She may have wished it happened” - and the assessment of a social worker after meeting her family the morning after the murder: “They were all losers.” To this, Perry adds dozens of her own interviews, the extensive news coverage, her personal archives and those of her family and friends, along with her memories to complete this entirely different but equally pressing investigation. There is the calendar from their kitchen wall documenting movies seen and hikes taken, and the underwear her mother wore that night, purchased oversize in “a funny sort of modesty.” Perry learns of an investigator’s suspicions of her - “Mother may have been an embarrassment to her. There she finds “ardent letters” between her mother and the college-student boyfriend who spun her in and out like a yo-yo, and rumors of the men who shared her mother’s bed and the ones who wanted to. I want those stories, those secrets.” So Perry explains her decision five years after the conviction of her mother’s murderer to search through the extensive police files gathered during the investigation. “A violent act is an epicenter it shakes everyone within reach and creates other stories, cracks open the earth and reveals buried secrets. But it also reveals much more: a town plagued by violence, addiction and generational poverty a culture of women taught to need men who were often ill equipped to love them and the courage and compassion required to not merely survive the worst thing imaginable but to make a kind of terrible sense of it. “After the Eclipse” is Perry’s effort to look behind this shadow. Like the partial solar eclipse Perry and her mother witnessed two days before the murder, this blackness blotted out the daughter’s and the mother’s former selves. The murder, which went unsolved for 12 years, marked Perry, infecting her with a “viscous blackness” unleashed by the killer’s act. In the early morning of May 12, 1994, in a small inland town in Maine, Sarah Perry’s 30-year-old mother, Crystal, was stabbed to death in her home, while Sarah, who was 12 at the time and lived alone with her mother, sat frozen on her bed on the other side of a thin wall. AFTER THE ECLIPSE A Mother’s Murder, a Daughter’s Search By Sarah Perry 350 pp.
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