Answer: I grew up wanting to write fiction, but never writing – or planning to write -- about my father's death.  Finally, in my early twenties, I took baby steps towards writing about the murder in a fictionalized form and even thought I would write about it as a novel.  But the story wouldn't work, because I would have had to change many of the circumstances of the murder to make the story believable, and I didn't want to change the facts because I was desperately trying to make sense out of them.  In Lucy Grealy's memoir "Autobiography of a Face," she writes of story as transforming fragmented experience into something whole, a shiny gold ring.  When I started the memoir I wasn't quite sure what I was searching for.  I would like to know who killed my father, but while I was writing the book I learned that I was doing something else than looking for the murderer.  I was trying to create that shiny gold ring, that story of what had happened to my dad, and to me, that felt whole and made sense.  After the book was finished I realized another reason why I hadn't been able to write it as fiction.  I was trying to write the story of how someone moves on from the grief and stigma of a murder, and I hadn't done that yet.  I had to write the book in order to make myself live out the rest of the story.  The living and the writing went hand in hand.

Q: You were present in the house the night your father was killed, and that scene opens the memoir.  Was that the most difficult scene to write?

A: I was so skittish at first, trying to write this book.  I didn't trust myself to handle whatever I might remember; I thought if the memories were too painful, my mind might snap.  For months I wrote circles around the real story, obsessing over surface details like the toys I had played with as a child, writing scenes with little emotion.  Finally I realized that to break through I would have to go to the heart of the book, the material that most frightened me.  I would have to write the night of the murder, everything I could remember of it.

I came home to my tiny studio apartment that night and dead-bolted the door and sat down in front of the computer and started with my stepbrother Bobby at my bedroom door the night Dad was stabbed.  And as I wrote the rest of the scene I was physically terrified.  I kept looking over my shoulder and feeling like someone would sneak up behind me and hurt me.  I had never processed those memories, never talked to anyone about them, never written them.  In my mind they were still raw, and I was still feeling them exactly as I had 15 years before.

I wrote that whole chapter in one evening.  And after I had written it and the fear had eased, I knew I could write anything I needed to for this book, that no matter what memories came up, I could handle them.

Q: The memoir contains vivid scenes from your childhood.  Yet early on in the book, you acknowledge that different members of your family have conflicting memories of the same events: For instance, you remembered your stepmother Sherrie as remaining tear-free the day of your father's funeral, while your relatives remember her crying.  Why was it important to you to acknowledge the fallibility of your memories?

A: It was so important to me to reveal all the gaps in memory, the way our memories are shaded by what we want and need to believe and by our biases.  First of all, ethically, because this is such charged material.  My family had for so long murmured that my father's final wife Sherrie had something to do with his murder.  Blaming her is a big part of how my father's parents and siblings, and even how I, coped.  Living with her as a child I had distrusted her deeply and found her terrifying.  I wanted to be absolutely honest about how I had felt toward her.  But I also wanted to make clear that my memories did not tell a full or unbiased story of who she is.

Later in the memoir this acknowledgement of memory took on a "Roshomon" effect.  Toward the end of the book, when I see Sherrie again after having no contact since my dad's funeral, she gives me an impromptu recounting of the murder night in fascinating detail.  And a little later I see Sherrie's son, my former stepbrother Bobby, and he gives me his own account, and the way these memories do and don't line up with my own are so telling, and so mysterious.  I think that when I started this book, I believed there was a truth about my father's murder that was all packaged up and waiting for me, if only I had the guts to look at it.  I thought maybe that truth lay in the case file, or that the detectives had it under lock and key.  And slowly I realized that the truth about my dad's death was in the overlay between all these different accounts, and some important truths about it were in the cracks between these accounts, too.

Q: It's not giving anything away to reveal that you never learned who killed your father.  And yet there is a deep sense of resolution at the end of the book.   Why do you think that is?

A: I hear from readers all the time—men especially—who say they thought they would be frustrated if they didn't learn who killed my father, but were surprised to find themselves completely satisfied with the ending.  And I think the reason the ending works is because it's utterly honest.  I reached a point where I wanted to move on from this murder, and ultimately I was candid about that.  Of course I would still like to know who killed my father.  But I feel that if I live the rest of my life not knowing, that would be just fine.

That's not a message we hear often in the media.  We hear far more often from family members who won't rest until their loved one's murder is solved.  We see movies and TV shows in which obsessive crusading leads to justice.  But justice isn't always available to murder survivors.  Nearly forty percent of murders will never see someone arrested or convicted.  A case that isn't solved within six months has such low chances of ever being solved.  There's so much more to recovering from a murder than justice.  I deeply respect those who keep pursuing a case until it's closed.  But that wasn't my route towards resolution – and I wanted to be completely forthright about my own feelings.

Q: Have most of the members of your family read the book?  What have their reactions been?

A: Most of my family has read the book, and several of my relatives have even selected it for their book clubs.  My mother had an interesting reaction to a late draft: She said that I was trying to make excuses for the fact that she stayed married to my abusive stepfather, and that I should go back and take all that excuse-making out.  That was an incredibly loving and freeing response.  The book is so much better because of her support.

I don't know if my father's parents have read the book, though I suspect not.  When "The Lost Night" was first published, I gave a reading in Merced, the small town where my father was killed and where most of his family still lives.  The reading was full to standing room.  Old friends of my dad brought their high school yearbooks and their memories of him to share with me.  Total strangers came to say that they remembered the murder and they were glad to see I was happy and well.  My mother came, and so did my father's second wife, Nanette.  My grandparents refused to come.  They still don't like to get emotional about the murder.  I wish they would have come, because I think it would have been healing for them.

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