She Had No Enemies: A Memoir

everything is true memoir, i will post in sections

                  Prologue                                 

    My youngest sister, Mickey, has been eighteen for more than twenty-five years now. That’s how old she was in the summer of 1980—when he murdered her.

    Anthony J. LaRette, Jr. was from out of town. We’d find out later, much later, that he was also a serial killer. The police placed the number of his victims—all young women—at two dozen, but he claimed to have raped and killed thirty-six.
    Mickey’s murder changed my life like nothing ever had before or has in the twenty-five years since. Whatever grieving process allows people to gain closure with loss has somehow passed me by.
    I took the capture of her killer, a thirty-year-old married man from Kansas, as something more than just a break from my emptiness and mourning. Everyone else in our family wanted him dead—I wanted to beat him to death.

    LaRette’s capture released me from two agonizing weeks of confusion, anger, and frustration, not knowing who had killed my little sister. I thought my relief would come when I was finally able to accept the finality of Mickey’s death—but I was wrong.

    Although most of us were broken in some way growing up in the chaos of our family, Mickey emerged intact.

 

                Ch-1.

  That is You. This is Me.

 

    From Mom’s first child when she was nineteen until her last at forty she was either pregnant, nursing a newborn, or trying to get pregnant again. Sometimes she was involved in two out of three at the same time. She and Dad managed about one birth for every two pregnancies, an eight-for-fifteen batting average. Had all Mom’s pregnancies been successful, I would’ve had fourteen brothers and sisters.
     Mom’s parents abandoned her and her younger brother in their childhood, and their maternal grandmother, a large woman whom we called Big Grandma, raised them. Both she and her husband were German, spoke with thick accents, and were very strict.
    Whenever we visited Big Grandma, she made us sit on plastic-covered furniture or play on the polished linoleum in the sunroom. She handed out hard candy by the piece. Running wild, the way we did at Little Grandma Fleming's house, was strictly verboten. I think that the life Mom lived—staying at home with her children, pregnant, or with a newborn—was her way of making up for the loving atmosphere that had been missing in her own childhood.
    Seeing Mom pregnant while bottle-feeding an infant was a common sight in our home. It was her life. I asked her why she wanted so many children, and she said she was happiest when she was at home, cooking, doing laundry, toting a baby, watching a toddler, and resolving the issues of the older children.
    My older sister, Joanie, got stuck helping Mom raise most of us. Joanie said it was the main reason she never wanted children of her own. She had already done that.
    Mary Michelle (we called her Mickey) was the last child, the third of three daughters. Even at eighteen, she was still the baby of the family. She was born when I was twelve. Curly blond hair and hazel eyes like the rest of us, she made us a family of ten.

                    (Ch-1 cont.)

Reviews

[Malenkov]

This has a nice voice to it, detached, not sentimental, kinda this is what it happened and yet perceptive, obsertvant - the observations about the gran and mum compensating the missing pieces of their own childhood, and that seems to me to be the merging theme of chap 1 - that which is missing expressing itself in our own life: here seen in the gran and the mum, and the craving (if I can use that word) to fill that missed love. Deep themes.

Theres also something obviusly tragic in the sentence "Although most of us were broken in some way growing up in the chaos of our family, Mickey emerged intact." Seeing as she came to such a brutal end. There is a sense of a price paid for example by the sister who carries the burden of "unfullfillment" which the mother transfers to the daughter (as she has to do her care of the sharing and hence take over part of the mothers role.) and yet borne with love, and the granma, who learns love from the mother who never experienced it. Its a very touching human story which I can connect to - largely because it speaks of tragedy without sentimentalism, and because the details are very significant, little well chosen bits that reflect the themes without blurting them out. So I found myself absorbed in it.

Well written. Continue.

[jdwriter65]

I like the story -- although obviously sad, it sounds like the makings for a great memoir. About the writing... you have a lot of good potential in here for "show" words and phrases. Instead I think you are telling rather than showing. For example, you talk about Big Grandma -- what did she look like, feel like, smell like? What mannerisms did she have? Paint pictures for your reader. In one of my essays I have my grandmother always ironing, her paper-thin skin barely hiding the purple veins beneath. Her wobbly arms would push the heavy iron back and forth across the wrinkled cloth... If I had just told about it, I would have said something like, "My grandmother was old and always ironed." See the difference? Keep on writing -- you are on the right path! And let's keep in touch. There are not many other "creative nonfiction" writers on here! Janet