Sarah Gerard's 'Carrie Carolyn Coco' offers a better version of the true crime book

So many true crime stories sound the same. A man kills a young woman. He’s caught. Then, the media and courts comb over his interests, his upbringing, his “psyche” for some clue as to why he did it. The victim is given stock treatment. She’s always a “beautiful soul,” someone who “lit up the room.” The only remarkable thing about her, it seems, is that she was killed.

Sarah Gerard interrupts this narrative with her new memoir, “Carrie Carolyn Coco,” (out July 9 via Zando Projects) which covers the life and murder of poet Carolyn Bush. A St. Pete native, and Gerard’s friend, Bush was living in New York City and an active member of the literary scene when, on Sept. 28, 2016, her roommate Render Stetson-Shanahan stabbed her seven times for no apparent reason. Bush was six weeks shy of her 26th birthday.

Much of Gerard’s book goes to examining the life of Carolyn and the dozens of people who were affected and grieved for her loss. Bush emerges as a complex character, someone who took her art seriously and hustled to make ends meet. A self-proclaimed witch, she made several appearances in her friend’s dreams post-death, chain-smoking and pissed as hell.

In traditional true crime fashion, the media focuses solely on Render, a rich kid with a New Yorker cartoonist father. Despite spending most of his time posting about guns on Reddit, Render is labeled as a “struggling artist” while Bush, the active poet and writer, was relegated to “a part-time waitress.”

Gerard rightly avoids giving Render any sort of mystique. He is a boring sociopath, someone who complains about not getting gift baskets of organic food in prison and looks forward to being committed to a psychiatric hospital so he can “relax and read and paint.” He is every entitled rich kid millennial you know. He is uninteresting, even in this narrative, which firmly centers on Carolyn.

Gerard deftly braids the stories of Carolyn’s past, her writing, the present grief of friends and family, and the court case against Render. What makes this account fascinating is that Gerard emerges as a character. She met Bush in New York and learned they were from the same hometown, had the same dear friends, chose the same career. Because of this proximity, Gerard witnesses this drowning grief in real-time. She is not an outsider but someone who can paint a portrait of what it means to a community when a remarkable young woman is killed.

In a way, “Carrie Carolyn Coco” is an anti-true crime book. It trades in the sensationalism and gory fascination for an unflinching look at grief and celebrates the fiercely lived life of Carolyn Bush, whose own words echo throughout the book. I was lucky to sit down with Gerard and ask her about how she chose to tell this story.

What was important for you to convey while telling Carolyn’s story?

Who she really was, and the complexity of her, as much as I could capture it. Writing about anyone necessarily turns them into a character, which is not fair. So there’s a little bit of tragedy in that, too. But now, all these different people get to meet her who never would have known who she was otherwise and keep telling stories about her.

And I also obviously wanted some sort of justice. It was just really unfair what happened to her and how her story was being told afterward. I think stories hold people accountable. And I wanted to start a conversation also about the ways that these wealthy institutions and the criminal justice system are organized to protect people who hurt women.

You do open up the story to talk about things that happened, like other men who committed violence at Bard (where both Carolyn and Render went), as well as “the shitty men in media list” and instances of racial and immediate partner violence. Why did you decide to open up the story instead of sticking to what happened to Carolyn?

Because it’s part of a larger pattern. What happened to Carolyn is not an isolated incident; actually, 90% of the time, if not more, when a woman is murdered, it’s by somebody she knew. And domestic violence is a pandemic. I mean, it affects every woman I know in some way or another. If not, personally, then familiarly. It’s affected me, it’s affected my mother, and obviously, it affected Carolyn. I mean, she was killed by somebody who she lived with.

I also wanted to try to define what an institution is at one point. In a way, Bard exists as an institution to protect itself and the people who perpetuate it instead of the individuals who live under it. What does this institution stand for? That was one of the research questions [I had] when looking at the institution of the criminal justice system.

Why did you decide to include yourself as a character instead of as a removed narrator?

I chose to appear in the book when I had something to contribute from my perspective. One of the things that really made me want to get to know Carolyn more was this weird pyramid scheme [The Circle] that she invited me to.

She was a struggling 20-something in the most expensive city in the country. I was also struggling at that time. I was—I am still—part of the gig economy, and so was she. I decided to include that scene because it demonstrated some of what she was going through at the time financially. I think it captures so many aspects of Caroline’s experience and personality. It was another women-led organization talking about spiritual experiences and female empowerment. Plus, I tried to collect as much of Carolyn’s writing as I could: texts, emails, blog posts, you know, poems, essays, and I had this email from her [trying to recruit me.]

I included myself because I was there and I thought [The Circle] was an important thread in her life. And I could talk about being with her face to face and, and also a little bit of my own motivation for wanting to write about her. She was my friend…

I wish she had gotten to write her own book. I know she would have written so many books. She should have been able to do that.

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