What She Left Uncrossed

I saw a book review on Instagram and came back with a new bibliography for a woman who doesn’t exist.

The thriller being reviewed wasn’t my story. I’d never heard of it. But it came close enough to one idea in Lore Lassen’s unfinished manuscript that I sat there thinking, Well, shit.

The rabbit holes are staying. I just needed a different book at the center of them.

Then I remembered I’d already written its back cover.

A Woman of Some Renown was supposed to be Lore’s debut. I’d given it a cover, a place on her website, and a blurb about a woman nobody knew until she died. The trouble was that I kept looking at this fictional book by my fictional author and wanting to read the rest of it.

So I moved it. Monster Revision is Lore’s debut now. A Woman of Some Renown is the manuscript she leaves behind when she disappears. I get to write the book as Lore. Lore gets to write it as Evelyn McHale.

I am sure you are thinking, “Who is Evelyn McHale?”

Evelyn was twenty-three when she died after jumping from the Empire State Building in 1947. A photography student took a picture of her body on the crushed roof of a limousine. Life published it as the Picture of the Week, and the photograph traveled much farther than her name did. People came to call it “the most beautiful suicide.” Her death made her famous. Her life largely disappeared behind the image.

I have... opinions. So, in Lore’s book, Evelyn gets opinions, too.

I’ve been reading about Evelyn, and I keep returning to her suicide note.

She revised it. Edited it.

She wrote about marrying in June, then crossed out the lines about being a bad wife. She wrote about her mother. She asked that no one see her body.

People have been looking at it ever since.

She took the time to write down her final wishes. The world made her corpse famous anyway. They turned it into art that spans the globe from Andy Warhol to Taylor Swift.

I’d already planned for Evelyn to haunt Lore for writing about her. The more I read, the less that felt like a supernatural plot device. Lore is fascinated by Evelyn. So am I. We’re both making pages out of a woman who asked to be left alone.

Maybe that’s why Lore leaves the manuscript unfinished. Maybe it’s the only way she can give Evelyn the last word.

Which is inconvenient, because I really want to write the book. I am also infuriated that a woman's wishes are ignored and all of her rights stripped by her death.

I wrote this poem in Lore’s voice to go in her manuscript that fills the pages of my book Vorlass.

She doesn’t come out of it innocent. Neither do I.

Still Life