The Fact of a Body: A Murder and a Memoir

by Alex Marzano-Lesnevich

Overview

"Complex and challenging... push[es] the boundaries of writing about trauma." —The New York Times
“A True Crime Masterpiece” – Vogue
Entertainment Weekly "Must" List and Best Books of the Year So Far
Real Simple's Best New Books
Guardian Best Book of the Year
Lambda Literary Award Winner
Chautauqua Prize Winner


"The Fact of a Body is one of the best books I've read this year. It's just astounding."
— Paula Hawkins, author of Into the Water and The Girl on the Train

"This book is a marvel. The Fact of a Body is equal parts gripping and haunting and will leave you questioning whether any one story can hold the full truth." — Celeste Ng, author of the New York Times bestselling Everything I Never Told You and Little Fires Everywhere


Before Alex Marzano-Lesnevich begins a summer job at a law firm in Louisiana, working to help defend men accused of murder, they think their position is clear. The child of two lawyers, they are staunchly anti-death penalty. But the moment convicted murderer Ricky Langley’s face flashes on the screen as they review old tapes—the moment they hear him speak of his crimes — they are overcome with the feeling of wanting him to die. Shocked by their reaction, they dig deeper and deeper into the case. Despite their vastly different circumstances, something in his story is unsettlingly, uncannily familiar.

Crime, even the darkest and most unsayable acts, can happen to any one of us. As Alex pores over the facts of the murder, they find themself thrust into the complicated narrative of Ricky’s childhood. And by examining the details of Ricky’s case, they are forced to face their own story, to unearth long-buried family secrets, and reckon with a past that colors their view of Ricky's crime.

But another surprise awaits: They weren’t the only one who saw their life in Ricky’s.

An intellectual and emotional thriller that is also a different kind of murder mystery, THE FACT OF A BODY is a book not only about how the story of one crime was constructed — but about how we grapple with our own personal histories. Along the way it tackles questions about the nature of forgiveness, and if a single narrative can ever really contain something as definitive as the truth. This groundbreaking, heart-stopping work, ten years in the making, shows how the law is more personal than we would like to believe — and the truth more complicated, and powerful, than we could ever imagine.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9781250080554
Publisher:	Flatiron Books
Publication date:	05/08/2018
Edition description:	Reprint
Pages:	336
Sales rank:	92,771
Product dimensions:	5.30(w) x 8.20(h) x 1.00(d)
Lexile:	900L (what's this?)

About the Author

A 2014 National Endowment for the Arts fellow, Alex Marzano-Lesnevich has received a Rona Jaffe Award and has twice been a fellow at both MacDowell and Yaddo. Their essays appear in the New York Times, Oxford American, and the anthologies TRUE CRIME and WAVEFORM: Twenty-first Century Essays by Women, as well as many other publications. They received their JD from Harvard, their MFA at Emerson College, and their BA from Columbia University. They now live in Boston, where they teach at Grub Street and in the graduate public policy program at Harvard’s Kennedy School of Government.

Editorial Reviews

"This book is a marvel. With unflinching precision and immense compassion, Alexandria Marzano-Lesnevich peels apart both a murder case and her own experience to reveal how we try to make sense of the past. The Fact of a Body is equal parts gripping and haunting and will leave you questioning whether any one story can hold the full truth."
--Celeste Ng, author of the New York Times bestselling Everything I Never Told You

"The Fact of a Body is unlike any murder story I've ever read, a masterpiece of both reportage and memoir, a book that could only be written by an author with Alexandria Marzano-Lesnevich's staggering gifts: a relentless reporter with a law degree from Harvard, a poet's understanding of the cadence of a line, and a novelist's gift for empathy. Walter Benjamin famously said that all great works of art either dissolve a genre or invent one. This book does both, and its greatness is undeniable."
--Justin St. Germain, author of Son of a Gun

"The Fact of a Body is a remarkable act of witness, an anatomy of silence and the violence it abets, a book of both public and private accountings. Rejecting the false comfort of certainty, it confronts the inadequacy of all our tools for fathoming not just unforgivable crimes, but the baffling, human grace that can forgive them. This is a profound and riveting book."
-- Garth Greenwell, author of What Belongs to You

From the Publisher

★ 04/01/2017
During an internship in law school, Marzano-Lesnevich (public policy, Harvard Kennedy Sch.) viewed the videotaped confession of a man convicted of murdering a six-year-old boy and possibly molesting him. In an instant, though a lifelong opponent of the death penalty, she wished death upon Ricky Langley. Struggling to pinpoint this new, aggressive feeling, the author began to dig deeper into not only Langley's story but also her own, parallel in disturbing and heart-wrenching ways. Half memoir, half crime investigation, this book alternates among the present, past, and everywhere in between within each of their lives. Marzano-Lesnevich was the victim of sexual abuse by her grandfather, which her parents discovered and halted, only to remain silent on the matter. Descriptions of the murder and sexual abuse throughout are often graphic, and readers may be cautioned. The author describes the court case Palsgraf v. Long Island Railroad Co., which contends with the issue of fault—who or what is the initial cause for blame. She poses a greater philosophical and legal question of one's past and how that determines cause in an exquisite and thought-provoking comparison study. VERDICT The writing is superb and gripping and never heavy-handed on the legal jargon, creating a moving must-have for any collection. [See Prepub Alert, 11/27/16.]—Kaitlin Malixi, Bucks Cty. Free Lib., Doylestown, PA

Library Journal

2017-03-07
An accomplished literary debut weaves memoir and true-crime investigation.Essayist and lawyer Marzano-Lesnevich (Writing/Harvard Kennedy School of Government) fashions an absorbing narrative about secrets, pain, revenge, and, ultimately, the slippery notion of truth. In 2003, working as a summer intern at a Louisiana law firm that defends clients sentenced to death, the author discovered the case of a child's murder by a confessed pedophile. Passionately opposed to capital punishment, she realized that she wanted this client to die. That response—unsettling and unexpected—incited an interest in the case that became nothing less than an obsession. For 10 years, she read 30,000 pages of documents, including court transcripts, newspaper coverage, and a play based on interviews with the victim's mother; watched the killer's taped confessions from three trials; and traveled multiple times to Louisiana. That fixation inflames another investigation, as well, into her own troubling past. "I am pulled to this story by absences," she writes. "Strange blacknesses, strange forgettings, that overtake me at times. They reveal what is still unresolved inside me." With care and pacing that is sometimes too deliberate, the author reveals the blacknesses in her own family: her father, a successful lawyer, succumbed to rage and depressions; her mother, also a lawyer, was stubbornly silent about her past; the author learns that she was not a twin but really a triplet, with a sister who died within months, never mentioned by the family; and, most horrifically, her grandfather sexually abused her and her younger sister for years. When Marzano-Lesnevich finally revealed the abuse to her parents, they buried it, refusing to acknowledge her pain even when she became severely depressed and anorexic. Her family members, she realizes now, were "prisoners" of their own triumphant narrative: children of immigrants, they were living the American dream, "determinedly fine." The author admits that she has "layered my imagination" onto her sources to make her characters vivid, inevitably raising questions about the line between nonfiction and fiction and about how such embellishment can manipulate the reader's perceptions and sympathies. A powerful evocation of the raw pain of emotional scars.

Kirkus Reviews