In the wake of a critically successful book, The Fact of a Body: A Murder and a Memoir, author Alexandria Marzano-Lesnevich begins teaching at Bowdoin.
Interview by Brock Clarke, A. Leroy Greason Professor of English and Chair of the English Department
The Fact of a Body is a terrific book, and it's been terrific critical and readerly success. At what point during the writing of the book did you realize you were onto something? And did the book you ended up writing end up being much different than the book you started writing, the book you thought you were writing?
Writing always seems to me to be an act of faith. There’s the electric quickening that happens when the subconscious realizes it’s onto something—and then there’s just how fleeting that sensation can be, when, inevitably, the editor-brain re-enters and starts to question how exactly the narrative will come together, whether it will “work,” etc. For me, there wasn’t just one moment of realization. Rather, it was a process of learning to trust these fleeting electrical impulses and where they were pointing me—always deeper, always into something more complicated that seemed like it might not work. Until, quite late, it did. I remember in particular one afternoon in the fall of 2015—months after I’d sold the book, and thereby promised myself, my agent, and my editor that it would indeed work (that faith again) when suddenly the material shifted. The shape appeared solid and I finally didn’t just suspect what I was headed towards but knew. That shape emerged organically, across years of drafting, and for that reason, the book I wrote is both profoundly different than the one I conceived and yet exactly what it needs to be to make good on the original idea, the original impulse. It’s just that to fulfill that initial idea, the book had to become both structurally and emotionally riskier than I could have imagined at the start. I’m a great believer in the idea that the book teaches you how to write it.
What sort of feedback have you gotten from readers? Have you heard from any of the characters in the book? I’m sure this is a delicate thing—to respect the lives and feelings of real people while also trying to do justice to their stories, and to your own story. How did you manage to strike that balance? Or, do you not even think about that while you're writing?
I’ve heard from many, many readers of the book—another just now, as I was typing this response, actually—and in many ways the chance to connect with readers has been the most profound gift of this past year. It feels almost like magic sometimes: you spend so long alone in a room with a laptop, your memories, and your imagination, holding this thing only you can see, and then, after publication, suddenly it’s real to other people, too. Suddenly it has the chance to resonate with their memories, their emotions, their lives. The experience has brought me back to the thrill of reading I felt as a child, the sensation of connecting with a person across time and space.
And, yes, I’ve heard from some of the characters in the book, too. There have been a range of reactions, as I anticipated there might be. But, the messages that have struck me most, perhaps, have been from people I never thought of as “characters,” people who were bystanders to the real moments when they happened, but who it turns out were profoundly emotionally impacted: searchers who looked for Jeremy Guillory when he was missing in Louisiana, for example, or friends of my family. In thinking about the characters in the book, I had forgotten how much our stories ripple out—how memories are held by communities.
I did think about impact and balance while I was writing, particularly while revising. I felt strongly that I had to—that strikes me as the responsibility of writing about real people. To write, I had to give myself permission to develop a different relationship to the people in the book, my relationship to them as my characters. In many cases I had access to very intimate details from their lives. For every detail, I asked myself whether it had to be in there, whether there was a sufficient story-reason it had to. There were many details that did not make it in, either because they were narratively redundant or superfluous or felt invasive to include. I felt very much both the writer of this story and its custodian.
Can you tell me a little a bit about the classes you'll be teaching at Bowdoin this year? And how might your experiences researching and writing The Fact of a Body inform these classes?
I'll be teaching Art of the Essay and Memoir as Testimony in the fall, and Creative Research and Literary Journalism in the spring. I think of the essay as a place to try out ideas, often to try to unravel a knot or reconcile an irresolvability. The word comes, after all, from the French essai, an attempt—which may be why essays, particularly personal essays, are commonly now thought of as the genre of discovery. Certainly, this was true for me with The Fact of a Body, which had its earliest form in essays in which I tried out ideas that later came to deepen into, and inform, the book. Memoir as Testimony is a first-year seminar, and it will be exciting to think there about the way the story of an individual is also, always, the story of a moment in history, the story of a culture and its values and absences. My hope is that it will encourage students to think beyond their own lives and ask themselves what the stories of their lives thus far are also stories of, what cultural moments. For Creative Research in the spring—I drew on thirty thousand pages of court records to write The Fact of a Body, and I found that I had to develop a relationship to that research that fed my imagination. I’ve become very interested in how other writers have approached allowing research to take on as much vividness as imagination or memory, while still maintaining the work’s integrity as nonfiction. Students at Bowdoin learn such excellent research skills, I am eager to discover with them a few ways to harness those skills. Lastly, Literary Journalism is where it all comes together! Far from dying away, the genre is experiencing a real resurgence in digital forms, with our ongoing hunger for story and to learn of the world behind our own lives—whether that world is far away or just in the next backyard. For The Fact of a Body, I worked to craft a story that would read like fiction, but nonetheless be this form of journalism, and I'll be working with students to help them discover and tell the stories that speak to them.
Alexandria Marzano-Lesnevich’s first career as a death penalty lawyer led to a ten-year odyssey to write The Fact of a Body, which was named one of the best books of the year by Entertainment Weekly, Audible.com, Bustle, Book Riot, The Times of London, and The Guardian. The recipient of fellowships from The National Endowment for the Arts, MacDowell, and Yaddo, as well as a Rona Jaffe Award, Marzano-Lesnevich now lives in Portland, Maine. Coincidentally, Dana Spector ’08, who was the subject of our Winter 2008 Q&A, is the literary rights agent for the movie adaptation of The Fact of a Body.
This story first appeared in the Fall 2018 issue of Bowdoin Magazine.
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