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Table of Contents
About the Authors
Copyright Page
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KAREN
For Norah Grace
GEORGIA
In memory of Kim Murphy Friedman, who therapized me through the writing of this book.
This book is dedicated to all the Murderinos out there. We wouldn’t be here if it weren’t for you. Thank you.
The names of some persons described in this book have been changed.
art by Megan Lara
LET’S SIT CROOKED & TALK STRAIGHT: KAREN’S INTRODUCTION
Oh, hiiiiieee!
Welcome to our first-ever book! We’re so glad you could join us. Isn’t it weird? We know! It is for us, too. We’ve never written a book before. We don’t know where to put our hands!
Let us begin by saying thank you so much from the bottom of our hearts for buying this book. Your support truly means the world to us. We know some of you are young and hungry, living off of your wits and whatever spare change you can find in an old coat pocket. So this purchase was a true sacrifice. God bless you, child. The kingdom of heaven shall be yours. On the other hand, maybe you didn’t buy it. Maybe you checked it out of the library and the only sacrifice you made was hauling your ass to the building. Still, we like your style. And we love libraries. Never change. There’s also a chance you stole this book off your sister’s nightstand while she was in the shower and then later, when she asked you if you’d seen it anywhere, immediately started a fight to throw her off your scent. Hell yeah. We support you in any way you want to support us. Bless us all, but mostly the people who actually spent money.
Wait, hold on. Maybe you’re just standing in the bookstore right now skimming this introduction to assess whether or not you’ll like the rest of the book. What’s up, judgy? Are you pleased? Are you ever? You know what, how about you quit getting your finger grease all over our beautiful, pristine publication and just buy it. In fact, buy three. That’s right. You do what we say now. Look how the tables have turned. Also, thank you! We love the push-pull of your withholding personality. It’s not tiresome at all. Our overall point here is, no matter what you did to get this thing into your dirty little mitts, we appreciate your efforts.
Normally, we’d be talking to you through our podcast, where it’s all microphones and couches and air. But now we’ve gotten paper and ink involved and things have become rather highbrow. That’s right, this scrappy little true crime–comedy podcast that you’ve been sneak-listening to at your temp job has somehow figured out a way to transition itself into the world of … (SPINNING IN A CIRCLE AS ORCHESTRAL MUSIC SWELLS) … literature. We have gone from living inside your headphones to pouring ourselves out onto the page like a couple of Edna St. Vincent Millays. We invite you to drink deeply of us. We’ll get you good and fucked up.
Oh, you’ve never heard of us before? Sure, we understand. Podcasting is a relatively new thing. Let us introduce ourselves. We are the hosts of My—what’s that, you say? You’ve never listened to a podcast before and you’re not sure how they work and you don’t feel like getting involved? Gotcha. You’re not alone. But before you run off and buy some other book with “sexy” in the title, let us tell you a little story. It’s about two gals who were living passably fine lives in Los Angeles in the late 2010s. One was named Georgia, and she—to oversimplify both of their incredibly complex and varied careers—was a Cooking Channel host, and Karen, the other one, was a sitcom writer. So, one Halloween, they’re at a party together and they start chatting about a then new HBO series called The Staircase, which tells the story of a man going to trial for the murder of his wife. They realize they’re both obsessed and are thrilled to have found someone else to talk to about it. So they do. They talk and talk. Some people join in, some dip back out, and soon the kitchen’s clear of everyone except the two women. So they decide to meet for lunch. And they talk even more. Hours and hours of coffee and talking. The next time they see each other, Georgia suggests they start a true-crime podcast. Why not? They both already had podcasts of their own. They knew what it would entail. So they agreed to give it a try. CUT TO: hundreds of episodes, millions of listeners, sold-out international tour dates, and a book deal. It’s kind of a feel-good story. It feels really good to us, anyway.
OK, now that we’ve caught everyone up, let’s get back to the part about the book. We put a lot of effort into its creation, and for it, we have suffered mightily. For the past year and a half, we have been travelers set adrift on foreign seas aboard the HMS Write-a-Book. We set out impetuously, blindly, unfamiliar with the charted course, unsure what the food at the buffet would be like, afraid the other passengers wouldn’t be nice to us. We were anxious. We were seasick. We told ourselves, “Let’s just try to get through this metaphorical book boat journey in one piece. Be cool. Act natural. No, don’t whistle, stupid! That’s the opposite of natural. Why does everyone think whistling indicates relaxation? It’s literally one of the weirdest things you can do in public without breaking the law. Blowing spurts of air out of your pursed lips to produce a raspy little song like some sad bird impersonator. No discernable tune, no clear plan. Just kind of a long, vocalized exhale through big kissy lips. What better way to let the world know you’re at ease.” Whoops, sorry. We got carried away there. BECAUSE THAT, DEAR FRIENDS, IS THE POWER OF LITERATURE.
Here’s the bottom line—and not a lot of authors will be brave enough to speak their truth this way, but we’re just gonna say it: writing a book is a tiny bit terrifying. It threatens to expose you as the fraud that you are, but instead of running and hiding from the shame of it, you just have to keep staring into the mirror. It’s incredibly unnatural. You start out with an idea you like. You write that idea down. You let it sit for five days, and when you come back to it, the words have rearranged themselves on the page. Now it’s shape-shifted into the dumbest idea you’ve ever seen. So you try to fix it. And you just keep fixing it until you go computer-blind, all the joy is drained from your soul, and you no longer know what words mean. Then it’s on to chapter 2!
But look and listen: we did it! We actually finished a book. We must’ve, right? You’re holding it with your greasy fingers right now. And we’re all the better for it. Plus, now we’ll finally be in the Library of Congress! That’s been on our bucket list since, like, day one.
When we first agreed to write this book, we had a lot of different ideas about the kind of book we wanted it to be, but they all boiled down to the same general concept: big glossy pages with pretty pictures and a meaningful sentence or two here and there about unity or, like, the soul. A sort of printed-up Instagram or, like, a cookbook w
ithout all those cumbersome recipes. Short and sweet; the length and depth of a picture book made for a gifted toddler. And then, at the very end, maybe we’d have some kind of pull-out calendar featuring all of your favorite true-crime authors with their shirts off. But tasteful. Basically, we were imagining the kind of book you find in the sale bin at Urban Outfitters a week after Christmas. In hindsight, we can admit that we were aiming low.
But it turned out that the powers that be were expecting us to dig much deeper than that. They wanted us to give of ourselves fully. And not to use so many pictures. It was truly horrifying news.
“Just write about all the things you talk about on your show,” they said. “Write what you know.”
And this was the problem. You see, if there’s anything we’ve learned in our three years of doing this podcast, it’s that we don’t know anything. At all. We don’t know about geography or pronunciations or Roman numerals or percentages or the Cherry Hill Mall in New Jersey or dates or names or the law or really anything at all. It’s been a very humbling experience. And also a hilarious one. Being so consistently wrong made us very self-conscious about our lack of education and our habits of assumption and unabashedly filling in blanks. Every time we record, we know there’s a trapdoor of ignorance waiting beneath our feet. It’s made us a little skittish and untrusting of the floor. And in the beginning, it made us feel like we were doing it wrong.
But here’s the irony (a literary term): people still listened. Some even loved it. Our mistakes opened up the conversation we’d been having with each other and gave other people a chance to participate. That’s the thing with any kind of hobby like this—there’s always someone on the internet who loves it a little more than you do. They’re a little more obsessed, they’re a little better with memorization, and they’re super fired up.
At first that realization was intimidating. We’d get emails saying we said the wrong date or left out part of the story or pronounced a city name incorrectly. It felt bad, like we weren’t doing our homework correctly. But the messages were always complimentary and fun. That’s when we realized that the people communicating with us were excited to be filling us in. Because that’s the best part of being into true crime. There’s nothing more engaging than talking to someone about a case and finding out they don’t know a certain aspect of it. Now you’re the expert! You get to play newscaster and pass on the crucial information like it was passed on to you. It’s thrilling and bonding and a great way to pass the time, say, at a Halloween party, for example.
As this podcast grew, we found that not only could we show up as our deeply imperfect selves but that the people who were listening seemed to actually prefer it. The people who were into it wanted our full, sometimes insipid, and sometimes genius conversation, not just the listed facts of terrible crimes. It was a hang. And like any good hang, we felt comfortable confiding in you about all the awful mistakes we’d made in our teens and twenties (and thirties) so you could laugh and say, “I did that!” or wince and say, “I’ll never do that!” But we didn’t know how huge of a hang it was becoming until we did our first live theater show in Chicago.
We’d been booked at the Athenaeum Theatre for the Chicago Podcast Festival. We either didn’t ask how many people it held or we just weren’t paying attention, but when our theme song started and we walked out onstage, the ovation was overwhelming. Suddenly, a bunch of people who’d been silently hanging out with us all that time got to let us know that they were there. It was REAL loud. And it was totally thrilling.
We had no idea what we were doing, and it didn’t matter. That audience was there for the hang, and they let us know how happy it made them. It was such a moving experience that at the end of that show, to express our gratitude, we invited everyone to meet us in the lobby and say hi after. And they did. We ended up meeting around six hundred people that night. The staff was probably not thrilled with that bit of improvisation, but they accommodated us all beautifully and worked overtime to make it happen. And that was the first night that we got to meet a faction of the Murderino community. And they told us they loved us and that we were doing it right. You can imagine our surprise.
So now we’ve written this book about some of the themes we come back to again and again on the show and what it all means to both of us. It’s kinda personal and it’s kinda messy. Let us know if we get anything wrong.
Athenaeum Theatre, Chicago, November 2016
art by Danyell Adams
1
FUCK POLITENESS
GEORGIA: It’s all about avoiding the Feeling. You’re familiar with the Feeling. It’s the regretful, upset, disappointed feeling you get after someone says or does something particularly shitty and you’re so taken off guard that your politeness instincts take over so you just ignore it or go with it or kind of shut down. And then later you imagine all the awesome things you could have said or done—all the perfect angles1 that you could have kicked that person in the shin—and then you’re awake at 3:00 A.M. totally mad at yourself for not having said/done/kicked them. The epitome of fucking politeness is learning how to act in the moment, instead of wishing you had later.
But for women, it’s so much more than that. The politeness that we’re raised to prioritize, first and foremost, against our better judgment and whether we feel like being polite or not, is the perfect systematically ingrained personality trait for manipulative, controlling people to exploit. We ignore a catcall and seethe inside instead of telling the guy to fuck right off. We don’t blow off the dude at the bar who’s aggressively hitting on us. And we find ourselves in uncomfortable or straight-up dangerous situations that we absolutely do not want to be in and sometimes don’t even know how we got into them. All because being rude is so much harder and scarier than being staunch.
Georgia’s Take on Red Flags and Riot Grrrl Courage
Little girls are taught to be polite, to smile pretty and sit up straight, to be nice and accommodating. And then those little girls turn into grown-ass women who’ve spent years being polite to the detriment of their own wants, needs, and safety. Having been one of those little girls who was taught those rules myself, I’m fucking sick of it. So how’s about we kick things off with some thoughts on one of our favorite Murderino battle cries: “Fuck politeness.” Fuck the way we were socialized. Fuck the expectation that we always put other people’s needs first. And while we’re at it, fuck the patriarchy! Yeah, I said it.
But fucking politeness is so much easier said than done, and it’s taken me years of practice to even start getting the hang of it after a lifetime of being nice.
In July 1998, about a month after my high school graduation, I escaped the confines of my cloyingly suburban hometown in Orange County, California. I graduated by the skin of my teeth. So much so that when the principal handed me my diploma onstage, he gave me a shit-eating grin and said, “Who’d have thunk it?” Through clenched teeth, I did what I was taught to do: I smiled politely as I accepted my hard-won diploma.
I’d been dreaming of being done with public education and escaping all its bullshit rules since I got detention for yawning too loud when I was in kindergarten, so the dream of college was one I was happy to have neither the academic nor the financial resources to obtain. Instead I moved forty-five minutes away to the sprawling, gritty, insane world that is Los Angeles.
LA had always felt like my real hometown. And not just because I was born there, but I have real roots there. When you live in a transient city like Los Angeles, you tend to meet a lot of people at comedy parties who moved here from wholesome Midwest towns to pursue improv classes, and they can’t even fathom that someone would not only be born in Los Angeles but actually raised there as well; you get asked where you’re from a lot. My answer is never simple, mostly because saying I grew up in Orange County feels off, like the feeling of sitting in the back seat of your own car. My heart is from Los Angeles and I sprang from my mom’s womb in Los Angeles (ew), but I didn’t grow up here.
My great-grandparents had emigrated from Eastern Europe to the still-farmland-studded neighboring outskirts of Los Angeles called Boyle Heights, along with a ton of other Jewish immigrants in the 1920s. Later, my grandparents on both sides owned businesses in the equally Jewish-laden Fairfax district, a butcher shop and a barbershop, and my parents went to high school together at Fairfax High on Melrose Avenue. (My once favorite street for vintage shopping.) (More on that later.) But back to the summer of 1998 when I moved into my sweet grandma’s midcentury duplex in mid-city where my mother had grown up and I signed up for beauty school.
After eighteen years, I was finally free! I was a grown-up, goddamn it! And I was confident my chutzpah and tenacity would get me through anything. Eighteen-year-olds are stupid that way.
To pay for beauty school classes, I got a job waiting tables at a cute little breakfast spot in Santa Monica that specialized in various pancake situations. Being a waitress always felt like such an “adult” job, and I loved it immediately despite the country theme that made wearing overalls an employment requirement. Nobody looks good in overalls. Except maybe Chrissy Teigen, and even then she’d be like, “Fuck this shit.”
I worked the breakfast shift, which meant early morning beach weather, so warm, but overcast and cloudy. It gave the restaurant a cozy, homey vibe, until the marine layer burned off midafternoon and was replaced by that glorious Southern California sunshine that burns brightly despite the smog and exhaust that’re slowly killing us all, a fair trade-off for 360 days of sunshine.
I’d drink cup after cup of burned black coffee, and I became friendly with the cook who took pity on my overcaffeinated and underfed body so he’d always sneak me a huge blueberry waffle with a side of extra-crispy bacon to take home at the end of my shift.
Stay Sexy & Don't Get Murdered Page 1