Here’s the elevator pitch (in progress).
I got the idea for this book when I read the transcript of a dispute between Jeffrey Dahmer’s parents over what to do with his brain. They seemed like normal people, each trying to do what’s best according to their own lights, and I wondered what it would be like to have a killer in the family.
The story is the emotional and spiritual journey of a middle-class mom, Claire Davidson, whose 22-year-old daughter murders 15 college students in a campus spree killing. In the aftermath, Claire faces the death-penalty trial of her daughter, the dissolution of her marriage, dangers to her children from their peers and their own attempts to deal with the atrocity. She goes on a journey of discovery through her daughter’s life, to find out what happened to the girl and how she herself had become a Murderer’s Mom.
(Pitch format from Michael Hauge’s Selling Your Story in 60 Seconds. He’ll be giving a workshop on story structure in the Portland area in July.)
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