CARRIE CAROLYN COCO

A novelist and essayist turns to true crime in this deep-digging account of the murder of her friend.

Before she was brutally stabbed to death by her roommate in 2016, Carolyn Bush was a poet and a “founding board member of the nonprofit reading room and library” Wendy’s Subway in New York City. She was also a believer in astrology, a Bard College student, and a friend to many, including Gerard, whose account of Bush’s life and murder takes a kaleidoscopic approach. “To reconstruct Carolyn’s story in her own voice,” she writes, “I have gathered her language from text messages, emails, blog posts, poems, essays, social media, and interviews with many of her loved ones in which they recollected their experiences and correspondences with her.” The result is a well-researched yet often disorganized collage that includes detailed accounts of the murder and resulting trial, as well as the lives and histories of both Bush and her murderer, Render Stetson-Shanahan, who also attended Bard. At times, Gerard’s heavy use of quoted material gives great insight into Bush’s character and the story of her death, such as the marginalia scribbled in Bush’s copy of Simone Weil’s Gravity and Grace: “‘Time heals all wounds, unless the desired body ceases to exist. Then it is a wound, disembodied.’” However, too many voices on the page often bog down the text, and Gerard’s attempt to cover every facet of the lives of both Bush and Stetson-Shanahan leaves many storylines unfinished and readers unsure where to focus. Whereas “we can easily understand and consume” the typical cultural narrative of the death of a white woman “without too much reflection,” Gerard’s collagist biography and true crime investigation demands the readers participate in meaning making.

A comprehensive, heartfelt, occasionally chaotic examination of the far-reaching impacts of one woman’s life and murder.