INTERVIEW: Sarah Gerard (Carrie Carolyn Coco)
Carrie Carolyn Coco:
My Friend, Her Murder, and an Obsession with the Unthinkable
Sarah Gerard
Zando
Interview by Shirley Chan
On September 28, 2016, Carolyn Bush was stabbed to death by her roommate. This is the impetus for Carrie Carolyn Coco, which goes beyond typical true crime territory and tells the story of Carolyn’s life. The work is a eulogy that celebrates her as a poet, artist, and community organizer through the eyes of her friends and family. In doing so, the reader feels the weight of what was taken away.
Author Sarah Gerard combines interviews, research, and commentary into a rich narrative. Her approach was informed by her background as an award-winning writer, mixed media artist, and private investigator.
Sarah and I met to discuss the book, her writing process, and of course, Carolyn. Our conversation is edited for clarity and brevity. Quotes from Carrie, Carolyn, Coco are added for context.
Shirley Chan: Would it be ok to begin with an exercise? The book mentions “exaggerated and grotesque” language used to sensationalize the murder and depict Carolyn incorrectly. I wonder how it would feel to rewrite some of those headlines.
Sarah Gerard: Let’s try it.
Sarah scans files nested in folders, nested in more folders on her laptop. I see labeled collections of six years of research, organized by type. She opens a folder of pdf articles and scrolls.
SG: I’m looking for some of the more egregious ones.
Sarah opens several articles.
Sarah selects one.
SG: How do we do this?
SC: Why did you choose this? Tell me what feels wrong.
SG: Well, it reduces Carolyn to a “roommate”. And there’s an implication to calling him an “artist,” like stabbing someone is part of the creative process.
We nod and study the article.
SG: “Wasted.” Why is there already an excuse for him in the headline? It’s too light of a word, like this was something that happened at a frat party. And “during fatal attack” like he didn’t mean to, it just happened.
SC: Let’s talk about what you would want in a headline about Carolyn.
SG: More seriousness. Blunt honesty. To center Carolyn and her humanity.
We draft new options like Woman Going About Her Life is Killed by Her Roommate, Whom She Trusted, and Rising Star Artist in Prime of Life Murdered by Roommate, before choosing one.
SG: If this is the headline, then the article would have to be about her. Her potential, her ambitions. It might not even go into who he is. There were a few like that, about Carolyn.
Sarah selects another article.
SG: I want to rewrite this one. “Struggling” is an excuse. And it is factually incorrect. There was no argument.
SG: That’s right.
SC: So I wanted to do this exercise because it felt like what you did with the book. You write about Carolyn’s life through the eyes of her friends and family. To humanize her, not her murderer.
You achieve this by collaging the memories of different people together. How did your visual art practice inform your approach?
SG: I try with the collages to create a seamless effect in an image. I also wanted to create a seamless effect in rendering Carolyn on the page.
So what I had to do was take these interviews—all the email conversations and texts and recorded interviews. I tried to create Carolyn's life story in a timeline. I was taking bits of conversations that people were having about her and cutting and pasting them together. This is an oral history.
SC: How do you decide what's important to tell when reconstructing someone's whole life?
SG: Okay well, for instance here's a quote from her dad, this is a direct quote.
Sarah points at long interview notes.
This whole story ended up in the book, but I couldn't have directly quoted all of this. There were some things that I had to synthesize in my own words. I was forced to realize what was important. And it was good because I felt very precious about all of this material.
SC: Because it is all important.
SG: Yeah, all of it was important. It's interesting and it informs Carolyn's life, maybe in a very indirect way. In this kind of a book, the deciding factor was Carolyn. Is it important to her story?
SC: That makes sense. What would make for a seamless portrait of Carolyn.
So this is a way into my next question. The book is a seamless conversation between different people remembering events and Carolyn. I wonder if you felt the challenge of holding seeming opposites and how to bring them all together?
SG: I don't think it ever felt like a challenge. She was so many different things to different people. That's what makes her interesting. She was never going to be one thing in this book, or in life either.
“...he wished there could be a rebuttal to whatever I wrote, published simultaneously, to capture her complexity.”
SC: So talking about the contradictions and your deliberate choice of words like rebuttal and other courtroom language, I wondered if you were consciously taking the trial out of the courtroom into the world.
SG: I don't know that I was literally thinking of it as a trial as I was writing it, but I was assembling a case about how we should tell stories about Carolyn. And I challenged myself to make her interesting enough as a character to convince people that we should focus on Carolyn and focus on the people around her who are grieving. I mean, a murder is a crime against the state and the people left behind, the constituents of that state.
SC: I noticed a theme where a lot of Carolyn's friends and family seemed, in the book, apologetic about grieving. What do you think enabled them to grieve and heal in the ways that they needed to?
SG: I saw a lot of people writing about her because she was friends with so many writers. Adjua [Greaves] and Matt [Longabucco] talk about that in the book. Gabe [Kruis] included that piece of her poem inside his. Lizzie Crawford was someone else who wrote about Carolyn, and the people from Wendy's Subway located some poems of hers and had them published posthumously. For creative people, that is how I saw them trying to understand what happened to her.
Pamela [Tinnen] has found a lot of healing and opportunities to talk about Carolyn since the book has come out. She's traveled with me and read an essay about Carolyn at many of those events. And then people would be at the events who knew Carolyn at different stages of her life. I loved being able to meet those people. Pamela loved being able to see them again and talk to them and that is wonderful and a way to grieve.
Some people just don't want to talk about it, and that's one way that people grieve, too. There's no wrong way to do it. I don't know that everyone is going to heal, either. There are going to be people in Carolyn's life who might never, or they just heal in completely different ways.
“...actually death has very little to do with the person who dies. It has to do with everyone else around them.”
SC: Do you think there's a problem in our society? Oh, it's such a big question. I wonder what makes it so hard for people to grieve?
SG: In the West, our discomfort with death. And when you lose someone you learn all these things about them that you didn't know before, and that hurts too. All these questions that go unanswered.
SC: Yeah, I remember some scenes where Carolyn's dad is taking it all in. Things that he hadn't known about.
How do you feel about the way the book came out? Did you achieve what you set out to?
SG: I did. It’s been an uncomfortable book to market. [It’s] hard to know how to talk about it, and keep Carolyn at the forefront. Part of doing that was creating a grant in her name with Lighthouse Writers Workshop, so that people can take writing classes, and so the royalties from the book have somewhere to go, because I didn't want to profit from this project.
Pamela also started the Carolyn Bush Living Archive, where there's going to be a living playlist for Carolyn that people can contribute to, like, “Oh, this is a song that reminds me of her,” “This is a song we loved listening to together,” or “I remember this song was playing when we did this.” And keep those stories bubbling up and shareable. It's been important for me to keep this about her. At a certain point I had to accept that I was doing this for the right reasons, and what other people might think about it is out of my hands.
SC: Has leaning into the contradictions helped you?
SG: I do think it helps to ask what Carolyn would want because she embraced her contradictions. She wouldn't want to be sanitized. It was important for me to have her character be very dimensional and textured and for her personality to come through. I mean, she had a biting sense of humor sometimes. I didn't want to leave those things out.
So if I were to apply that same rationale to myself, maybe some of the things that people don't like about me are actually my best and most interesting qualities. And maybe the things that people don't like about the book are actually my favorite things about it. So I don't know. There's just not one reader.
“Is there any justice in this case?”
SC: I'm shifting away from Carolyn because there is a huge part of the book that's about [the murderer] Render and his family and the system of enablers. There's a theme of the elite thinking they know better than the masses. I saw this echoed in Render’s decision for a bench trial, where a judge presided over his case instead of a jury.
This mindset operates in the shadows, right? Insisting on shining a light on it. How did that feel and what helped you do that work?
SG: I do that work daily now as a private investigator, so it's easier than it was in the beginning. But, this process has taught me how to be comfortable not being liked sometimes. Because something just needs to happen, right?
“You're the only one who has this information, so we're gonna have to talk about it.” I mean, it's a mindset that I have.
SC: Yeah I like that. Because you brought to light the way that wealthy families shame anyone who dares to question their practices. [The murderer’s family] did that in the courtroom. In their reaction to the prosecution’s expert witness, who was careful to not answer leading questions on either side.
SG: And Render’s family told him afterward, “I hope you can sleep at night.”
SC: They got their emotional jab in against a witness.
I saw you bring the shaming to light and it felt really powerful. It melts that shame away. I hadn't even realized that I just accepted it because it had been ingrained for so long.
SG: It's like the taboo around talking about money. Why is it embarrassing to talk about money? Well, because if we start talking about money, we'll see how fucked up it is. How much some people have, and how other people don't.
SC: I wonder if it's embarrassment or if it's rendering a mechanism of control visible.
SG: Right, exactly. But they are also embarrassed to be a part of this awful system, you know? I think they don't want to be seen as enabling something that actually hurts people, even if they do.
“...it’s evidence of privilege… You can kill someone
and get away with it.”
SC: They're still social creatures.
Well, there is a very honest moment when one of the Bard students says, “To this day, I do not know if I would have gotten in without my connections.”
SG: Yeah, Danielle [Sinay].
SC: Danielle, yeah. All of her quotes felt refreshing and honest. About that guilt that, if sublimated, then comes out in this shaming of others and shushing and hiding.
SG: I think it was brave of her to say the things that she did and allow me to put them in this book.
SC: Yeah, it felt great. When something's flat-out honest, everything clears up.
SG: I mean, the things that she shared about Leon [Botstein] calling her into his office and standing over her in this way that feels very menacing. She's speaking out against a powerful person [with] close ties to her family.
Another person, since the book came out, has shared with me that they used to work in the admissions office at the school and saw in the system where the admissions personnel would flag potential “sparkies.”
The student would have to say in their application to the school that they don't require financial aid. Even if they had bad grades in high school, poor performance. If they had checked that box, they would be flagged as a “sparkie,” this other category of students who could donate to the school. There was actually a flag for that in the admission system.
SC: I figured that happened, but it's bracing to hear it confirmed. These things only work in the shadows, right? So yeah, shine a light on it.
“‘There are literally several white male Bard students who get away with raping… assaulting… harassing, and stalking.’ And murder.”
In honor of Carolyn Bush:
All proceeds from Carrie, Carolyn, Coco will fund a writing grant in Carolyn’s name
