While They Slept By Kathryn Harrison, Random House, 304 pp., $25
Early one morning in 1984, 18-year-old Billy Gilley picked up a baseball bat and proceeded to beat to death his father, mother, and kid sister Becky. He then drove his surviving sister, 16-year-old Jody, to a friend's house, as a prelude to what he termed their "escape" from an abusive family. How Jody survived and managed to make a life for herself could have been a fascinating book. Unfortunately, "While They Slept" isn't it.
Author Kathryn Harrison, a self-described true crime addict, had a good hook for this book, ostensibly the story of the Gilley tragedy. In the first pages, she describes her fascination with Jody as someone who has a ruptured life, "a life divided into before and after." She can relate to such a life, she explains for anyone unfamiliar with her previous work, because she, too, suffered such a split. As her 1997 memoir "The Kiss" recalled, Harrison, in her 20s, had an incestuous affair with the father who had been absent most of her childhood. "If I have an endless appetite for . . . seeing how yet another young woman's life is ended, I also need to hear - perhaps I need to tell - the other story, the one about the girl that gets away," she writes. The problem with this association is twofold. First, and most obvious, an adult's conscious act, no matter how influenced by darkest childhood secrets, is not comparable in complicity or severity to a teen's surviving the brutal murder of her family by her brother. Second, Harrison does not know when to stop.
After the explanatory opening, "While They Slept" starts out with promise, re-creating the day before the murders. It's a typical day for the Gilleys: Jody flees early on to her friend Kathy's house. The two then cut school, and, when Jody's mother finds out, Jody knows she'll face one of the ridiculously severe punishments that her sadistic parents so enjoy. Harrison details these punishments, and also touches on the possibility of sexual abuse by both Jody's father and her brother. Using her extensive research, she then takes the story back further, tracing the familial problems through generations.
Harrison had access to many voices, from trial documents to in-person prison visits with Billy. She also enlisted the full participation of Jody, who not only managed to survive the slaughter but also the family's cycle of poverty and alcoholism. A graduate of Georgetown University, Jody is described as a "communications strategist," a member of "the power elite."