We mentioned How Sara Gruen Lost Her Life — Abbott Kahler’s Vulture* report on how “the Water for Elephants author’s six-year fight to free an incarcerated man left her absolutely broke and critically ill” — in yesterday’s Best Evidence, but the conversation on the story has bloomed so much in the day following that it makes sense to revisit it for our weekend discussion.
Since it was published, Gruen’s become a trending topic on Twitter (but has, herself, remained silent), and the reporting of the story has faced scrutiny for issues like — as noted by Josie Duffy Rice, the president of criminal justice pub The Appeal — its failure to mention the central role that oft-problematic former Los Angeles County DA played in the tale. Lacey “made exoneration as difficult as she possibly could on both Murdoch and Gruen and yet her NAME ISN’T EVEN IN THE ARTICLE,” Duffy Rice says. (h/t to Tara Ariano for that one.)
Still others, like Elena Avanzas (above) suggest that the popularity of true crime is somehow to blame for Gruen’s predicament, implicating Serial (and, presumably, its first-season exoneration battle) in the case.
Is it that simple? Is Gruen’s situation the other side of the at-home detective, the distaff version of the Michelle McNamara mythos? How much of Gruen’s behavior can be chalked up to the true-crime phenomenon? And, to Rice Duffy’s point, what’s the responsibility of a crime/memoir piece like “How Sara Gruen Lost Her Life” to get nuts-and-boltsy with the actual details of the case — is it enough to spin a good yarn, or do we need process explication, as well?
I'm sorry, I'm all for self-reflection but "the legacy of Serial" seems to be the kind of reach that you.'d pull a muscle trying. There is no indication that Gruen was even writing about the case, for a start, or had true crime ambitions.
I do not think you can blame serial or TC for this situation. It sounds, based on the article, more like a personal choice with some questionable decision making.
As an aside, is anyone else disappointed by the subsequent Serial seasons? They felt incomplete to me .
If Gruen weren’t so desperately ill, going the Serial route would probably be a decent way out of this mess. I know her TV show ideas didn’t work out, because it was probably the wrong medium and the wrong angle. But a Sarah Koenig type is probably what’s needed here—i.e., someone more objective than the article author.
". . . .force us to consider the impact of true crime," says Elena Avanzas in the quoted Tweet, and to be honest, that actually pisses me off in this situation. I don't think true crime has anything to do with Sara Gruen's story. It's not even as if she got interested in Murdoch's story as a true crime piece, and fell down the rabbit hole--she only got involved after he wrote to her directly and *then* she looked into his case.
Like I said yesterday, I think this is a story about Sara Gruen's mental health struggles more than anything. Sure, Murdoch is a real guy with a real case, and Sara Gruen tried to help him. But so much else of what is mentioned in the article, "and then the Aryan Brotherhood got involved!", "and then she was being followed!", "and THEN her phone was bugged and she had to run for her life!!!", is presented with little or no evidence and thus sounds mostly like the imaginings of a paranoid mind to me. (I am a skeptical asshole, so I'm prepared to eat these words if proven wrong.) This is why I wish a more impartial author had written the article, and not a friend of Gruen's.
I'm late for this topic. But. I really think this is less a story about a woman trying to run a crusade for justice and more a story about a woman who had failing health problems that were ignored because it had to be the stress she as under.
Stress most likely added to the problem, along with not wanting to spend money on things. But, it's really concerning to me that she had an episode where she had amnesia and then it took three more years of suffering for there to be an idea of a diagnosis.
This, to me, isn't a story about a woman losing her life (Also, I hate that headline. She's not dead, she's disabled.) fighting for a man in jail. It's a woman who fought for a justice while her health failed and the health system failed her.
I'm sorry, I'm all for self-reflection but "the legacy of Serial" seems to be the kind of reach that you.'d pull a muscle trying. There is no indication that Gruen was even writing about the case, for a start, or had true crime ambitions.
I do not think you can blame serial or TC for this situation. It sounds, based on the article, more like a personal choice with some questionable decision making.
As an aside, is anyone else disappointed by the subsequent Serial seasons? They felt incomplete to me .
If Gruen weren’t so desperately ill, going the Serial route would probably be a decent way out of this mess. I know her TV show ideas didn’t work out, because it was probably the wrong medium and the wrong angle. But a Sarah Koenig type is probably what’s needed here—i.e., someone more objective than the article author.
". . . .force us to consider the impact of true crime," says Elena Avanzas in the quoted Tweet, and to be honest, that actually pisses me off in this situation. I don't think true crime has anything to do with Sara Gruen's story. It's not even as if she got interested in Murdoch's story as a true crime piece, and fell down the rabbit hole--she only got involved after he wrote to her directly and *then* she looked into his case.
Like I said yesterday, I think this is a story about Sara Gruen's mental health struggles more than anything. Sure, Murdoch is a real guy with a real case, and Sara Gruen tried to help him. But so much else of what is mentioned in the article, "and then the Aryan Brotherhood got involved!", "and then she was being followed!", "and THEN her phone was bugged and she had to run for her life!!!", is presented with little or no evidence and thus sounds mostly like the imaginings of a paranoid mind to me. (I am a skeptical asshole, so I'm prepared to eat these words if proven wrong.) This is why I wish a more impartial author had written the article, and not a friend of Gruen's.
I find it fascinating that this also ran on The Marshall Project.... seems a bit different from their usual bat.
I'm late for this topic. But. I really think this is less a story about a woman trying to run a crusade for justice and more a story about a woman who had failing health problems that were ignored because it had to be the stress she as under.
Stress most likely added to the problem, along with not wanting to spend money on things. But, it's really concerning to me that she had an episode where she had amnesia and then it took three more years of suffering for there to be an idea of a diagnosis.
This, to me, isn't a story about a woman losing her life (Also, I hate that headline. She's not dead, she's disabled.) fighting for a man in jail. It's a woman who fought for a justice while her health failed and the health system failed her.