What Happened to Michelle in Forest Hills?
Janet Malcolm is bringing her (considerable) A-game to the New York Review of Books with the sort of thing Janet Malcolm is better at writing about than almost anyone else:
Michelle’s story, in fact, was never newsworthy. She was always a recessive and passive character, the object of other characters’ fantasies and desires, her image vague and undelineated like that of the offstage changeling boy in A Midsummer’s Night Dream over whom Titania and Oberon wrangle. A Daily News story that appeared the day after the verdict, under the headline “Slain Dentist’s Kid Happy Now” — with the subhead “‘She doesn’t know anything,’ uncle sez of girl whose mom had dad shot dead” — was a characteristic exercise in journalistic resourcefulness in the face of insufficient knowledge.
This is the first of three parts, so you may want to decide how you, personally, rank receiving closure over, say, enjoying fine long-form journalism and wait it out accordingly?