08-17-2010, 06:01 AM
(08-14-2010, 07:51 PM)bronte Wrote: It bothers me quite a bit that she write books about murder given her past. It seems that she would never want to think about such things again (even fictional murders). It is scary to me to think about an author that really killed.
That she writes about murder makes a kind of macabre sense to me; she's "working out" her past and examining the underlying motives and capacity for violence and murder in human nature, over and over again. Naturally this would be her life's obsession.
Yet I agree with you that it is scary. For this reason I have a hard time giving myself to her books, because so frequently I'm taken out of the story to consider: "This person who writes so beautifully and with such sensitivity once bludgeoned another person to death with a brick in a stocking." True, there is the question of her being medicated and not herself at the time. But that doesn't comfort one out of all reservations. Many people on the same medications did not commit murder.
But mind you -- moral judgment, reluctance to contribute to her royalties, are actually not ultimately what makes me squeamish about reading her books. Instead, it's a reluctance to dwell in her mind. Call it fear of the dark.