I'll Be Gone in the Dark: One Woman's Obsessive Search for the Golden State Killer

by Michelle McNamara

I love reading true crime, but I’ve always been aware of the fact that, as a reader, I am actively choosing to be a consumer of someone else’s tragedy.

the least appreciated aspect of a great true-crime writer is humanity.

We swim or sink against our deficits in life, and she made it a point to encourage me in ways that she had not been.

Holding my newborn daughter, I got it. I got the love that guts you, the sense of responsibility that narrows the world to a pair of needy eyes. At thirty-nine, I understood my mother’s love for me for the first time.

My mother was, and will always be, the most complicated relationship of my life. Writing this now, I’m struck by two incompatible truths that pain me. No one would have taken more joy from this book than my mother. And I probably wouldn’t have felt the freedom to write it until she was gone.

This is true for most serial killers too, I think. . .

I need to see his face. He loses his power when we know his face.

EAR was brazen enough to attend events dedicated to his own capture, that he blended in, observed, remembered, and excelled at a certain kind of malevolent patience.

The likelihood of any two individuals (except identical twins) having the same human bar code is roughly one in a billion.