Posts Tagged "Charles Manson"

Hello and welcome to my shiny new cyber-home! I hope you’ll pull up a seat and stay awhile. Yes, there’s still much work to be done on the website, but the blog will be going strong all week long (and then some) to celebrate the family release TOMORROW, 4/26! Have you ordered your copy yet?

In the meantime, this being Monday Muse at MicolOstow.com and all, I thought I’d talk a bit about the inspiration for the novel.

I’ve already waxed rhapsodic about this school, and this mentor, and I’ve even spoken about spending a summer here, steps away from the original Woodstock concert site.
By day, this was my view as I wrote:

At night, it was a little different:

You can see where the creep factor came from, yes?

I was working on the first packet of my final semester of graduate school; I began with a short story about a memory I had from age 12 – being carried off by a riptide during a family trip to the beach. My mentor liked the story, and encouraged me to write another. The second story I wrote was about a young male sociopath, loosely drawn from this urban legend. Those who’ve read family will likely recognize both references.

I’d been perennially interested in Charles Manson, but couldn’t figure out just why he and his Family so fascinated me (other than the obvious explanation: there was something deeply wrong with me). I’d been toying with the idea of a book “about” Manson for years, but it wasn’t until I’d drafted those two short stories that my “way in” became apparent. The protagonist, then unnamed, from “undertow”, was clearly emotionally damaged – just the type to be lured by a Manson-esque Svengali. Eureka!

(Yes, those eureka moments do happen. Sometimes. If you’re lucky.)

Re-reading Helter Skelter further crystalized my characters for me; it’s easy to dismiss Manson’s acolytes as crazy, or deranged, but to do so is to disregard just how many of them there were, and the horrifying things they were willing to do on his behalf.

For the most part, characters in family are composites – the book is a work of fiction, after all – but I can confirm that the story’s protagonist, Melinda Jensen, was indeed inspired by a particular person in history:

Linda Kasabian joined the Manson Family in July of 1969, and was immediately welcomed to their Spahn Ranch compound. She quickly adopted the attitude of the other girls on ranch: “We always wanted to do anything and everything for him.”

As a member of Manson’s inner circle, Kasabian was hand-picked to participate in the Tate-LaBianca murders, which Manson believed would set “Helter Skelter” in motion. On August 8, Kasabian accompanied a select few family members (Manson did not join them) to 10050 Cielo Drive (Los Angeles), where actress Sharon Tate was staying with several friends, with orders to slaughter indiscriminately. However, despite Manson’s directive to “make it messy,” once on the scene, Kasabian froze.

Kasabian tried to stop the murderers by claiming that she heard “people coming” onto the Tate property, but the killers had insisted that it was “too late.” According to family members Tex Watson and Susan Atkins, Kasabian stood rooted to the front lawn, watching, horrified, as her companions committed murder. Kasabian later testified that, while in a state of shock, she ran toward the car, started it up, and considered driving away to get help, but then became concerned for her daughter back at the ranch.

Indeed, Kasabian ultimately became the star witness for the prosecution for the Tate-LaBianca trial, and her testimony is considered to have been instrumental in putting Charles Manson away.

That said, I was inspired by Linda Kasabian, not because her “change of heart” released her from culpability or erased her time spent with the Family, but because the change of heart had happened at all.

As unfathomable to me as the violence committed by the Family is, I’m taken aback by the notion that a person could find herself truly poised on the threshold of horror…and choose to change her mind.

Linda’s story got me thinking:

What sort of person falls into a “family” like Charles Manson’s, and where does one have to be, emotionally, to find comfort in that structure?

But even more that that: how does a person come back from that state of mind? How does a person who’s so far gone, ultimately choose to fall back?

I’m certainly not suggesting that Kasabian’s withdrawal from the violence of August 8 excuses her from fault or blame. But that notion of an eleventh-hour realization, long past the point that anyone else might consider an about-face even possible, offered me a complicated, complex jumping off point for my “Mel.” The conclusion I eventually came to for myself was that, while our decisions do define us, ultimately, there is always the option to choose again. To choose differently.

To refuse to be “broken.”