She taught us that the sad truth is, you can’t “stay out of the forest” because the world is a forest. And it’s filled with predators. If someone is assaulted, it wasn’t because they were careless, irresponsible, or dressed wrong. It happened because some piece of shit chose to assault them. And if someone is murdered, it’s because some piece of shit chose to murder them. We need to turn the conversation toward identifying the behavior that leads to these attacks, figuring out how to identify these criminals faster and making sure their jail terms accurately reflect the seriousness of their crimes. And some of us need to unlearn the way we’ve been taught to think about the victims of those crimes. The following quote is from a TED Talk my sister sent to me that blew my mind:
We talk about how many women were raped last year, not about how many men raped women. We talk about how many girls in a school district were harassed last year, not about how many boys harassed girls. We talk about how many teenaged girls got pregnant in the state of Vermont last year, rather than how many men and teenaged boys got girls pregnant. So you can see how the use of this passive voice has a political effect. It shifts the focus off men and boys and onto girls and women. Even the term violence against women is problematic. It’s a passive construction. There’s no active agent in the sentence. It’s a bad thing that happens to women. It’s a bad thing that happens to women, but when you look at that term violence against women, nobody is doing it to them. It just happens. Men aren’t even a part of it!
—JACKSON KATZ, PH.D., FROM HIS TED TALK “VIOLENCE AGAINST WOMEN: IT’S A MEN’S ISSUE”
Stay Out of the Forest: Final Thoughts
KAREN: What’s the riskiest decision you’ve ever made, and how did it turn out?
GEORGIA: Quitting my desk job in 2009 (at almost thirty years old) to try to make it in the entertainment industry (specifically, hosting food shows). I’d lived my entire life paycheck to paycheck, so not having a regular salary or any guaranteed work was really scary, but I saw a chance and took it. My only goal was not to have to go back to a dreaded soul-sucking desk job, and so far, it’s working! Giving myself the chance to try was pretty much the best, kindest decision I’ve ever made for myself.
KAREN: Have you ever intervened because you thought someone else might be in danger?
GEORGIA: I’m not at all shy when it comes to intervening. I’ve yelled at a woman for abusing her small child on a train, hugged a crying stranger in an airport, told a guy I overheard at a restaurant being a douche to his date that he was a douche, driven an old woman home when I saw her trip and fall on the sidewalk. To me, intervening is a much better way to be a human than being someone who minds their own business. Plus it gives you better stories to tell at parties.
KAREN: Tell us about the most interesting time you’ve ever interacted with the police.
GEORGIA: The time when we took an Uber to the airport in New Orleans after an MFM live show and the driver turned out to be a local cop. When he found out we gave away the glitter-covered shoe, given to us by the revered Krewe of Muses, to our Murderino bartender the night before, he lost his shit and almost kicked us out of the car. We had no idea how coveted and rare and precious those shoes are and that giving ours away was akin to saying we hated god. We’re so sorry, Krewe of Muses.
NOTES
Chapter 1: Fuck Politeness
1 angels
Chapter 5: Don’t be a Fucking Lunatic
1 attic
2 Sadly, Kim passed away in 2018, during the writing of this book. See dedication here.
3 See here and dedication here.
Chapter 8: Stay out of the Forest
1 See here.
2 See here.
3 See here.
4 I just googled “NecroSearch Michele Wallace,” and a My Favorite Murder fan site was the second link that popped up. I am just so amazed that I get to be associated with such an amazing organization in this way. Life is CRAZY!
5 Asher, Leah, and I still say this stuff to each other all the time. (e.g., Leah accuses me of stealing her wedges: Move away from me now, move away from me now…)
art by Lauren Goldberg
FUCKIN’ HOORAY!: GEORGIA’S CONCLUSION
When I was about twenty years old, during the first gasp of the new millennium, I met a dude on a fledgling dating site called Makeoutclub. It was mostly hipsters with lip piercings (that’d be me) who wanted to meet other hipsters with lip piercings in their town. The guy I met and dated for a few months before we became lifelong friends (hi, Doug!) was one of those early internet people who knew about cool shit that you’d never heard of, like bands and local happenings, and would burn you copies of cassettes of super funny prank calls and made homemade video compilations of weird vintage commercials set to French pop music. Essentially, he was cooler than you but had endless enthusiasm about introducing people to said cool stuff, so he wasn’t a douche. It was in that vein that he sat me down in the early stages of our dating life and put on his recorded-off-the-TV VHS copies of a low-fi cable show called Mr. Show that had already been canceled. I loved it and was in awe of what was happening on the TV, the hilarious, WTF sketches that always looped together by the end of the episode to form a crazy but dependable story arc. I’d never seen anything like it, but it felt like a familiar friend. Doug and I quoted it all the time and annoyed our friends by cracking each other up saying, “It’s pumpkininny!” or “Stop needling me, you prick!”
When Doug found out that some of the comedians from Mr. Show regularly performed at a divey Italian restaurant on Fairfax Avenue called Largo, just a few minutes’ drive from where I lived with my grandma, we immediately made plans to go. We were too broke to book a table at the restaurant, which would have guaranteed us a seat but also meant we had to order an expensive (for us) dinner to confirm our seating. Instead, we lurked around out front until the show was about to start, at which point the bouncer would or wouldn’t let us come in and press up against the back wall, where we’d secretly sip cheap whiskey from a flask passed between us. There, in that tiny claustrophobic venue down the street from where my grandfathers had once run a butcher shop and barbershop, respectively, we saw fledgling comedians like Zach Galifianakis, Patton Oswalt, Sarah Silverman … and yes, even one Karen Kilgariff, perform to a spaghetti-eating crowd.
Karen was so funny—and confident, which, to a self-conscious twenty-year-old, also equals intimidating. Back then, there was no way I would have been able to speak to her with any sort of casualness. And she could have shot me down with one of her signature withering, caustic remarks had I tried, so I never did. But fifteen years later, after we had initially bonded over true crime at a Halloween party and I found out that we’d both be at Thanksgiving dinner at our mutual friend Joe’s house, I was excited to have the chance to force her to be my friend. It’s super fun when you get older and build confidence and know that you’re good enough to be friends with anyone, no matter how big of a fan you are or how many times you saw them on TV. That even if they’re a super funny, cool comedian that you’ve been in awe of for fifteen years, you’re still good enough to be someone they think is cool, too. That takes a lot of time and self-care and LOTS OF THERAPY, but it is possible. I promise.
At Thanksgiving, which was just a small gathering of mostly awkward comedy dudes who didn’t have the money to fly home to their families for both Thanksgiving and Christmas, I was totally myself, which meant loud belches so my cute but tight vintage dress would fit better and my inability to eat in silence (which you already know is my last lingering throwback to my eating disorder). So I asked a question to the assembled group, who were quietly masticating their stuffing and turkey while I tried not to gulp my whiskey on the rocks too fast, as I tend to do when I’m at an awkward social gathering.
“Hey!” I chirped. “Let’s go around in a circle and each say something vulnerable!” I was in the middle of reading Brené Brown’s Daring Gre
atly, which expounds upon the virtues of being an open book and essentially living your life with your heart on your sleeve in an effort to connect with the best parts of yourself and others. READ IT IMMEDIATELY, KIDS. My Favorite Murder wouldn’t exist without it. Because despite Karen’s confident exterior, it turns out she was withering in her own special brand of awkwardness, too that day, BUT she was also in the middle of reading Daring Greatly, which I found out when she perked up at her place on the sofa and asked if I’d read it.
The mostly awkward comedy dudes didn’t share anything vulnerable about themselves that day, but Karen and I bonded immediately and shortly after made plans for lunch over Twitter Direct Message. That first lunch lasted for five hours, and in between stories about our lives, many of which you’ve just read, our conversation was peppered with our favorite murders. It was so fun and such a relief to start a friendship with someone from a place of vulnerability; I know that helped us connect right off the bat.
But also, when we came up with the idea for My Favorite Murder during the last month of 2015, we were both in pretty bad places in our lives, which isn’t something we really talk about when asked about the podcast. We’ll both vaguely reference how much it’s changed our lives or how grateful we are for its success, which would be true even if we had both been living it up like Rihanna. But if you listen closely to those words, you’ll hear a desperate gratefulness that surrounds them like an invisible cloud of the smoke that both our lives were in the midst of going up in.
My Favorite Murder saved my life in a lot of ways. I know that sounds dramatic, and of course I don’t mean I was about to drive my car off the top of a parking-lot structure or anything, but at the time and for many years before, when I would lie awake at night and stare into the crystal ball that is anxiety, my future looked sad and bleak and stuck. While I loved so many aspects of my life, my wonderful, supportive relationship with Vince, our cute apartment and beloved cats, that I was healthy and didn’t have to work a nine-to-five job, in other ways I was miserable.
My whole life was immersed in a career tied to a person with whom my relationship had become toxic. She and I didn’t like each other anymore and resented that we had to continue to put on a façade of friendship in the name of money and increasingly distant potential success. Although, of course, I’d like to blame the whole thing on her, I’m working on living an examined life, so the reality is that we triggered each other, and the person I had become after being fully enmeshed in her life for seven years while we hustled to create a career together wasn’t someone I’d want to be friends with either.
I was desperate for a way out, but my self-esteem had been so damaged by our toxic relationship that I felt like I was worthless without her, which I think she exacerbated due to her own issues. The confidence and tenacity I had when she and I had met, what had probably drawn her to want to be my friend in the first place, had been slowly scraped away. I felt broken, and I didn’t know how to fix it, despite hours and hours of therapy.
I reached out to Karen to start a podcast out of desperation, really. I knew Karen was struggling, too, financially and creatively, so I threw a life raft to us, and we both gratefully grabbed on. Really, it was just a way for us both to have something else. Something creative and fun that didn’t have the enormous stakes that every other endeavor in my life felt like it had. I had been trying SO HARD the prior few years to create something new, something I could be proud of and would make me feel like I had purpose.
My Favorite Murder was, from the very first episode, about vulnerability and a way to talk about a taboo subject that I wasn’t ashamed to be interested in and that I felt was a legitimate topic that could benefit from being taken out of the “inappropriate to discuss in civil company” box so long as it was treated with the awareness and respect it deserved.
I was so excited to finally talk about this “weird” subject that I had been ob-fucking-sessed with since I was a kid with someone smart and funny and equally obsessed. It felt more like a therapy session than a podcast. In the months we had before it took off and became my main focus, everything else in my career went to shit. One night, after a long weekend working out of town for a food show the friend and I were on together, an exhausting job which after seven seasons of having to binge-eat desserts promised to give me diabetes and had started to rekindle my long-dormant eating disorder (having to eat fourteen doughnuts in two hours will do that to you). I was broken. I had nothing else to do to make money, but I just didn’t care anymore. My soul was like, “Nope, you’re done,” and I knew I had to quit just to make room in my life to be happy enough to try something else. At least four years had gone by since I could reasonably say I was quitting while I was ahead. At this point, I was quitting before I was dead.
Shortly after, when My Favorite Murder hit number one on the iTunes comedy chart, I thought it was a mistake. Vince was the one who showed me, and I figured it just meant that we were number one on his chart’s algorithms (hi, I’m not very computer savvy sometimes). When I showed it to Karen, she, in her infinite ability to downplay everything, told me not to get too excited. That it was indeed a fluke and I needed to chill the fuck out. But of course, in my infinite ability to daydream and scheme, I didn’t chill the fuck out. We added mini episodes every week because I knew that the more episodes people have to listen to, the more listeners you’ll get. We added new merch designs for sale based on the many quotes that listeners kept informing us were funny and important. We built this community of awesome (mostly) women who were just as ambitious and supportive and badass as we viewed ourselves to be, and who supported us even though we got names and dates and facts wrong and were very (very) far from perfect. I got to have the new life I wanted not despite of my imperfections but because my imperfections ended up being what was relatable and charming about me.
Thank fucking god I’m not a perfectionist, ’cause I really don’t think any of those things would have happened had I needed everything to be just so. I think when you start out in life with low self-esteem and self-worth, your expectations for yourself are kinda lowered. That sounds super negative, but I actually am really stoked that for me, giving something your best shot is good enough, even if you fail. Aside from my grandma Mollie’s favorite saying—“Bigger dummies than you”—I’ve also always had the question, “Why not me, too?” in the back of my mind. And while of course that doesn’t apply to stuff like going to college and becoming a detective or going to culinary school, because as I’ve established, school and I don’t mesh, it does apply to wanting to be a Cooking Channel personality or having a voice in true crime or having a top comedy podcast even though I’m not a comedian.
So it was in that spirit that I asked Karen if she wanted to start a true crime–comedy podcast. Why the hell not us, too?
* * *
The illusive Golden State Killer was caught this week, as I’m in the middle of writing this conclusion. After forty-plus years of not knowing the identity of the prolific rapist and murderer who terrorized California in the ’70s and ’80s, DNA finally led law enforcement to the doorstep of an aging, unassuming grandfather who also happened to be a psychopath. Karen and I talked about this case over endless cups of black coffee at our very first hang-out lunch, and it was Karen’s first murder that she did on the very first episode of the podcast. We praised Michelle McNamara, who had made this case her obsession and passion project, and had even given the fuckface murderer his new moniker, which without a doubt gave him more attractive branding and which caught people’s attention so much better than EAR/ONS (East Area Rapist / Original Night Stalker). I was so insanely in awe of Michelle’s tenacity and dogged determination. I wanted to be like her so much, instead of just a fangirl to rock stars like her and other journalists and the detectives who spent their lives chasing bad guys.
When Michelle unexpectedly died in April of 2016, halfway through writing her book about the Golden State Killer, I was so angry at the world. It felt so unfair.
She was the good guy, and her death felt like the bad guy had claimed another win. When the killer was caught this week, one of my first thoughts was how freaking stoked Michelle would have been that he was finally going to answer for his crimes. I wanted to sit down with her for coffee and press the final pieces into the puzzle with her. I wanted to high-five her because even if law enforcement won’t admit that she had a hand in tracking down this monster, we web sleuths (hey, Billy Jensen!) and the best detectives (hi, Paul Holes!) know the truth: if people like Michelle and other “armchair detectives” didn’t give these cold cases attention, they would fade into obscurity.
Michelle’s legacy will always be the Golden State Killer, and the period on that sentence is that, almost exactly a month after her book about the freezing-cold case was published, he was finally caught. That ain’t no bullshit. Michelle galvanized the law enforcement community through her own rabid curiosity, a trait that I proudly share with her. (I finally did get to listen to the audiobook while cleaning out my closet, btw.)
My close friend Carey, a girl who collects crystals and is a fellow advocate of self-care through mental health, recently texted me a screengrab of a post from My Favorite Murder’s private chat room (she’s kinda my spy in there) (I guess I just compromised her). A college student named Carley was in a class about feminism and social change and was working on a research paper about feminist movements. “So I am turning to my community to ask you how the rhetoric around MFM has changed your life and your idea of feminism?”
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