In the Waning Light

by Loreth Anne White

what we remember depends upon what we believe—the human mind is not an objective recorder of information

readers of true crime expected to see justice prevail. That was the appeal of the genre. It made people feel a little more in control of a world where bad things happened to good people. They gravitated to the genre because it gave them real-life heroes—cops, prosecutors, judges who helped bring closure to victims. Who righted the natural order of things. It showed there was recourse. It restored faith.

You have not put it behind you. This is not about your work. It’s about your problem with intimacy, with letting people in. You want connection, yet you push people away. You push me away.”

But her so-called self-indulgence, her cutting everyone out of her life, had been an act of survival, not the act of a victim. It took courage. Not cowardice.

When you relinquished life, you relinquished your own story, the ability to tell it, shape it the way you wanted the world to see it.

“Are you ever afraid?” asked another club member. “That one of those bad guys will come after you when he gets out?” “I suppose that concern always lurks in the mind of a true crime writer, but as my mentor Day Rigby always says, the question is not whether you are in danger, it’s whether you choose to worry about it. It’s like swimming in the sea where there are sharks. You know they’re there, but your choice is whether you allow your fear of them to stop you from ever going in. Sure, you take precautions, and you don’t swim when there’s a sighting, but you also don’t let it stop you from reaching your goal, or the shore on the other side.”

did need to come back and rewrite the past within new context. Not only did it reveal the truth of what happened to Sherry, it showed me who I was, who I always had been, at the core. How, for all these years, I’ve been trying to run from my true self, mold myself into a woman I thought I should be, that you wanted me to be, but always, underneath, lay this struggle to reconcile those disparate halves. And this is who I am.”