Lying with the Dead (23 page)

Authors: Michael Mewshaw

Tags: #Domestic Fiction, #Psychological, #Family Life, #Literary, #Psychological Fiction, #Black humor (Literature), #Fiction - General, #Fiction, #Humorous, #Adult children of dysfunctional families

BOOK: Lying with the Dead

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Author’s Note

Lying with the Dead
and
Life for Death

The genesis of most novels is as opaque as the human psyche and as elusive as dream logic. But
Lying with the Dead
had its origin in specific childhood experience that shaped the man I became, and has now been reshaped by the imagination.

In 1961, a friend, Wayne Dresbach, age fifteen, murdered his parents and was sentenced to life in prison. If the event was devastating for the Dresbach family, it was only a little less monumental for me and my family. It changed the already precarious emotional equation of our lives, as Wayne’s younger brother, Lee, moved into our home, and as my mother became increasingly obsessed with the case. For more than a decade, while raising four children of her own and running a day nursery for other kids, my mother served as a surrogate parent for both Dresbach boys and worked tirelessly to overturn Wayne’s conviction and get him released.

Like Maury in
Lying with the Dead
, Wayne did twelve years at Patuxent Institute for Defective Delinquents, and like Maury’s siblings, I passed an adolescence in the shadow of the U.S. penal system. Sunday was visiting day. Christmas brought the annual convict party celebrated in a cell block with pretzels and Kool-Aid. Each New Year commenced with another parole hearing, an emotional mixture of hope and dread.

As Wayne did his time, I went on to college, then graduate school, and became a writer, always intending to do a novel about murder and its ongoing effects on a family, the Greek tragic cycle of hubris, nemesis, and catharsis. But when Wayne was paroled, he moved in for a time with me and my wife and son, and I became persuaded that at least at first, I owed it to him to tell the events from his point of view as nonfiction. I did so in 1980, with the publication of
Life for Death
.

But inevitably the story and its aftermath remained lodged like a stinger in my brain, and so now I have circled back to it, not just revisiting the past but reimagining events, reconstituting a family forever teetering on the brink of discovery and dissolution, and reexamining elements of personal biography and reframing everything as fiction. The result is
Lying with the Dead
, my eleventh novel, a tragicomedy almost fifty years in gestation.

Production Editor: Yvonne E. Cárdenas

Poetry excerpt on page 192 from “This Be the Verse,” from
High Windows
by Philip Larkin. Copyright © 1974 by Faber and Faber Ltd.

Excerpt on page 212 from William Faulkner’s
As I Lay Dying
copyright © 1930 and copyright renewed 1958 by William Faulkner.

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THE LIBRARY OF CONGRESS HAS CATALOGED

THE PRINTED EDITION AS FOLLOWS:

Mewshaw, Michael, 1943-
Lying with the dead / by Michael Mewshaw.
p. cm.
eISBN: 978-1-59051-355-2
1. Adult children of dysfunctional families—Fiction. 2. Domestic fiction.
3. Psychological fiction. I. Title.
PS3563.E87L95 2009
813′.54—dc22 2009008675

PUBLISHER’S NOTE:
This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents either are the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously, and any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, events, or locales is entirely coincidental.

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