Winter arrived on my birthday, December 21, 2011, signalling the conclusion of the Fall into Reading 2011 challenge. I did not manage to read all of the books I planned to read because life interceded at a few points along the way. But I did manage to read (and review) a total of twenty books:
Click here to see the full list of participants, visit their sites, and peruse the titles of books they read in conjunction with the challenge. You are sure to find a few to add to your stack of yet-to-be-read books!
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Some are smooth, obviously well cared-for, the pigmentation even, the manicure flawless. Others are calloused, wrinkled or show age spots, the nails cracked and splintered. Some hold modern electronic gadgets, others grip more traditional tools with which they perform work, some bear the ravages of arthritis. Still others hold the fruits of their labor. One pair embrace a guitar, the musical instrument that provides peace and serenity in an otherwise chaotic world. Some are adorned with jewelry.
All represent the faceless individual whose life experience is spotlighted on the particular page opposite the collection of stunning photographs by Terilee Dawn Ouimette.
Kristin Rossum was an extremely intelligent, beautiful girl from an accomplished family for whom the future held literally endless possibilities. Today she is an inmate at the California Correctional Women’s Facility (CCWF) in Chowchilla, California, where she is serving a life sentence without the possibility of parole after being convicted of murdering her husband, Greg de Villers. Her story is the subject of Poisoned Love by Caitlin Rother.
Kristin was passionate about roses — her favorite movie was American Beauty. As a high school student, she began using drugs and was soon addicted to crystal methamphetamine. Rather than provide her with the treatment she clearly needed, her parents opted to send her away to college for a fresh start. And for a time, Kristin seemed to pull herself together. But eventually, she began using again and when she suddenly disappeared, rather than confess that she was flunking all of her courses, her parents were frantic. Kristin ran away to Mexico where she encountered Greg de Villers on a getaway with his two brothers, Bertrand and Jerome. Immediately drawn to each other, Greg seemed to be the savior Kristin so desperately needed. She began living with him and once again got clean. She returned to school, graduated summa cum laude with a degree in chemistry, and embarked on a promising career with the San Diego County Medical Examiner as a toxicologist. Despite the misgivings that she enunciated to her parents, Kristin and Greg were married.
Unfortunately, Kristin was also passionate about her supervisor, Michael Robertson, and the two began a torrid affair. Kristin’s job gave her ready access to a variety of legal and illegal drugs, especially considering the laboratory’s lack of security protocols. As one newspaper observed, it was a veritable “candy store” for an addict like Kristin.
When Greg died suddenly, Kristin’s behavior created suspicion. Kristin posited that Greg, who disavowed even benign over the counter drugs, took his own life after learning that Kristin planned to leave him by taking an overdose of old prescription medications that she thought she had disposed of, along with cough syrup. Kristin’s story about finding Greg in bed unconscious and pulling back the blankets to find his chest covered with red rose petals — their wedding photo tucked under his pillow — sounded more like a murder staged to appear to be a suicide, especially after the details of her relationship with Michael, who was at her side in the emergency room that night, began emerging. “[Greg] had given me a dozen beautiful long-stem roses for my birthday. I think he was just making a statement that he knew our relationship was over,” she insisted, but the jury did not believe her, instead accepting the prosecution’s version of events: Kristin poisoned Greg with fentanyl in order to prevent him from exposing her drug addiction and affair with Robertson which would have derailed both her career and the life together she and Robertson were planning.
Employing the painstaking research and impeccable attention to detail for which she is known, author Caitlin Rother relays the real–life cautionary story of Kristin Rossum and the “American Beauty murder” of her husband, Greg de Villers, just a few days before his twenty-seventh birthday.
The story has all the makings of a great mystery: Illicit, passionate sex and desire; jealousy and resentment; a codependent relationship; easy access to drugs; and at the center of it all, a narcissistic addict enabled by her naive, appearance-conscious parents. The result is a taut, fascinating tale. Rother details Kristin and Greg’s childhoods, as well as how they met and instantly fell into a relationship. Greg was an average student and quiet young man who was close to his two brothers. The three boys survived a tumultuous childhood wracked by their parents’ prolonged, bitter divorce that eventually resulted in Greg’s estrangement from his physician father. Although Kristin came from an intact home and her parents were both professionals holding advanced degrees, they did not address her drug use effectively upon learning of it. The result? A “perfect storm” was set in motion when Greg happened upon a strung-out Kristin and determined to rescue her.
Rother explains how Kristin’s addiction fueled her behavior and the undisputed facts indict the employers who failed to recognize her problem either through appropriate background screenings or personal observations by professionals who, based upon their training and expertise, should have recognized the signs. Ironically, Kristin was placed in a position of responsibility for logging and accounting for drugs recovered from crime and accident scenes, and worked under the direct supervision of an expert on some of the most effective yet potentially lethal painkillers available. As a toxicologist, Kristin knew the procedures employed during autopsies, as well as what drugs were the subject of routine screenings. Fentanyl was not among them. Further, when she became romantically entangled with her boss, their superiors failed to take appropriate action to preserve the integrity of the workplace, thus unwittingly compounding the factors that would eventually allow Kristin to take Greg’s life.
Rother takes great pains to present the story in a matter-of-fact, nonjudgmental manner, as she chronicles the observations and strategies of medical and law enforcement personnel, as well as both the prosecutors who eventually secured Kristin’s conviction and her team of defense attorneys. She presents the trial highlights, as well as aspects of Kristin’s numerous appeals, in a straight-forward, understandable style. Rother’s restrained technique serves to underscore and heighten the tragic import of Kristin’s drug-addled, self-involved agenda, while inspiring more questions than answers about who Greg de Villers really was. His family portrayed him very differently than did Kristin and her parents, leaving readers to draw their own conclusions about the young man whose life ended far too soon. The jury convicted Kristin. Readers may or may not, depending upon their own interpretation of the evidence so skillfully and even-handedly presented by Rother.
Poisoned Love, originally published in 2006, is Rother’s first book. It has been re-released with updates about the status of Kristin’s various appeals, as well as the lives and careers of the principals involved in the case. It is a compelling read, powerful in its truth as expertly unveiled by Rother. Rother reveals her personal reasons for penning the book: she was married to an alcoholic who took his own life in 1999 a few days after she told him the relationship was over. Like Kristin, he was a San Diego County employee who managed to hide his addiction from both his future wife and his coworkers for quite some time. But eventually the disease resulted in depression, shame, lost jobs, and failed marriages. About Poisoned Love, Rother observes:
Yes, this book is a sexy story about a fatal love triangle, illicit drugs, adultery, addiction and murder. But I hope people will also see it as a cautionary tale about how drugs can destroy not just one life, but many others in the process.
I highly recommend Poisoned Love to all readers, but especially those who enjoy true crime works.
Author Caitlin Rother has generously provided one copy of Poisoned Love to be awarded to a lucky Colloquium reader! Submit your entry utilizing the Rafflecopter widget.
Until December 28, 2011, at 12:01 a.m., you are invited to enter to win a $15 Amazon gift certificate! That’s right. It’s my birthday, but for the second year in a row I am giving a present to one lucky Colloquium reader as my way of expressing my gratitude to my readers and followers!
Mandatory Entry:
Post a comment in which you describe the meaningful, memorable, and/or cherished birthday present you have ever received. (Be sure to include your email address for notification and delivery purposes.)
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I jumped at the chance to bring Linda back to Colloquium and again spotlight Half in Love because I was so impressed with both her work and the importance of her story. In Half in Love, Linda details the struggles her mother, Pulitzer Prize-winning poet Ann Sexton, endured with alcoholism, depression, anxiety, and manic episodes that led to multiple suicide attempts and resultant hospitalizations, and, eventually, her suicide at the age of 45. In the aftermath, Linda waged her own battles against guilt, depression, and self-mutilation (cutting) before coming to terms with the legacy of suicide that can exist within families. The story of her painful journey is difficult to read, but imbued with healing and hope.
There is a mental condition called “survivor’s guilt” that plagues those who witness the death of others in catastrophes like the Holocaust, natural disasters, and traumatic events. The term also applies to those whose lives are touched by the fire of the suicide of a loved one –though not, exactly, in the same way as those who survive a plane crash or a terrorist attack while others die. In the case of suicide, the survivors’ anguish comes not from the fact that we survived when others did not, but that we were unable, quite literally, to save those whom we loved. And for this we bear a terrible guilt.
Guilt leads to blame. Early in 2011, I wrote about this duet of emotional reactions for my own website. I named the post Guilt: The Inevitable Emotion. Though one would imagine that writing about a subject once would provide some sort of emotional catharsis — apparently it does not.
How is it that I return to the subject one more time, like a child running laps around the mulberry bush, creating an endless circle for myself? As part of an interview for another literary blog, I was asked: Is it inevitable that the families left behind after a suicide experience guilt? Will they always be asking themselves for answers, yearning to know if there was something more they could have, or should have, done?
Part of why I wrote my latest memoir, Half in Love: Surviving the Legacy of Suicide, (published in hardcover by Counterpoint Press in January 2011, and coming out in paperback January 2012), is that I had always blamed myself for my mother’s suicide, even though I had been only twenty-one and a college senior. She was a Pulitzer Prize-winning poet, and had appointed me her literary executor immediately before her death. It was a job I didn’t want. For so long, I had dealt with her difficult life and her suicide attempts. I didn’t want another task that would involve me with her again, so intimately and so completely — from personality to poetry.
When she died, I had a multitude of reactions: anger, grief, relief, a near sense of giddiness, sadness, depression. The list could go on and on, some of the emotions embarrassing ones, others predictable. But to me the most interesting is the one I have had the most difficulty laying to rest: guilt. Was it somehow my fault that she had at last succeeded in killing herself?
I had spent the afternoon of her suicide in my college dorm room, reading for my thesis on Virginia Woolf’s To The Lighthouse, unaware of the news that was about to crash into my life. Back at home, my mother had lowered the garage door, locked herself into her car, and turned the ignition key. When my telephone rang some three hours later, I went into shock. Later that evening, I would pick up her red telephone book and begin making the calls that would tell others of her suicide. Her best friend accused me then, in a voice steeped in pain: “It’s your fault, you know. It’s all your fault.”
For a long time I believed that it was. But ultimately, having my own children and then once again taking up the reins of my own life, I learned that it was not — any more than it was my children who were to blame when it was my turn to assume the mantle of the suicidal parent. I came to the conclusion that there was no one to blame other than myself when it came to my own commitment to life or death. Half in Love is all about taking the responsibility for my depression and my suicide attempts. It is about how I made the transition into recovery and how I learned to accept myself again. It is about how I put my own survivor guilt to rest.
When I published Half in Love, I received emails from so many people who confessed that they were angry with a loved one who had committed suicide, or who had even tried to do so, or with those who were just plain old depressed. On some level they blamed themselves, and that blame made them angry, because it was unjust. When they told me of their feelings, I tried to reassure them that it was okay to feel both guilt and anger toward the suicidal member of the family, or the friend. It was natural. Someone important to them had purposely taken themselves away, somewhere they could not follow — how could you not be angry about that?
As I was growing up, moving through childhood into adolescence, my mother’s various psychiatrists never counseled my family that our anger and grief were normal. We were told not to be angry, but to be patient and loving. This wasn’t realistic and it wasn’t supportive. We needed someone to tell us that our anger was appropriate. And when my mother finally died, we needed someone to hold our hands through the process of resolving that anger and learning to accept her suicide.
And so when I get those emails from guilty and grieving family members, I tell them what I always wished I had heard back then, some thirty-seven years ago: that the guilt and the anger show us how much your mother, father, sister, brother, son or daughter meant to you. Over time, your negative feelings will dim, as did my own, and you will be left only with the pleasure these people once brought to you. Never let it go.
Click here to read my review of Half in Love (Surviving the Legacy of Suicide).
Enter to Win a Copy of Half in Love
Author Linda Gray Sexton has graciously provided one copy of Half in Love (Surviving the Legacy of Suicide) to be awarded to a lucky Colloquium reader.
To enter, post a comment in which you answer this question:
What aspect of my review of Half in Love (Surviving the Legacy of Suicide) most intrigues and inspires you to read the book?
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Author Darryl Nyznyk, like many folks, is dismayed by “the loss of Christmas to the chaos, anxiety, and pressure of shopping, spending, and gifts.” After all, the true spirit of Christmas has little or nothing to do with the latest and greatest electronic gadgets, toys, and designer fashions. In response, Darryl penned his first novel […]
Welcome to the TLC Book Tour for The CHICKtionary If you think the Merriam-Webster dictionary has it all covered, think again. Author Anna Lefler provides definitions for many of the words not included in standard dictionaries in her new book, The CHICKionary: From A-Line to Z-Snap, the Words Every Woman Should Know. Invite your girlfriends […]
Welcome to Pump Up Your Book’s Virtual Book Tour for Writing Your Way Julie Smith’s new “how-to” guide, Writing Your Way — The Great American Novel Track offers something for every novelist … or would-be novelist. It is a straight-forward, candid, plainspoken primer on how to structure, organization, construct, and sell your work of fiction. Although […]
My special guest today is Julie Smith, author of the new how-to book, Writing Your Way: The Great American Novel Track. Julie is an accomplished author and writing educator who focuses on helping authors find their own unique writing method and voice, rather than imposing draconian rules that simply do not work for all writers. […]
Welcome to the Gift Card Giveaway Hop! The Gift Card Giveaway Hop is hosted by Inspired Kathy at I am a Reader, Not a Writer and Peep at Attack of the Book. Through Wednesday, December 14, 2011, at 12:01 a.m., you are invited to enter to win a $15 Amazon gift certificate to help you […]
Welcome to Pump Up Your Book’s Virtual Book Tour for Give Me A Break! No-Fuss Meditation Meditation “is about experiencing every moment with full attention. It’s not about being good or bad,” author Whitney Stewart explains. So for readers who have never attempted to meditate and would like to learn effective meditation techniques, but are […]
My special guest today is author Whitney Stewart, a woman with a fascinating background. Her latest book, Give Me a Break: No-Fuss Meditation, focuses on overall — mind and body — health and tranquility. Whitney describes the book as a “straightforward, non-denominational guide to meditation” that is suitable for all audiences ages ten and up. She […]
Welcome to the TLC Book Tour for So Far Away Synopsis: Christine W. Hartman is the daughter of German immigrants, Hans and Irmgard, both of whom were highly intelligent, pragmatic, and products of their upbringings. When her parents divorced, it was Irmgard who left the family home, leaving Christine and her brother to live with their […]
Today my special guest is Sarah Tate, author of the new autobiographical novel Web of Lies — My Life With a Narcissist. Sarah Tate was a young newcomer to Switzerland when she was swept off her feet by a company manager, Bill, seventeen years her senior. Bill had been married twice, but his second wife […]
Welcome to the Book Lover’s Holiday Giveaway Hop! The Book Lover’s Holiday Giveaway Hop is hosted by Inspired Kathy at I am a Reader, Not a Writer and Alyson at Kid Lit Frenzy. Through Wednesday, December 7, 2011, at 12:01 a.m., you are invited to enter to win a $15 Amazon gift certificate to help […]
Click on the book cover to enter to win your own copy of The Legacy of Eden, an epic family saga from debut novelist Nelle Davy
Entries will be accepted until Monday, February 20, 2012, at 12:01 a.m.
Congratulations to Judy Cox who won a copy of A Whisper to a Scream! Congratulations to C.E. Hart at C.E. Hart ~ Author whose entry was selected at random. A copy of In Leah's Wake has been sent to C.E. Congratulations to Connie Shelor who won a copy of The Other Life by Ellen Meister, one of my favorite books of 2011! Congratulations to Debbie Penny who won a copy of Skipping A Beat by Sarah Pekkanen, one of my favorite books of 2011! Congratulations to Anita Yancey who won a copy of Mary's Son ~ A Tale of Christmas by Darryl Nyznyk!
February 13, 2012 ~ Guest Post from Catherine McKenzie, author of SpinFebruary 14, 2012 ~ Book Review & Giveaway: Spin
February 17, 2012 ~ Guest Post from author Spencer Seidel, Scavenger Hunt & Giveaway: Lovesick February 18, 2012 ~ Interview with Kristina McMorris, author of Bridge of Scarlet LeavesFebruary 19, 2011 ~ Book Review & Autographed Giveaway: Bridge of Scarlet Leaves February 20, 2012 ~ Guest Post from Loree Lough, author of Honor RedeemedFebruary 21, 2012 ~ Book Tour, Review & Giveaway: Honor Redeemed February 24, 2012 ~ Guest Post and Giveaway from Margaret Norton, author of When Ties Break ~ A Memoir About How to Thrive After Loss
February 28, 2012 ~ Book Tour & Review: Walter's Muse
March 1, 2012 ~ Book Tour, Review & Giveaway: The Garden Intrigue March 27, 2012 ~ Book Review: The Replacement Wife April 2, 2012 ~ Guest Post from Jessica Chambers, author of Dark is the SkyApril 3, 2012 ~ Book Tour & Review: Dark is the Sky
February 13, 2012 ~ Guest Post from Catherine McKenzie, author of Spin
February 14, 2012 ~ Book Review & Giveaway: Spin
February 16, 2012 ~ Book Tour & Review: 
February 17, 2012 ~ Guest Post from author Spencer Seidel, Scavenger Hunt & Giveaway: 
February 18, 2012 ~ Interview with 
February 20, 2012 ~ Guest Post from Loree Lough, author of Honor Redeemed
February 21, 2012 ~ Book Tour, Review & Giveaway: 
February 24, 2012 ~ Guest Post and Giveaway from Margaret Norton, author of 
February 27, 2012 ~ Book Tour & Review: 
February 28, 2012 ~ Book Tour & Review: 
March 1, 2012 ~ Book Tour, Review & Giveaway: 
March 27, 2012 ~ Book Review: 
April 2, 2012 ~ Guest Post from Jessica Chambers, author of Dark is the Sky
April 3, 2012 ~ Book Tour & Review: 
April 24, 2012 ~ Book Tour & Review: 
May 2, 2012 ~ Guest Post from author 
My two handsome sons!
Sophie
Buddy
