My Life as a Killer

It was a dark and stormy night. OK, it wasn't … it was a sunny weekday afternoon about a million years ago and I was 48 hours into a bad breakup. You know, the kind that comes out of nowhere and makes you feel as if you've woken up in a parallel universe. Let's not get into too many details but suffice it to say, I was upset. It was your garden-variety heartbreak, really, but it was my reaction that's still interesting. I experienced a rage so complete, so all-consuming, that I'm about 97.8 percent sure that if the jerk had been standing there, I would have killed him. Unfortunately, I'm not kidding about that. I know that because since he wasn't there, I took my fury out on his stuff. I really went Fatal Attraction there for a while—I shredded his books, destroyed his clothes, and broke all his tchotchkes. But I am pleased to report that I'd never felt anything like that before or since. And for that I am eternally grateful. I tell you this not as a cry for help but to explain my allegiance to the true-crime and mystery-thriller genres.

I can honestly say that books like John Sandford's Prey series and Lawrence Block's Hit Man books prevented me from becoming a bitter old shadow of my former self. I used crime literature to soothe myself with the fact that thinking about committing homicide is lot different than actually murdering someone. I mean, my goodness, there are a lot of knuckleheads out there who really do believe that killing a person will solve something. Hey, I may have taken the rejection a little hard, but I didn't lose my mind. As for the mystery thrillers, I started reading them by the dozen and then I started writing one—not as a revenge fantasy, but as a means of imagining myself as stronger, happier, and much more in control of my emotions and circumstances. (OK, I'm lying a little bit—it was a teeny bit revenge fantasy.) I created a fictional version of myself as a tough guy in the model of Jason Bourne or Angelina Jolie in Wanted, and turned all my problems and anxieties into tropes straight out of pulp fiction—a hard-living gal with a secret finds solace in righting wrongs—something like The Big Sleep meets Bridget Jones's Diary. Here's a taste just to give you an idea of what I'm talking about:

No, no, no. No need to recommend a good psychiatrist or warn my husband. It's just a book—some symbolism and a lot of imagination. Murder ain't my thing. It's just that working on this book helped me. The writing is a safe place to work on my issues. As Jeremy Sherman, an evolutionary epistemologist (who knew there was such a thing?), wrote in Psychology Today: "We identify with everyone in our dreams and our fiction. We don't just identify with the good guys against the bad guys. We are the good and the bad guys both. We are the cops and we are the robbers. We are the cons, the conned and the detectives who sort them out." And it doesn't hurt that I am and will probably always be completely fascinated with good people gone bad. This type of literature allows you to study the unimaginable, to find an answer to "how on earth could somebody do something so awful to another human?" But really, to tell you the absolute truth, crime books help me come to terms with my own dark side, to understand that just because I wanted to commit a cardinal sin doesn't mean I'm a bad person. Right?