What to Read and Why by Francine Prose

Author:Francine Prose
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: HarperCollins
Published: 2018-07-02T16:00:00+00:00

In 1995, she heard that Mary’s mother had died and that Mary wanted to write “a serious book” about her life—and so their intense and often painful collaboration on Cries Unheard began.

Cries Unheard is structured rather like a detective story, an inquiry into the mystery of why the hapless eleven-year-old reached the breaking point, an explosion preceded and accompanied by a series of troubling incidents (Mary attacked other children, broke into the local preschool, ran away from home) that might have broadcast her wish to be stopped or caught—if anyone had been paying attention or been qualified to interpret her behavior.

The book begins with the trial at which Mary was sentenced to life imprisonment. Her codefendant and best friend, thirteen-year-old Norma Bell, was acquitted of all charges, though Norma undeniably knew about—and was perhaps complicitous in—the killing of Brian Howe. But the slow-witted Norma had the advantage of a demonstrably loving family, while Mary, far more intelligent and disturbed, came from a more problematic and (at least to the jury) less sympathetic background. Her biological father’s identity was unknown, and her mother, Betty, was a prostitute whose “specialty” involved whips, as well as a delusional sociopath who acted out at the trial, took suggestive photographs of Mary while she was in detention, and hawked personal information about her daughter to the tabloids.

Only after reading about the arraignment of the bewildered child (whom the press described as “a freak of nature” and “a bad seed”) do we learn the details of the criminal investigation that began after Brian Howe’s body, strangled and marked by peculiar scratches, was discovered between two cement blocks in the Tin Lizzie. Gradually, the detectives’ suspicions collected around Mary and Norma, who had been behaving bizarrely since Martin Brown’s death, nine weeks before. A few days after Martin was found, Mary “rang the Browns’ doorbell and, smilingly, asked Martin’s shocked mother to let her see the little boy in his coffin.” The girls protested their innocence until their inconsistent and improbable stories—and their eerily accurate knowledge of unpublicized aspects of the murders—pointed to their involvement, and they were arrested.

Sereny tracks Mary’s thorny, circuitous route from imprisonment to parole, a journey that began at Red Bank, an enlightened reform school for boys, headed by a compassionate former naval officer whose kindness first suggested to Mary that an adult could be trusted. But the progress made at Red Bank was rapidly undone in prison, where Mary responded to her rehabilitation with escape and suicide attempts, violence, and her endlessly inventive uses of sex and personal charisma to manipulate her surroundings.

In these sections, as in the rest of the book, Sereny is less engaged by facts of biography than by questions of consciousness and of epistemology. What was Mary’s experience of the crimes, the trial, and her detention? And what does she remember and understand in the light of what she subsequently learned? Cries Unheard has not even a vague familial resemblance to a “true crime” story, but is instead

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