The Most Wonderful Terrible Person

Every now and then, I’ll come across a piece of media or art that speaks to me directly in a way that would feel unnerving if it weren’t also a kind of relief. This past week, I tuned into the latest episode of the podcast Criminal, which features stories about true crime that veer further away from the salacious and exploitative, and more toward the complicated and nuanced side of the genre — or as its website states: “stories of people who’ve done wrong, been wronged, or gotten caught somewhere in the middle.”

It’s this “somewhere in the middle” that especially intrigues me. Episode 213: The Most Wonderful Terrible Person focuses on an interview between show host Phoebe Judge and a woman named Debra Miller, who recounts her experience after her mother, Lucille, is convicted of murdering her father in the fall of 1964 when Debra is just 13 years old. Because the episode is a true masterpiece of storytelling, I won’t dive too deeply into specific details since I think it deserves a full listen. But suffice it to say, the most wonderful terrible person from which we get the title of the episode (not to mention this blog post) is none other than Debra’s mother.

In fact, Debra’s mother is the focus of the first essay in Joan Didion’s 1968 nonfiction tour-de-force, Slouching Towards Bethlehem, which is perhaps one of the reasons Judge and the rest of the team at Criminal have given Debra this platform to discuss Lucille and what happened in the years following the conviction, the publication and wide distribution of Didion’s essay*, and Lucille’s eventual death at age 56 of breast cancer.

Though I love Didion, I’m less interested in her take on the Miller trial as I am with that of Debra’s. Debra is now in her early 70s and working on a book about her mother. It’s Debra who attributes the phrase “the most wonderful terrible person” to her mother, describing her just four minutes into the podcast as both very loving and very mean. And boy, dear reader, did that moment make me sit up a little straighter in bed where I was, before this point, passively listening on my way to dreamland.

“My house, everything was unpredictable,” Debra says. “You could do one thing and it would be fine and do it again another day and you would be slapped. It was a nervous house to grow up in.”

I sat up even straighter and started listening hard. Debra goes on to describe her relationship with her mother, which — perhaps surprisingly — grows stronger and more intimate the older Debra gets. Debra, once a self-appointed Daddy’s Girl, feels an affinity toward her mother as she recognizes Lucille’s attempts to nurture her into an independent and confident young woman. Then, her father dies under mysterious circumstances only for her mother to be arrested on murder charges.

Even as Lucille is convicted of her father’s murder, Debra confesses her fear and desperation at losing her mother to prison. Throughout the whole podcast episode, it’s undeniable how much Debra loves Lucille. It’s the kind of love that borders on desperation, at least in the ways Debra tries to express it to her mother while Lucille is in prison, sneaking her contraband items that seem to take on supernatural weight when Debra gets the creeping suspicion that her mother cares more for Debra’s visits as a mule than she does as a daughter.

“I had a feeling that if I wasn’t going to do it, there was no point in me coming to visit her. She never said that, but she also didn’t do anything about my fear. It didn’t matter to her,” Debra explains. Despite everything, Debra shows up for her mother time and again. When Lucille is finally released from prison, Debra moves with her from place to place over the ensuing years, not out of filial obligation so much as a strong desire to be near the woman she loves so much. As Debra puts it, she wanted her mother “by hook or crook.”

By the time Lucille dies in 1986, Debra had stopped living with her many years prior. It’s when recounting Lucille’s funeral that Debra makes the somewhat baffling admission to Judge that it was then that she first got an inkling that maybe her mother was actually guilty of the murder. Up until that point, she had maintained her mother’s innocence, though she definitely had had her moments of doubt throughout her lifetime. Debra describes it as a moment of hilarity, which — if you’ve ever lost someone close to you — might feel eerily recognizable. At least, it did to me. I think that sometimes big truths about our parents can only come after they’ve died, but maybe that’s just my writer’s ego butting in. Whatever the case, Debra allowed herself to reframe her mother’s conviction after the point was moot. I think a little irony goes a long way in helping you laugh when you’re in the thick of grieving.

Now that she is writing a book about her mother, Debra admits that she will never know for sure whether her mother is innocent or not. But, she says, “I need her to be guilty because she suffered so much.”

It’s at this line that I had to physically pause the podcast and take a deep breath. It comes toward the end of the episode, as Judge and Debra are wrapping up their conversation. Debra’s voice is warbly throughout the episode, her tone slick and funny and wonderfully self aware. But where before she handles the narrative with a kind of matter-of-fact bemusement, she seems especially fragile at this moment, almost as if she can’t believe what she’s saying. Yet the statement, and the unspoken emotion behind it, feel like the truest part of her story. She loved her mother and saw her suffer. Of course she would want that suffering to have meant something. We don’t get a lot of information about Debra’s father, but Debra doesn’t come across as not loving him. If anything, she seems to regard her parents as complex, deeply troubled people. Perhaps, if he died in such a terrible way, that must mean something, too. We’ll have to wait for her book to find out what.

At the end of the episode, Debra delivers another line that cut me to my core and made me realize our individual stories are more familiar to one another’s than they are strange and intangible:

“I couldn’t have her to myself. I always wanted her to myself. And in the years that I’ve been off and on with this memoir, I’ve had her to myself. And she will be gone when it’s finished.”

Writing is hard, and I’m not ready to let go just yet. Sometimes I need my mom to be guilty because she suffered so much. I need us all to be guilty.

Thanks, as always, for reading.

X

Sam

Notes

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*If you’re not a Didion fan, it’s time you became one. You can start by reading her essay in question, based on this case, here.