William Leith

Two dark tales

Alexandra Marzano-Lesnevich interweaves her own experiences with the tragic case of a six-year-old boy from Louisiana

issue 01 July 2017

Just over halfway through this grim and gripping book, the author describes herself and her girlfriend ‘lying on my bed kissing’. She says: ‘I love kissing her.’ And: ‘We kissed and kissed, and soon my hands were at her shirt and I was tugging it off.’ And: ‘I kissed her again.’ And: ‘I reached down between her legs.’ And: ‘She reached down to touch me and then we were moving together and it felt good and I moaned and it felt good again.’

Then she says: ‘And then it didn’t.’

The sex feels good. Then it doesn’t. Something has happened to the author, deep in her past, and it comes back to haunt her. ‘I realised I was going under, into the memory,’ she tells us. ‘My breath quickened. I gulped air. I fumbled for something to hold on to.’

In this passage, she’s telling us how sexual trauma actually feels​. And let me say: I haven’t read anything quite like this before. Anybody who reads this, who didn’t know how sexual trauma feels — how it plays out across the years, how it can rear up and grab a person decades after the event, or events — will have a much better idea now.

Alexandria Marzano-Lesnevich has thought very hard about sexual trauma. She really, really wants to tell us about it. Very few people do.

But let’s back up a bit. This book is partly about the sexual trauma that happened to Marzano-Lesnevich when she was a child. But it’s also about a case that she worked on when she was training to be a lawyer. The case concerns a man called Ricky Langley and a boy called Jeremy Guillory. Ricky killed Jeremy. The case is horrible; it will appal you.

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