Murderer’s Mom — the pitch (in progress)

Grace asks: “I get more and more curious about your book. Do you have a blog entry somewhere back there that talks about what it’s about, what it’s called and all the rest of that? If not, do you feel like doing one just to fill me in?”

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.)