The Quiet Tenant

by Clémence Michallon

I was born in the city that killed Kitty Genovese; some people heard her scream but were scared of speaking to the police, or they were confused, or they didn’t think calling would do any good. What Kitty Genovese taught me: when the world doesn’t look out for you, you can’t look out for others. I took my first steps in a park where, one morning in August of 1986, the body of an eighteen-year-old girl was found, hours after she’d left a bar with a boy she knew. Across the street from the same park was where the singer was gunned down in 1980, by a man who had in his pocket a paperback of my favorite novel when I was a teen.

These two paragraphs contain references to three real-life cases: the killing of Kitty Genovese, the killing of Jennifer Levin, and the killing of John Lennon (by Mark David Chapman, who was carrying a copy of JD Salinger's The Catcher in the Rye). When working on the first draft of The Quiet Tenant, I had just discovered the fantastic podcast You're Wrong About, which covered the first two of the three cases mentioned above. The show taught me so much. It, of course, brought me a ton of knowledge about specific parts of our modern history. It also prompted me to reflect on how the stories we tell ourselves about ourselves interact with the stories we tell ourselves about the world. This is reflected here in our protagonist's way of depicting her life story against the backdrop of the news events she remembers reading about. Do we have any You're Wrong About fans in the room?