Author: Heidi Tiedemann Darroch
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True Crime: The Difficult Life and Tragic Death of Writer Barbara Sorel
The early twenty-first century has become more forgiving of difficult women, at least in literature. Novels like Claire Messud’s The Woman Upstairs, as well as the complete oeuvre of Otessa Moshfegh, have gradually acclimated readers to interesting, spiky women, women who know what they want (but who make life difficult for other people). I’m reading…
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Rachel Monroe’s Savage Appetites: Four True Stories of Women, Crime, and Obsession
I came across Monroe’s book while seeking comps (comparable titles) for my own work-in-progress, which is a bibliomemoir: a life story told through reading and, in my case, crime fiction. It’s an expanding genre, and I highly recommend Guardian culture writer Lucy Mangan’s excellent Bookworm and Bookish. Other examples include Austen Years: A Memoir in…
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4th of July: Murder Ballads and Gretchen Peters’s “Independence Day”
Katy Horan’s gorgeously illustrated and chilling little book compiles twenty traditional murder ballads, some of them well known and others less familiar (at least to me), with insightful analysis of the genre. She Wore Black, a fun podcast about things gothic, horror, and mystery, has an interview with her that’s worth a listen. Horan talks…
