59 pages • 1-hour read
This Book Will Bury Me
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Themes
The Human Desire for Answers and Explanations
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. Jane herself makes this observation, realizing, “Maybe I didn’t get involved because I was trying to be a hero. Maybe I wanted to know my own father, but couldn’t figure out how, and some part of me thought that if I helped decipher other people’s mysteries, I could learn for him” (31).
Jane thus throws herself into sleuthing because it allows her to impose order on a chaotic narrative. Even the process of investigation satisfies this need: She is soothed by a set of tasks with measurable goals and outcomes, so she enjoys combing through victims’ and suspects’ social-media pages because the work allows her to connect dots, learn more about key relationships, and use that information to further the group’s investigations. She appreciates being able to untangle complex threads, solving many tiny mysteries along the way to the larger mysteries at the heart of the case.
By the end of the novel, however, Jane realizes that some mysteries cannot be solved. She has learned that her father was a survivor of childhood sexual abuse but has not succeeded in finding out anything more about that trauma. She has also learned that her father was an accomplished fanfiction writer, but she hasn’t learned why he kept that part of his life from her. Most importantly, she is no closer to understanding what first plagued her: why he refused to take blood-pressure medication when he knew he was at risk. In light of this, Jane realizes that most people are not fully knowable and that some situations can never be explained: She must simply get more comfortable with not knowing.
The Ethics of True Crime
This Book Will Bury Me is a fictionalized account of a real-life case that became a nationwide media sensation, and the author uses the text to ask big-picture questions about the ethics of one of the United States’ most popular cultural products: true crime. The novel considers the genre (as well as the related phenomenon of amateur sleuthing) through a variety of lenses, highlighting the psychological, social, and practical reasons why true crime often veers into ethically questionable territory.
One potentially problematic phenomenon that the novel identifies early on is parasocial attachment, the feeling of “knowing” a media figure whom one has never actually met. Through the many hours she spends working on cases, Jane begins to feel as though she actually knew the victims. For someone with few actual friends, that faux connection is difficult to resist, as she observes,
I felt like I was getting to know him. It was strange, the intimacy created by searching through someone’s records and social profiles, trying to familiarize yourself with every detail about them. It was like that with Indira, too, this uncanny sense I knew her from poring through her life (62-63).
As the novel demonstrates, this kind of obsession can negatively impact the person experiencing it. Jane’s fixation erodes her health, distracts her from the realities of her own life, and adversely impacts her relationship with her mother. However, the emotional investment that Jane feels in victims also causes another problem: It makes her more willing to engage in unethical behavior in the pursuit of justice.
The novel emphasizes this point by establishing contrasts between the members of Jane’s group. Lightly and Mistress have a more traditional set of ethics surrounding their cases. Lightly is especially mindful of law-enforcement procedures and does not want to use any investigatory tactics that might get a case thrown out in court. Meanwhile, Mistress shares Jane’s sense of personal connection to the victims but retains a more professional distance from the case. By contrast, Jane, Goku, and Citizen all impersonate students to elicit more information about the victims. Jane is aware that her actions are not entirely defensible, but she is too fixated on the investigation to make better choices.
The novel also considers how bias shapes public opinion in high-profile true-crime cases, noting “Racism, classism, petty bias, they color how we treat the dead as much as how we treat the living” (100). This maxim holds true as the group begins to investigate the Delphine murders. Lightly is hyper-aware that attractive, female, white victims receive more media attention because the public tends to view their deaths as more tragic, and he is not the only member of the group to realize this: Mistress and Jane share his concerns. Nevertheless, they cannot help but get caught up in the media storm: They want to solve this case because it is high-profile, which means that they become part of the media machine that grants special status to white victims while largely ignoring the cases in which people of color died. In a similar vein, Jane calls out the sexism in media coverage of high-profile murders: The victims are dehumanized, treated like objects, and often sexualized. The moniker “Barbie Butcher” for the Delphine murderer exemplifies this: It overtly figures the murdered women as dolls, rendering them less human. Jane is especially troubled by TV host Nina Grace’s coverage, noting that she focuses on lurid details and objectifies the victims rather than treating them like human beings whose lives were tragically cut short.
This speaks to the novel’s final and broadest criticism of true crime: its tendency to erase the personhood of the people at its heart. While biases of various kinds contribute to this trend, the novel also connects it to the commercialization of tragedy, suggesting that ethics will be a secondary consideration as long as the pressure to create popular and lucrative content persists.
The Need for Friendship and Belonging
Jane and her group connect ostensibly through their shared interest in amateur sleuthing, but they are ultimately drawn to one another because each of them is looking for friendship and belonging. Jane, a socially anxious introvert who has recently lost her father, is most obviously in need of meaningful connection, and the group becomes her only experience of real friendship. However, her fellow group members also rely on one another more than on “real-life” friends, bonding over their shared experiences of loss and loneliness.
Jane introduces herself through the framework of grief and isolation. She is a self-avowed introvert who has always struggled to make friends. In college, she has only one friend. She craves connection, but she is also ill at ease among her peers and prefers to spend time alone. Her father’s death plunges her into both depression and further isolation: She stops attending class, moves home, and spends all her time by herself. When she meets the group, she finds not only companionship but also a balm for her insecurity as a cadre of experienced sleuths expresses admiration for her investigative abilities. The discovery that the other members have also experienced loss and that several of them share her discomfort with traditional social situations deepens the bond she feels: She has found not only a community based on common interests but also one that is accepting and like-minded. Jane increasingly comes to think of them as family, with Lightly and Mistress becoming parental figures for her.
Jane is not the only group member to crave human connection. Mistress and Lightly come to the group for similar reasons. Mistress is a widow whose grown children live far from her, and Lightly is recovering from a career that ended in tragic loss and allegations of racism in his department. Both Mistress and Lightly have struggled to cope with their respective losses, and each prefers to use their time and energy fighting crime rather than trying to make friends in the “real world.” In the group, they find acceptance, people who understand the way that grief impacts individuals, and a cluster of people who share the propensity for turning grief into action.
Goku and Citizen also desire to belong, but their arcs reveal the dark places to which that desire for belonging can lead. Goku has always struggled in social situations. He has high-level computer skills but, like Jane, never found himself with a real group of friends. His struggles ultimately led him to some problematic online spaces, forums in which conspiracy theories swirled and misogyny ran rampant. Although Goku was troubled by some of what he read from his online peers, he remained part of those groups because they were his first experience of social cohesion: “It wasn’t that I agreed with anything those guys were saying. I just liked having friends” (159). While Goku ultimately finds a healthier dynamic with the sleuthing group, Citizen does not. The murders that he commits to keep the group together are an extreme example of how desperation to fit in can lead to immoral behavior.
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