The Fact of a Body is not what you expect when you first begin to read. Within its pages, Marzano outlines the details of a murder, as you would expect, but also outlines so much more, and suddenly, you realize the book was never really about the murder, it is about Marzano herself, and the facts scarred within her body.

I must tread delicately in this review so as not to spoil the book, but as you can tell from the stars, I was thoroughly enthralled. I’ve never read a book like this. It is simultaneously a true crime novel and a memoir of a girl confronting her past. Marzano uses time prominently throughout the book, regularly jumping forward and backward in time to bring in the numerous threads of the story as she knits them together. Early on, the reader feels a growing discomfort as details of the murder and the author’s childhood are revealed in fragments. I found myself thinking, “something is very wrong here…” more times than once, and Marzano did a fabulous job keeping me on the hook, holding back elements of the past until she, and the story, were ready to reveal them.

Marzano writes with poetry in her words that I cannot put to words myself. Her emotions are tangible and beautiful, despite the tragedies she writes about. I respect her for not keeping her writing process hidden from the reader. She shows how she did her research within the book itself, which made everything more real, as if I was there with her in the county clerk’s office flipping through hundreds of thousands of court documents and evidence files. I cannot imagine the time she put into this book, but you can tell it is a labor of love, and pain. Marzano seems to wrestle with her story, wrestle with how to arrange it just right so as to tell her unabashed truth, do justice to the real, human characters within, and keep herself sane through it all.

In the first few chapters when the reader first realizes this book will not contain a single story, but many stories that the author will alternate between, it may feel disjointed or hard to follow. Maybe even the reader would find they like one story more than the others and look forward to when Marzano returns to it. However, as the reader continues, they will come to find that the stories are linked inextricably, not by time, or by the characters within, but by Marzano herself. It begins to feel as if the story of the murder was brought into her life for an intangible and unknowable reason. She needed that story, and the way it connects to her own past, her own family, and her own experiences make this book unique from any other I’ve read.

It is strongly rated XGC, but I haven’t read a better book in years. This book earns my highest recommendation.

Interested in buying this? Support Writing.Com by making your purchase of The Fact of a Body: A Murder and a Memoir   from Amazon.Com!

Created Mar 21, 2019 at 9:38pm • Submit your own review...