[BRIEF NOTE] More on Amber Frey

[rfmcdonald]

Back on the 4th, I posted a bitter complaint about how Scott Peterson's ex-girlfriend--the one he killed his eight-months-pregnant wife for, apparently--managed to produce a book that earned her a fair degree of prominence in the bookselling market. Bryan Curtis at Slate provides a useful rejoinder to my spleen. A sample:

Frey's salacious confessions—unlike, say, Monica Lewinsky's or Jessica Hahn's—serve a noble purpose. Other Women rarely convict cheating husbands of anything more than sexual harassment or soliciting a prostitute. Yet Frey was the star witness in a capital murder trial and, by almost every account, a dazzling one: Prosecutors say her excellent testimony was crucial to Peterson's conviction. She carries none of the religio-political baggage of Lewinsky, Hahn, or Donna Rice. And whatever its scant value as literature, Witness is the best chronicle we'll ever read of Peterson's gruesome manner.

And re-reading Frey's book, I have to agree with Curtis. Perhaps the problem lies with the people who consume works of literature indistinguishable from and actually interchangeable with real-life sordid murders, not with its individual members. (Then again, perhaps we need a new humanity. In which case, sigh.)