Exploring the Exquisite Work of Michelle McNamara
All deaths are mysteries in their own right. Even if the last hours are spent in a communion of love with friends and family and the cause is known, maybe even anticipated, so the factors can someday be woven into a narrative more coherent than the experience. Death keeps secrets.
Patton Oswalt’s latest hour-long stand-up special, “Talking for Clapping” is astute, pointedly hilarious and as strong as you’d expect. It was released streaming to Netflix April 22nd. It has more to do with children’s birthday parties than death. Oswalt, a prolific constant within comedy, tweeted to promote the special as well as condolences for the loss of Prince. Hours later he lost his wife and the mother of their young daughter for reasons unknown. Her name was Michelle McNamara.
In a succinct, beautiful tribute on TIME’s website, Oswalt avoids first person pronouns until he no longer can. He explains it as, “Probably because there hasn’t been much of an “I” since the morning of April 21. There probably won’t be for a while. Whatever there is belongs to my daughter—to our daughter. Alice.”
I’ve been reading truecrimediary.com. The website, full of stories, guest contributions, offers of standalone facts on unsolved crimes to a greater community is Michelle McNamara’s exquisite true crime blog. Some posts are ghosts stories of generic-seeming people and their equally innocuous victims that couldn’t run fast enough or fight hard enough to escape a monster. Other posts are contemplations on the nature of humanity in crime, the mistakes criminals and law enforcement makes. Still others argue the difficulty of ensnaring vulnerable, lost people in a Manson-type “family” nowadays in the age of social media and ever-accessible online omnipotence. Each one of Michelle McNamara’s subjects ended their lives dependent on the sliver of a chance those left living would find truth. Michelle wrote to help these lost people, to continue that effort when their cases were long shut and victim’s best advocates, those who knew them, had also passed away.
Her site is a planetarium of unexplained facts. In her writing you stare in awe at a dark beyond or bent on decoding the constellation of happenings if and when you look hard enough for long enough. So many elements are only evident through the inconclusive stains of a repercussion, no reason. No explanation. I’m not reading with one eye out for an aside pertaining to her marriage to a behemoth in comedy or to spot a seed that would expand into why Michelle’s young body betrayed her one night in April. McNamara’s writing is too strong, too engaging and she’s too professional for that. On these topics especially, there’s just so much to say.
The blog is a testament to McNamara’s career and talents but a shard of her life. The stories are only so much. “The pulling in of you, the reader, was never aggressive, calculating or desperate… Those are facts but not her entire story,” Oswalt writes.
Patton Oswalt tweeted, and later wrote in the same TIME article about a mid-morning declaration made by their seven year old daughter, Alice, one hazy dawn: “When your mom dies you’re the best memory of her. Everything you do and say is a memory of her.” She’s right, spot on. It’s reassuring, that we hold so much inherited love coiled within us like mattress springs. When those twists release their energy, the recoil is agony. That impact has an inverse relationship to the love it stems from and as Oswalt writes on losing Michelle, “She hasn’t left a void. She’s left a blast crater.”
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Rachel Crowe
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