Reading Genre in the Contemporary US Murder Memoir

This thesis considers what happens to the process of identity formation in memoir when the true crime genre’s structures are used as a framework for understanding the individuated past. In order to do so, it focuses on the ‘murder memoir’, a subgenre of true crime writing that combines a memoir narrative with a true crime narrative. The thesis focuses on five texts as its case studies: Maggie Nelson’s Jane: A Murder (2005) and The Red Parts (2007); Alexandria Marzano-Lesnevich’s The Fact of a Body (2017); James Ellroy’s My Dark Places (1996); and Claudia Rowe’s The Spider and the Fly (2017). Each of these case studies provides an example of a ‘hinge’ through which the memoir and true crime genres intersect within the form. The thesis identifies these hinges as genre visibility, the archive, the crime scene photograph, and the body. Part One of the thesis establishes the narrative and ideological frameworks of the murder memoir. It argues that it is a form that is fundamentally anxious about its relationship with the legacies of popular genre and keenly aware of its tenuous status as non-fiction. Part Two of the thesis then tests the limitations of the frameworks established in Part One in relation to the murder memoir’s status as a non-fiction genre. Part Two shows that the murder memoir’s anxiety about its status as both ‘true crime’ and ‘non-fiction’ results in its reading of the autobiographical subject as fictive and the ‘facts’ of the past as contingent and polysemic. Because these texts produce the narrative of a memoirist’s suffering alongside and against the typically rigid and conservative structures of true crime narratives, the thesis ultimately argues that the murder memoir offers an insightful case study to examine true crime’s relationship with victimhood as a narrative and cultural construction.