This Book Will Bury Me

Content Warning: This section of the guide includes discussion of death, child sexual abuse, racism, gender discrimination, and mental illness.

Jane is initially drawn to the world of true-crime sleuthing because of her grief. There are many mysteries surrounding her father’s death that she cannot solve, and she turns instead to cases that she can shed light on. Her investigatory work becomes an attempt to impose order on a messy world. By the end of the novel, however, she realizes that not all questions have answers and that she must get more comfortable with unsolvable mysteries.

Jane is overwhelmed by her father’s death in part because it was so sudden but also because it raises some difficult questions. She learns that he turned down a medication that might have saved his life and is mystified that “he hadn’t just taken the meds” (26). This action does not make sense to her within the context of who she knew her father to be, and it sends her reeling. When she sees television coverage of a nearby murder and realizes that she may be able to shed light on the crime, she finds an outlet for her frantic energy and the opportunity to answer tricky questions: She cannot find the answers that she is really looking for, but she can calm her unquiet mind by answering another set of questions.