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Nonfiction

At a Law Firm that Defended a Child Murderer, an Intern Recalls Her Own Childhood Abuse

Alexandria Marzano-LesnevichCredit...Nina Subin

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THE FACT OF A BODY
A Murder and a Memoir
By Alexandria Marzano-Lesnevich
326 pp. Flatiron Books. $26.99.

Alexandria Marzano-Lesnevich’s cross-genre book travels back and forth in time and space, between her own life as the comfortable, Ivy League-educated daughter of New Jersey lawyers, and the life of a poor, possibly psychotic pedophile and child murderer in Louisiana named Ricky Langley. In 1992, Langley strangled and likely molested a 6-year-old boy. In 2003, Marzano-Lesnevich, then a 25-year-old intern at a law firm that defended Langley, watched his videotaped confession and, despite a lifelong objection to the death penalty, wanted him to die. That’s because for years, she and her sisters were sexually abused by their grandfather, who played checkers with the girls in the afternoon and then crept upstairs into their bedrooms at night.

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Unnerved by the chasm between her beliefs and desires, Marzano-Lesnevich quit law and began writing, spending a decade delving into the unlikely parallels between her past and Langley’s history. She wanted to understand why people tell themselves stories, and to know if she or other children could have been spared. Even if pedophilia is the perverse “destiny” Langley once claimed, Marzano-Lesnevich came to believe that Langley and her grandfather would have inflicted less damage if society faced its monsters, rather than denied their existence. Langley pleaded for help from friends, family, counselors and prison officials, but he was repeatedly ignored. At age 8, Marzano-Lesnevich revealed the abuse, only to be similarly disregarded.

This refusal to acknowledge wicked acts and urges, Marzano-Lesnevich finds, excuses abusers and shames victims. Her parents’ reaction to learning of their daughters’ abuse was uniquely devastating: They simply stopped inviting grandpa for sleepovers and urged Marzano-Lesnevich to keep quiet, lest she hurt dad’s career or grandma’s feelings. Years later, her father implied that she had invented the abuse, and one sister announced that she no longer wished to identify as a person who had been molested. Marzano-Lesnevich changes her sister’s name, but reveals violations she suffered, writing, to justify the decision, that she won’t put her own experience “alone in my family again.” This is a particularly merciless devotion to truth.

Perhaps Marzano-Lesnevich’s battle to claim her own story has led her to claim the stories of others too. In the book’s memoir sections, she writes candidly of her father’s rages, the hidden death of an infant sister, her eating disorder. But in the sections about Langley, she inserts inventive flourishes and fabricated details atop real-life events. Though she has engaged in extensive research to reconstruct the case — Langley’s tragic conception, his twisted development, his hideous crimes — she does not seem to have interviewed the living characters for her book. Instead, she explains, she pored over documentation and then “layered my imagination onto the bare-bones record of the past to bring it to life.” The result can seem contrived. The dead boy’s mom imagines “he’d be sweet on a girl at the high school by now.” Langley dreams of buying his mother a wheelchair, which she’ll crash “into the couch and oh, they’ll laugh and laugh.”

Marzano-Lesnevich is at her most powerful when she recounts personal memories. As a teenager, she confronted her grandfather. “A part of me may always be 18, standing in that room with him,” she writes. “The old-man, wet rot of his breath and the stench of urine, the face I loved and the face I feared.” Years later, she finds that someone removed photographs of him from the family albums. They probably hoped Marzano-Lesnevich would be complicit in the cover-up. But in her case, as in Langley’s, secrecy protects only the abuser, and so with this book, she lays it bare.

Justine van der Leun is the author of “We Are Not Such Things: The Murder of a Young American, a South African Township, and the Search for Truth and Reconciliation.”

A version of this article appears in print on  , Page 25 of the Sunday Book Review with the headline: Facing Her Monsters. Order Reprints | Today’s Paper | Subscribe

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