Los Angeles Review of Books has just published an essay by Faculty member Aimee Liu comparing Sarah Koenig’s brainchild to Sebastian Junger’s A Death in Belmont — with shouts out to Anthony Doerr and Alan Dershowitz in the bargain. This essay was written with the theme of the upcoming MFA residency in Port Townsend — URGENCY — in mind.
Here’s an excerpt:
“It’s really hard to account for your time,” Koenig observed, then proceeded to ask several seemingly random teenagers to remember what they’d done on a day six weeks earlier. None of them could.Okay, so memory is unreliable. But … three million listeners were hooked on this show. Why?
I’d expected a uniquely mind-jangling plot and deeply complex characters. Instead I learned that Koenig was investigating — though she’s not a detective or even a crime reporter — a 15-year-old teen murder conviction. “On paper, the case was like a Shakespearean mash-up,” she promised. “Young lovers from different worlds, thwarting their families, secret assignations, jealousy, suspicion, and honor besmirched […] a final act of murderous revenge.”
But … this wasn’t even a cold case. Back in 2000 a Baltimore jury took just two hours to convict 17-year-old Adnan Syed of murdering his ex-girlfriend Hae Min Lee. So what was it that had millions of listeners not just hooked but raving about Koenig’s documentary? How, in other words, had she given this story sufficient urgency to generate all this new interest?
For the rest of Liu’s wrestling match with this question, go to