the impression that this was a coming of age memoir, I think if it mentioned that after a couple of chapters she would be chatting about squeezing a person about of herself, I might not have been so excited about reading it.

I didn’t buy this book but was gifted it after I put it on my Amazon wish list, I wanted to read it because, as a late bloomer myself, I wanted to compare and laugh at someone else’s bad fashion choices, questionable crushes and dread of psychical education. All these things were in there but in my opinion, not enough to fill a book.

It does give me a little hope that one day I could compile my Christmas lists and diaries into a ‘memoir’ but I know that if a somewhat talented writer like Una LaMarche couldn’t make it work, then I couldn’t either. So in a way it killed my dreams, but I’ve never done anything with my life worth writing about and in a way I feel like Una’s embarrassing stories are not quite humiliating enough and are a bit too everyday to be as entertaining as they could have been.

I think a reviewer on Goodreads summed it up best when they said that the best thing about the book was the cover. Although this isn’t strictly true, it is a fantastic cover that promises so much more than the book delivered.

BOOK 159: THE MUSEUM OF INNOCENCE: ORHAN PAMUK

The Museum of Innocence (Turkish: Masumiyet Müzesi) is a novel by Orhan Pamuk, Nobel-laureate Turkish novelist published on August 29, 2008. The book, set in Istanbul between 1975 and 1984, is an account of the love story between the wealthy businessman Kemal and a poorer distant relative of his, Füsun.

THEMES: Pamuk's work often deals with clash of culture between East and West, which was cited as part of the reason for him being awarded the Nobel Prize in Literature. This novel continuously references the influence of the West (Europe and America) on Istanbul's culture, through both the idea of museums and the film industry, which becomes a large part of the novel.

Female Identity & Turkish Culture: One of the key themes throughout the novel is the role of the female in Turkish culture. The novel describes the ostracism of women who have lost their virginity before marriage, despite the fact that many claim to have a "more western" attitude toward this in 1970s Istanbul. Pamuk describes this as the taboo of virginity that is part of an old system in Turkey.

In an interview Pamuk blended all of these themes as he commented on how the role of the museum is also one of ownership, as Kemal looks to own Füsun as a trinket in his own museum, rather than allow her autonomy of her own life.

MUSEUM: Pamuk has established an actual "Museum of Innocence", based on the museum described in the book. It is housed in a building in the Çukurcuma neighbourhood of Istanbul, and displays a collection evocative of everyday life and culture of Istanbul during the period in which the novel is set. Originally, the museum was scheduled to be exhibited at Frankfurt’s Schirn Kunsthalle in October 2008, during the annual Frankfurt Book Fair, but the exhibition was cancelled. In 2010, Pamuk still hoped that the museum would be opened in 2011. After much delay, the museum was finally inaugurated in April 2012. Although created later, the museum and the novel were conceived of in tandem, displaying the obsessive romance between two Istanbul families, as well as eternalizing a perspective on upper-class Istanbul in the 1970s. The project was supported by Istanbul 2010 – European Capital of Culture. According to the book, the museum allows free entry to those who bring a copy of the book. A ticket placed in the 83rd chapter of the book will be stamped before ushering the reader in.

(Information found here: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Museum_of_Innocence#Museum)

BOOK 155: THE NEW YORK TRILOGY: PAUL AUSTER

Originally published sequentially as City of Glass (1985), Ghosts (1986) and The Locked Room (1986), it has since been collected into a single volume.

Ostensibly presented as detective fiction, the stories of The New York Trilogy have been described as "meta-detective-fiction", "anti-detective fiction", "mysteries about mysteries", a "strangely humorous working of the detective novel", "very soft-boiled", a "metamystery" and a "mixture between the detective story and the nouveau roman", This may classify Auster as a postmodern writer whose works are influenced by the "classical literary movement" of American postmodernism through the 1960s and 70s. There is, however, "a certain coherence in the narrative discourse, a neo-realistic approach and a show of responsibility for social and moral aspects going beyond mere metafictional and subversive elements" which distinguish him from a "traditional" postmodern writer. The New York Trilogy is a particular form of postmodern detective fiction which still uses well-known elements of the detective novel (the classical and hardboiled varieties, for example) but also creates a new form that links "the traditional features of the genre with the experimental, metafictional and ironic features of postmodernism."

ADAPTATIONS: City of Glass was adapted in 1994 into a critically acclaimed experimental graphic novel by Paul Karasik and David Mazzucchelli. It was published as City of Glass: A Graphic Mystery in 2004.

In 2009, Audible.com produced an audio version of The New York Trilogy, narrated by Joe Barrett, as part of its Modern Vanguard line of audiobooks.

In 2016, Edward Einhorn adapted City of Glass as a play Off-Broadway, at the New Ohio.

(https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_New_York_Trilogy)