Join us for an evening with Rachel Monroe, who will be reading from her true crime nonfiction book, Savage Appetites. This event will be free and open to the public.
In Savage Appetites, Rachel Monroe interrogates the appeal of true crime through four narratives of fixation. In the 1940s, a frustrated heiress began creating dollhouse crime scenes depicting murders, suicides, and accidental deaths. In the aftermath of the Manson Family murders, a young woman moved into Sharon Tate’s guesthouse and, over the next two decades, entwined herself with the Tate family. In the mid-nineties, a landscape architect in Brooklyn fell in love with a convicted murderer, the supposed ringleader of the West Memphis Three, through an intense series of letters. After they married, she devoted her life to getting him freed from death row. And in 2015, a teenager deeply involved in the online fandom for the Columbine killers planned a mass shooting of her own. Savage Appetites is a scrupulous exploration of empathy, justice, and the persistent appeal of violence.
Rachel Monroe is a freelance writer and volunteer firefighter living in Marfa, Texas. She was a 2016 finalist for a Livingston Award for Young Journalists and was named one of the “queens of nonfiction,” along with Susan Orlean, Rebecca Solnit, and Joan Didion, by New York Magazine in 2016. Her essay about murder fandom and adolescence, “Outside the Manson Pinkberry,” originally published in The Believer, is anthologized in The Best American Travel Writing 2018. She is a contributing writer at The Atlantic and regularly writes for the New Yorker, The New York Times Magazine, Esquire, New York Magazine, Texas Monthly, The Guardian, and others.