Review: Harrison, While They Slept (2008)

While They Slept: An Inquiry Into the Murder of a Family by Kathryn Harrison

My rating: 4 of 5 stars


So Kathryn Harrison is famous (or notorious) mostly for writing a book about her affair with her father, which I mention because that's the angle from which she comes at this book. It isn't a memoir, but it is absolutely NOT free of Harrison's personal history of familial trauma. Sometimes this feels relevant and meaningful; sometimes this feels like Harrison intruding herself into the story of Jody and Billy Gilley.

In 1984, Billy Gilley beat his father, his mother, and his little sister to death with a baseball bat. He did it, he claimed, in order to free his sister Jody and himself from the abuse of their parents. (He claims his little sister's death was a sort of accident: she started screaming and he panicked.) Harrison wants there to be an incestuous love story between Billy and Jody, because that's the baggage she brings to the table, but she's honest enough to admit that there isn't. Billy may (or may not) have been "in love" with Jody; Jody was definitely not "in love" with him; Jody was frightened of and repulsed by him. On the other hand, there is plenty of evidence that yes indeed, Bill and Linda Gilley were emotionally abusive, sometimes physically abusive. 

The most interesting part of the book is the comparisons Harrison does between what Billy says and what Jody says, both about the night of the murders and about their lives leading up to that night, the way that, with Jody's help, she picks Billy's story apart (for example, Jody says that Billy was molesting her, not protecting her from their father) so that as readers we can see the weird mix of truth and untruth in Billy's story. Also the way that both Jody and Billy change between the court records in 1984 and the interviews in 2008.

I came away from the book feeling that the Gilleys died because Billy was what their abuse made him and because they refused to see what they had made. And because all the institutions and organizations that are supposed to protect children failed to take Billy away from his parents.





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