Despite good looks, brilliance, and abundant charm, a man cannot find his place in the world. Convinced that such a place exists, he tries one job after another, taking his young family on a Childe Harold's Pilgrimage through state after state until they arrive at the final cliffs and can go no further.
In this memoir, the author spends a day with the stepmother she hasn't seen in many years. The memoir takes the reader through the day, describing what she sees and learns. The stepmother tells her what happened the night the narrator's father decided to kill himself.
Barn Burning
Wood and hay kin burn.
—William Faulkner
I was two-and-a-half years-old when I stood at the living room window with my very pregnant mother, watching our barn burn down. “I think you kind of enjoyed it,” she told me later. “The neighbors came and threw snowballs at the flames.”
No firefighters ventured out to save the barn or the animals lodged therein—ten cows, a horse, and a cat. Perched at the top of a hill, on a long dirt road, our farm lay twenty miles from the nearest city, in the extreme northeast corner of Pennsylvania. We were isolated at all times but especially in winter, when snow and ice left our home beyond the reach of the outside world.
The law regards the felon as ignominious. It assumes the convict will be held in dishonor. Indeed, the stigma that flows from a criminal conviction is a factor courts consider in determining whether mens rea shall be required for that crime. Yet criminals are not always the objects of opprobrium. Noncriminals often enjoy, love, even admire criminals. They admire them not in spite of their criminality but because of it — or at least because of qualities that are inextricably linked to their criminality. That they sometimes do so wonderingly, against considerable inner resistance, serves only to highlight the strength of the attraction. This article explores noncriminals’ admiration for the lawbreaker. Drawing on literature, films, history, and psychoanalysis, the article seeks to delineate and explain this paradox. The article concludes that criminals and noncriminals are profoundly bound together. It argues that criminals, by their very existence, perform psychological functions for the law-abiding — gratifying their anti-social impulses, reassuring them of their comparative innocence, and assuaging their guilt through vicarious punishment. From this perspective, criminals are far from being an unequivocal evil; they are in fact necessary for us to be what we are. They are the Sancho Panza to our Don Quijote, the Fool to our King Lear, the partner we need to perform our complicated dance.
A nine-year-old speaks with apparent callousness as he walks by the body of the girl he has killed. A fourteen-year-old jokes about "body parts in her pocket" after bashing in her mother's head with a candlestick holder. And a fifteen-year-old laughingly names his accomplice "Homicide" after participating in a robbery that culminated in the victim's death. Seemingly remorseless acts such as these can have a crucial impact on the way a child or adolescent fares in the juvenile justice or criminal system. Yet, when one looks closely at what the courts interpret as indicators of remorselessness - taking into account psychological findings about the developmental stages, sociological theories about the code of the street, and literary portrayals of the paradoxes of the human mind - these indicators often appear ambiguous, the courts' interpretations problematic.
One of the most widely publicized cases of our time is that of Amanda Knox, the college student from West Seattle who was convicted of murdering her British roommate in Italy and served four years in prison before being acquitted and released. Retried in absentia, she was convicted again, only to be exonerated by the Italiaan Supreme Court, which handed down its final opinion in September, 2015. Throughout its eight-year duration, the case garnered worldwide attention, in part because of the pretty, photogenic defendant and the drug-fueled sex game that the prosecutor adduced as the motive for the crime. Interest in the case spiked again with the release of a Netflix original documentary, Amanda Knox, in the fall of 2016.