(Gentle content warning here for sexual assault mentions. No descriptions.)
Because I must always begin these missives with a self-indulgent anecdote, here is the abridged version of a long story. A while ago now—like, almost 20 years—I had a friend. We met at work, eventually moved into a rented house together with a bunch of mutuals, got close over time because we liked the same garbage music and used to go to shows together. He was a little older and had more formal education and I remember mostly wanting to be liked by him, because being liked was the single motivating force in my life before I started therapy.
Life happened, as it does: we all left the rental house and went separate ways but stayed in touch. After I was married and bumming around my hometown waiting for Alan to get back from deployment, the friend and I started hanging out a lot. Like, a lot a lot. Started throwing the term Best Friends around.
During that deployment year, Best Friend dated or tried to date a girlfriend of mine from high school. It flamed out pretty fast, after an incident while they were camping together at the beach about which I never learned any actual details, with him claiming that she’d done something awful to him and me accepting his version as The Facts.
They stopped speaking. And without me ever officially declaring it—like a person with a spine might have done—I took his side. He convinced me that she was crazy and he was a misunderstood sentimentalist to whom nobody would give a fucking break. I believed him. He was my Best Friend.
We each moved to the west coast, to different cities. He visited all the time, crashed on our couch. Sometimes, he’d bring other friends from his circle, old friends from college. We’d hang around at bars and, I can’t believe I’m about to admit this, Best Friend would make jokes about finding girls in his grad school classes he liked, tracking down their addresses, and going to their homes, just “to see.” We’d all laugh and laugh, call him a stalker, and never stop to acknowledge the underlying anxiety that perhaps this behavior leaned way too hard over the line into actual, you know, fucking stalking. When he would joke about doing murder suicides when he got dumped? We all laughed! Hah hah! This is all jokes! We’re in our early 20s and we don’t know shit! How funny what a pathetic loser he is! Good stuff!
And anyway, how can a dude with a Girl Best Friend be a creep? We used to live together, surely I would know if something was off!
There was a girlfriend, once. Later. Toward the end. I liked her as soon as I met her. The two of them visited constantly, sleeping on an air mattress in my living room, cuddling with my dog when I woke up in the morning. Eventually, they broke up and I began to quietly dread visits from him, because things had been so much nicer with her around.
Alas, he kept visiting.
Then, one night ten years into this Best Friendship, we closed down a bar, as we’d done dozens of times. It was a piece of shit bar, the kind where you drink Pliny and there are fifty-year-old caricatures stapled to the ceilings and the bathroom doors are saloon-style and the juke box is punk rock or GFY. A Dive’s Dive, my favorite in my neighborhood. Something felt off—he was jittery, all over the place. I attributed it to his recent breakup, or maybe that he’d just gotten into town that day. While walking back to my apartment sometime after 2AM, he pushed me up against a wall and, to spare you the details, let’s say: he got handsy. Begged me to fuck him, despite my husband (with whom he was also friends!) sleeping blissfully back at my apartment. Stuck his whole tongue into my mouth.
I sobered up very fast. I sidled out from his sweaty grasp, walked home, locked myself in the bedroom, and left it to Alan throw him out. I never saw him again. Incidentally, I also stopped going to that bar for a long time, and eventually it was bought by developers and turned into a soulless husk of its former self complete with a faux fireplace. Things are bad all over.
Was I shocked? Absolutely. Had there been signs everywhere? Oh, totally yes. But still, somehow, he’d had a lot of smart women convinced.
The first friend of mine that he fucked over, the high school friend? I never saw her again. I think about her all the time. She left our hometown for a career in warmer climes. I have thought endless times about reaching out, only to return to the conclusion that I would be doing it to assuage my own guilt, and that the last thing she needs is me dredging all that up again. I hope she’s happy and that he didn’t scar her too badly, and that if she thinks about me at all it’s with all the casual disdain I deserve for the way I abandoned her.
As for the second friend, the actual girlfriend? After the dust had settled and I’d stopped having panic attacks, I realized I really fucking missed her. So I decided I wasn’t going to let him steal another relationship from me.
I wrote her a note. Said I wanted to buy her a drink next time she was in town. I thought maybe she would say sure sure and then forget, or that maybe I’d have six months to figure out what I wanted to say. But she travels a lot for work, and she was going to be around the following weekend, which meant I had about three days to get it together. I was terrified. Terrified she would call me a liar or accuse me of having always had a thing for him or otherwise just wonder why on earth I felt like this was information she should have.
I met her at the newly-renovated bar, its ghosts having been evicted with the caricatures and the punk rock juke box, and I told her what happened. I told her he and I were no longer friends, and that really we didn’t need to talk anymore about it because I didn’t fucking care about him—what I really wanted was for her to know she was rad and that meeting her was the only good thing to come out of that stupid waste of a decade of my heart. She hugged me and we both cried and told stories and we’re still friends, and I’m so lucky to know such a gorgeous, funny, kind spot of light in this world.
She lives nearby and occasionally, before the world ended, we would get drinks and catch up.
Over here, now, in The Rest of My Life, I find him to be the least interesting part of this whole mess. He was a piece of shit who manipulated women into thinking he was a tortured soul and then gutted them when they got too close—every woman knows one of these. He was one guy who sucked but behind him is a rippling wake made up of women he hurt who know each other or used to know each other who all have stories that intersect and diverge and combine. There are so many others in this wake that it could be its own newsletter series.
Toxic men don’t exist in a vacuum. After all, toxicity is relational.
Notes on an Execution is a book about a man at the center of a web like this. Ansel on death row, sentenced to die in 12 days. We start there, with him and his crimes—but the book isn’t about him. It’s about the wake, it’s about the web, the circle of women radiating from him, the ways he has moved through their lives and the damage he has done there. The teenaged mother who loved him but had to leave. The orphanage, where he frightens a young girl who never forgets him. His ex-wife’s twin, reeling from the loss of her sister. The detective who is certain there is more to him than she can figure out. The corrections officer he is manipulating as part of a desperate Hail Mary escape attempt. We spend time with them, we get to know them, we see the shapes of the people they might have been if they had never crossed paths with Ansel.
Through them, we also get to see Ansel’s shape, the contours of who he is, juxtaposed against who he might have been, juxtaposed against who people think he is, and the Venn Diagram between them. An abandoned baby, a desperate boy, a cruel man. A person, under it all. We sit with him as the end comes, we listen to the screaming around him, we consider his darkness without having to stare directly into the sun of his crimes (the acts themselves happen off screen).
The narrative propulsion, though, doesn’t come from Ansel. It is driven by the web, by its intersections, by the women he hates. It’s driven by our obsession with true crime, the failings of our criminal justice system, the wrong-headed fascination we all have with Bad Men.
Instead of being A Serial Killer Book or a who-dun-it thriller or a nature vs. nurture polemic, Notes on an Execution is foremost a meditation on empathy. Here is what happened, and here are the people. Here is how they were changed, here is what they gave to him and what they withheld and why. Here are the ways that nobody ever truly gets Justice.
Or that maybe the best justice we ever get is to sit down over a beer and say, let’s not talk about him anymore. Let’s tell our own stories.
This is one of the best books I’ve ever read. I never thought a book about a death row inmate could make me feel so seen.
Notes on an Execution comes out on January 25. Pre-order a copy here or from your local indie.
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Llistening: Death Panel, and you should too if you feel like what’s missing from the COVID discourse is JUSTIFIED OUTRAGE. Here’s the essay that made me finally listen: Deaths Pulled from the Future
Cooking: I made this rye bread and I wanted to eat it every day for the rest of my life, it has pickle juice in it this is not a drill
Fairy Tale: This guy’s right eye smiles and his left eye cries and it’s because someone stole his magical grapevine that produces a barrel of wine every hour, please enjoy Ain’t No Way to Hide Your Cryin’ Eye
Reading: this bizarre saga of some Magnolia Home grifters that will send you down 80 rabbit holes
Appreciating: hard-hitting local journalism
Indulging: this guy was set up at my farmer’s market over the holidays selling these astonishingly beautiful cutting boards and i just want everyone to know that they are even prettier in real life, i’m gaga for them
This inspired me to check out 'Notes on an Execution,' which I devoured over the weekend. Excellent blogging, incredible book, thanks for your writing!