Marketing Sensationalism
by Patrick Connolly
In class today, we were asked to look at the peritextual elements (basically everything that makes up the physical copy of the book, cover to cover) of Missing Sarah, a book written by the sister of one of Robert Pickton’s victims about her life in the Downtown Eastside of Vancouver. While the writer, Maggie de Vries, is forced to reflect on the life of her sister and find out more about her life after she left the family because she is missing, the book is focused on Sarah de Vries as a person, on the relationships with her family and others, and as a reflection of the writer on how the two sisters went down very different paths in life. But as the peritext would suggest, the focus of the book is on the crime that was committed, not on the person who would become a victim of that crime. This is a marketing tool.
On the back of the book near the bar code, the book is labelled “Memoir/True Crime”. I don’t have much of a problem with the label “Memoir” (especially as the sub-heading is “A Memoir of Loss”), but the label of “True Crime” irks me in this context. In his book, True Crime: Observations on Violence and Modernity, Mark Seltzer explains certain conventions of true crime. Ultimately, they come together to create a product that turns “crime fact into crime fiction.
The salacious material that is often associated with the True Crime genre does not appear in this book. In essence, True Crime deals in trying to recreate a crime to emotionally encapsulate an audience. This book’s author chooses not to spend much time recreating the crime, but instead recreates the life of the victim. Of course there is an emotional effect on the reader’s part, but it doesn’t exploit the subject.
The True Crime billing is not accurate for this book. While it could be possible that this book is hard to put into a marketable category, it’s more likely that this label was used to market it to a readership more interested in the Robert Pickton case than one of his victims lives.
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Hi Patrick! I agree with you and I also felt that the addition of ‘Updated since the Pickton Trial’ further added to the impression that this is a text revealing an insider’s experience of all the gory details of a murder investigation.
I feel that this text has been marketed not only as a genre which it is not, but a genre which it actively aims to overcome. The text seeks to reject any sensationalising of Sarah’s murder; Maggie De Vries wanted to communicate the story of Sarah’s life as a way of showing that her murder did not define her. Therefore, for the biotext to be marketed as focused on the crime undermines everything the author was trying to achieve. I think that it is an insult to both Maggie De Vries and the memory of Sarah.