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troisoiseauxI finished Agatha Christie's autobiography (titled, creatively, An Autobiography); overall, it had what I can only describe as a jolly tone, which made the couple of times she said something sentence-stopping-ly, *record scratch noise*-ingly bananas - her opinions on criminal justice* will haunt me forever - even more of a stopped-in-my-tracks WTF moment. (There was also a fair amount of period-typical attitude™/language that did not age well, of the kind you encounter in her novels.)
That aside, I found it interesting to read about Christie as a person, because even though I've read her other memoir - Come, Tell Me How You Live, about life on her husband's archeological dig in Syria - I have to confess I've never thought that much about her as a person. She's always loomed in my mind as something of an Institution, a genre in herself, distinct in a way from the Agatha Christie Mallowan of Come, Tell Me How You Live. It was also interesting, having read biographies of Laura Ingalls Wilder and Harper Lee - authors whose works were inspired by their own childhoods/families/hometowns - over the summer, to read about Christie's more impersonal (?) approach to writing. She'd mention in passing that the inspiration for a book came from this person, or that house, or a plot that a friend suggested to her, but for the most part I didn't come away from this memoir with an obvious line from Agatha Christie's life to her work, as with Wilder and Lee, and she doesn't offer one.
* Which ranged from "is the death penalty really that bad?" to "transportation to 'a vast land of emptiness, peopled only with primitive human beings' was probably the best option we found" (the interior quotes being her exact words, YIKES) to "convicted criminals should have to choose between execution and being used as human guinea pigs in scientific experiments," apparently. What the hell, Agatha?!
I also read Savage Appetites by Rachel Monroe and am currently reading Dead Girls by Alice Bolin, which both explore the phenomenon of true crime (and, in Bolin's essays, fictional crime) as popular culture.
Savage Appetites is more to the point, telling "four true stories about women driven by obsession" through the framework of the four roles in a crime story: detective, victim, defender, and killer. The most interesting story, for me, was the "detective," 20th century heiress and pioneer of legal medicine Frances Glessner Lee, whose Nutshell Studies of Unexplained Death (read: murder dollhouses) I am furious I missed when they were at the Renwick in 2017. The one that made me sick to my stomach was the "killer," a young woman radicalized by (among other things) Tumblr's serial killer/mass shooting "fandom", who planned a mass shooting with her online boyfriend that thankfully never came to fruition.
The scope of Bolin's Dead Girls is broader than the title implies. Her essays weave together personal anecdotes and self-reflection, analysis of books and TV shows, and true crime (not always murder; one essay is dedicated to the reality TV roots of the 2008 Bling Ring robberies). It kind of strikes me as a morbid cousin of Jia Tolentino's Trick Mirror.
That aside, I found it interesting to read about Christie as a person, because even though I've read her other memoir - Come, Tell Me How You Live, about life on her husband's archeological dig in Syria - I have to confess I've never thought that much about her as a person. She's always loomed in my mind as something of an Institution, a genre in herself, distinct in a way from the Agatha Christie Mallowan of Come, Tell Me How You Live. It was also interesting, having read biographies of Laura Ingalls Wilder and Harper Lee - authors whose works were inspired by their own childhoods/families/hometowns - over the summer, to read about Christie's more impersonal (?) approach to writing. She'd mention in passing that the inspiration for a book came from this person, or that house, or a plot that a friend suggested to her, but for the most part I didn't come away from this memoir with an obvious line from Agatha Christie's life to her work, as with Wilder and Lee, and she doesn't offer one.
* Which ranged from "is the death penalty really that bad?" to "transportation to 'a vast land of emptiness, peopled only with primitive human beings' was probably the best option we found" (the interior quotes being her exact words, YIKES) to "convicted criminals should have to choose between execution and being used as human guinea pigs in scientific experiments," apparently. What the hell, Agatha?!
I also read Savage Appetites by Rachel Monroe and am currently reading Dead Girls by Alice Bolin, which both explore the phenomenon of true crime (and, in Bolin's essays, fictional crime) as popular culture.
Savage Appetites is more to the point, telling "four true stories about women driven by obsession" through the framework of the four roles in a crime story: detective, victim, defender, and killer. The most interesting story, for me, was the "detective," 20th century heiress and pioneer of legal medicine Frances Glessner Lee, whose Nutshell Studies of Unexplained Death (read: murder dollhouses) I am furious I missed when they were at the Renwick in 2017. The one that made me sick to my stomach was the "killer," a young woman radicalized by (among other things) Tumblr's serial killer/mass shooting "fandom", who planned a mass shooting with her online boyfriend that thankfully never came to fruition.
The scope of Bolin's Dead Girls is broader than the title implies. Her essays weave together personal anecdotes and self-reflection, analysis of books and TV shows, and true crime (not always murder; one essay is dedicated to the reality TV roots of the 2008 Bling Ring robberies). It kind of strikes me as a morbid cousin of Jia Tolentino's Trick Mirror.
