It’s a hard job being a mother, and not everyone is up to it, even if they’d like to be. Which is why so many of us spend years dissecting our mother’s frailties and faults with our friends and mates and therapists. But would you feel justified or fair in writing down the story of your mother’s stab at motherhood for any stranger (or worse, her friends and neighbors) to read?

Most of us adhere to an accepted code of family loyalty and live privately with our experiences and our hard-won insights. Now, however, the new age of literary memoir — heralded by Mary Karr’s fiercely honest, unapologetically loyal “Liar’s Club,” a reminiscence, at its heart, about her mother — has joined the prevailing tide of cultural self-examination and made it acceptable, even fashionable, for writers to take their family skeletons by the hand and lead them out of the closet and onto the page. (Acceptable for the reading public, that is; what the mothers think may be a different story.)

The moms caught on paper in five recent memoirs by daughters — NPR correspondent Jacki Lyden, poet Mary Karr and novelists Kathryn Harrison, Jamaica Kincaid and Linda Gray Sexton — are not your run-of-the-mill specimens. In fact, they are a rather horrific lot, which makes these books a good test case for the possibility of, to paraphrase Wordsworth, recollecting daughterhood in tranquillity. If these daughters survived, so, with our mostly garden-variety mothers, might the rest of us.

What they survived was none too pretty: a mother so spectacularly insane that she thought she was the queen of Sheba, complete with eye-pencil hieroglyphics scribbled up her bare arms (Lyden’s “Daughter of the Queen of Sheba”); an alcoholic mother so tormented by secrets and loss that she tried to kill her children and married seven times (Karr’s “The Liar’s Club”); a mother so withholding that her daughter started an affair with her father, both to punish her mother and to get her attention (Harrison’s “The Kiss”); a mother so mysteriously powerful, cruel and uncaring that her children consider her “evil” and call her “Mrs. Drew,” her married name, and will not eat the food she makes (Kincaid’s “My Brother”); a mentally ill mother so self-absorbed and lacking in restraint that she sexually abused her young daughter (Sexton’s “Searching for Mercy Street”).

All five of these mothers have certain traits and circumstances in common: All were considered by their daughters (who now range in age from their mid-30s to mid-40s) to be attractive, smart, even gifted, and all five found their dreams thwarted in some way — whether through culturally accepted sexism or romantic disappointment or poverty or small-town backwardness. Remarkably, despite having experienced childhoods of sometimes nauseating trauma and violence and fear, these daughters — with the qualified exception of Harrison — have written books that are honest, fair and free both of self-pity and vindictiveness. Somehow, the power of their first love for their mothers, flawed and handicapped as those mothers were, prevails.

Lyden, who has spent much of her professional life living in and reporting from some of the most chaotic places in the world (thereby mirroring the familiar chaos of her girlhood), writes in “Daughter of the Queen of Sheba”: “You could say that my life as her daughter, the life of my imagination, began with my mother’s visions … Her madness was our narrative line.” Her memoir is an artful, empathetic portrait of a woman whose mental illness was a logical and even ingenious response to heartbreaking circumstances. Lyden’s mother, Dolores, was living in a tiny Wisconsin town and married to her second husband, a handsome, cold-hearted doctor whose underhanded abuse of her daughters was starting to take a heavy toll. When Lyden was 12, Dolores had her first “nervous breakdown,” appearing in the doorway as the queen of Sheba, swaddled in yellow bedsheets, wearing a toy tiara and bequeathing a country apiece to each of her three daughters.

Lyden’s tragicomic recollection of her stepfather’s first encounter with her real father, who became deaf and virtually mute in a fluke accident when he was 29, portrays the doctor’s malevolent nature. Pushed to his limit by the dissolution of his marriage and by finding another man caressing his wife in the house he built with his own hands, Lyden’s father
rushes at the doctor. The doctor meticulously removes his camel hair coat and elegant fedora, scribbles a variety of insulting words — “fathead,” “pipsqueak,” “loser” — on his prescription pad, then stuffs them into Patrick Lyden’s shirt pocket before pushing him into the Christmas tree.

Dolores’ ill-fated second marriage was the last straw in a lifetime of disappointments. Though beautiful, talented and intelligent, her working-class parents refused to allow her to attend college, sending her instead to work in a bakery the day after high school graduation. She married Patrick Lyden because her father had insisted and she’d been too intimidated to admit she wasn’t in love and found herself with three tiny children living in a backwater so monotonous that the townspeople had memorized the order in which the annual 4th of July fireworks went off. There was no room, in the 1950s and early ’60s, for someone like Dolores Lyden, who dreamed of being a model or a lawyer but who had to content herself with makeshift fashion shows in the living room with her daughters (“pivot and turn, girls!”), playing timpani in the town Legion Band every Sunday and decorating her Jello-O molds with real violets.

For 20 years, until she was finally diagnosed as manic-depressive and capitulated to drug therapy, Lyden’s mother slipped in and out of her regular, banal life, creating in her mind a life of dignity, power and achievement. Rather than projecting the blame for her disappointed life onto her child and extracting punishment by denying her love as Harrison’s mother seemed to do, or drowning herself in a vodka-flavored sea of despair and self-destruction like Karr’s mother, Dolores Lyden simply conjured up a new identity. Her reign as the queen of Sheba was one ongoing fantasy, as was the belief that she was Marie Antoinette or the daughter of a Mafia chieftain or evangelist Mary Baker Eddy. She also believed she was the CEO of her own company, for which she would rent out ballrooms for parties and send out invoices for products (anchovy cookies and meat juice jelly) to the judges, lawyers and doctors embroiled in the various lawsuits related to her mental illness. In one heartbreaking scene, the adult Jacki comes home for a visit and finds her mother sitting in the kitchen amid a pyramid of 500 purple coffee cups, each inscribed with her motto, “Think About Me.”

Like Lyden, the other four memoirists spent much of their lives painfully absorbed with their mothers — how to save them, how to keep out of their way, how to rouse their interest or win their approval. Ten years after escaping her poisonous mother’s home as a teenager and moving thousands of miles away, Kincaid still “spoke of my mother, but only to describe the terrible feelings I had toward her, the terrible feelings she had toward me, in tones of awe … as if ours had been a great love affair …”

Sexton, who despaired as a child of ever pleasing her furious, distracted mother, the renowned confessional poet Anne Sexton, realized as a young girl that her only lifeline to her mother was poetry. Sexton remade herself as her mother’s most trusted reader and ended up her literary executor, an unenviable position that led to numerous painful public revelations upon the publication of Anne Sexton’s authorized biography — including the excruciating news that would cause Linda to live on in the public’s memory forever as the little daughter upon whom Anne Sexton masturbated.

Harrison’s affair at age 20 with the father she had never known was, she candidly admits, partly a punitive act, toward both her narcissistic mother for withholding her love and herself for struggling without success to earn that love: “The good girl who failed, the thin girl, the achiever, the grade-earner, the quiet girl, the unhungry girl, the girl who will shape-shift and perform any self-alchemy to win her mother’s love. She failed, and I must destroy her. Obliterate this good daughter with one so bad that what she does is unspeakable.”

Lyden conjured up her own fantasies of escape, knowing all the while that she could never leave her two sisters and her maternal grandmother, Mabel — an irascible, foul-mouthed character prone to cooking up squirrels and who believed that life was “something you threw yourself into, like a vat” — to cope alone. “But how,” Lyden understood, “could I run away? Kate and Sarah and I and Mabel and my mother, Dolores, names like the rays on the compass. They were the world of visible magnetic force, and I could no more abandon them than rearrange the continents.” Lyden made a virtue of necessity, documenting her mother’s illness. Her goal was not merely to catalog her mother’s “most annoying acts”; she wanted to decode the meaning of her mother’s maniacal messages from the strange, loopy planet where she lived.

“The doctor says it’s just a condition,” Lyden’s mother says now of her Lithium-controlled illness, of which she remembers very little. “She doesn’t remember in any specific way the costumes and speeches and strange migrations,” writes Lyden, “the visit to bail out a prisoner or attempts to steal a horse or set a feast for Mary Baker Eddy. What she remembers is the feeling that she could set the world on fire, that she could paint what people were thinking and feeling, that she had the physical prowess of three — that she felt wonderful. That she was brilliant. That’s what she remembers.”

But Lyden remembers it all. In its darkest hours, when their mother’s madness and their stepfather’s cruelty had each of the Lyden girls spiraling into their own lonely self destructions, Lyden describes her family life as being “what a black hole is to a star. We had burned ourselves through at the center, but we were of the same shattered world, exiles who could not escape one another, and so we continued to orbit.” And yet Lyden seems to have emerged from this difficult family with a refreshing lack of darkness or self-delusion — with neither Kincaid’s bitterness nor Harrison’s sentimentality, which manifests itself in an unconvincing claim that she has achieved reconciliation with her mother.

One sad, memorable comment made to Linda Sexton by her mercurial mother, regarding Anne’s capricious, regretted divorce of Linda’s long-suffering father, was, “I found out that a little love is better than no love at all.” Perhaps this is true, but a lot of love is undoubtedly better, especially if the counterweight to that love is questionable maternal skill. Lyden’s memoir, like Karr’s, makes a strong case for the power of unconditional love to sway even a powerful tide of familial destruction.

Karr announces her forgiveness on her book’s acknowledgments page, where she mentions her mother’s invaluable support and help with research. Her stately, sophisticated mother, stuck in a smelly Texas refinery town reading philosophy and mourning a few gloriously urbane years she spent in New York, was a woman tormented by the secret loss of her first two children. Her self-loathing led her to attempt to do away with Karr and her sister: by steering a car off a bridge in one instance, another time gathering up all of the children’s clothes and toys and burning them before going back to their bedroom with a knife.

But Karr balances these terrifying episodes with affirming memories that glow like the phosphorescent water of the Gulf of Mexico, in which her family once went skinny-dipping: “Mother and I are flying underwater like light-green phantoms … Ahead of us in the green water, I can see [my sister] Lecia’s pale white feet like the neon tailfin of a mermaid slipping away just out of reach.” She remembers, too, her mother weeping over corny Mother’s Day cards, her mother’s gentle hands as she smudges charcoal around Karr’s eyes: “She is working right on my face, like she’s using all her attention to paint me right into being … I am the cathedral wall on which the painter Giotto outlines an angel.” Karr evokes a mother who was not just godlike and frightening in her stumbling pain but also eminently lovable.

Like Karr, Lyden writes of her mother’s feverish manias with a touch of wistfulness and admiration, as something that brought her childhood and her mother into high relief, a kind of Technicolor lens on the landscape of her girlhood. She sees beyond the liability of having a crazy mother and remembers her mother’s moments of glory — even if they were only in her head — as a gift. She is grown up enough and wise enough to love her mother not just despite her weaknesses, but because of them. Whether our relationships with our mothers are troubled or calm, tortured or joyous, we should all be so lucky.

In “Halfway Heaven,” Melanie Thernstrom, a Harvard graduate who also taught there, addresses this mystery with intelligence, tenacity and courage. She appears to have felt the tragedy deeply and to have striven mightily to understand it. Unfortunately, she also strove to resolve it — unfortunately because by the last third of the book her desire for resolution has apparently shriveled her capacity to understand. “Halfway Heaven” starts as a thorough, meaty and humane illumination; it ends as a Hollywood movie about Good and Evil. This ending not only disappointed me, it made me angry. A story like this urgently needs our deepest compassion, for both the perpetrator and the victim, not only for the sake of the dead, but for the rest of us as well. And dramas of Good and Evil simply don’t allow room for much more than a sentimental counterfeit.

Thernstrom would doubtless say that she did have compassion, and truthfully it is clear that she tried very hard. Of course, she didn’t have to try to feel for Trang Ho; anyone would. She escaped Vietnam with her father and older sister in an illegal boat, arriving in America after staying almost a year in an Indonesian refugee camp which Thernstrom describes as “violent and dangerous.” Trang showed great courage and ingenuity in adapting to her new country, excelling in school and supporting her struggling father; the high school teachers interviewed by Thernstrom clearly loved her and were moved by her. She was a natural leader with a nearly overdeveloped sense of responsibility who worked hard at everything, was endlessly cheerful and, it would seem, almost single-handedly held her family together during an ugly divorce. “When someone dies you always portray the victim as so perfect and good,” said a friend, “but with Trang it’s really true — she really was that perfect.”

Although she came from an upper-class family, Sinedu faced difficult circumstances too. She grew up during Ethiopia’s Red Terror, a time of mass murder and atrocities, when corpses were dragged to families’ doorsteps by soldiers who then forced the bereaved to pay for the bullet before giving up the body. As Thernstrom puts it, it was a regime in which “the murderers had the power.” Sinedu’s father was imprisoned by this regime for two years when Sinedu was 7, throwing the family into turmoil. In this deadly atmosphere, Sinedu worked single-mindedly to gain admission to the prestigious International Community School where she graduated a valedictorian and gained a scholarship to Harvard.

But the dream opportunity soon devolved into a nightmare as Sinedu proved completely at a loss to cope with the demands of the new environment. She was unable to keep up academically and she made no friends, not even with the relatives she had in the area. She became so desperately lonely that she sent a letter to dozens of strangers, randomly selected from the phone book, pleading with them to befriend her.

When Thernstrom traveled to Ethiopia to find out who this young woman really was, she couldn’t; Sinedu apparently had no friends there either. Indeed, her family seems never to have known her — or to have wanted to. Thernstrom described Sinedu’s family as rigid and strangely surface-oriented; even their expressions of grief implied a refusal to look at anything beneath the immediate surface. They praised their dead daughter, but almost as though she was a stranger, in terms of her accomplishments. They categorically refused to accept that Sinedu committed murder or suicide; they buried her with the words “While she was studying at Harvard University an unfortunate accident happened.”

The way Thernstrom came to know Sinedu was through her diary. Through it, we see a picture very different from the dull, conscientious, diffident student described by observers — and it is a picture of a soul in unspeakable pain. We see that Sinedu burned in a private hell of loneliness more profound than most of us can imagine; she never felt loved (and it seems likely that she was in fact not loved) and so did not have an ability to feel love or to relate to others in even the most fundamental way. She could not feel her heart and she knew it. As she put it in her hopeless public letter, “I am like a person who can’t swim choking (sic) for life in a river.” Desperately, she tried to school herself in ways to “make people like you,” writing to herself in the third person with instructions like, “Do not show what you really think. Put on a mask,” or listening to inspirational tapes. When these steps failed, she anguished about what she poetically called her “heart-failer thing,” the way she felt “dead and it is hard to warm myself up.” When she met Trang, Sinedu believed that finally she had found someone with whom she could have a genuine relationship. When that failed and Trang rejected her, it was more than she could bear.

Thernstrom is meticulous and empathic in drawing interwoven portraits of the two women. She is compassionate in showing us how much pain the murderer was in, even expressing a degree of respect for her doomed attempts to cope: “She left behind an extraordinary record: that of an intelligent, insightful, strong-willed person using all those capacities to fight as hard as she could for mental health — and losing, day by day, hour by hour.”

Thernstrom is at her best when she examines Harvard’s handling of the catastrophe (and courageous, considering that institution’s influence). The official response was one of complete mystification, but in fact the school had at least one loud, clear warning. One of the people to whom Sinedu sent her pleading letter was acquainted with an administrator at Harvard, and she forwarded it to that acquaintance for obvious reasons — the letter reads like a fire alarm. The administrator sent it to the dorm where Trang and Sinedu lived. The house master read it and filed it. Contrary to what Harvard officials claim, Sinedu sought counseling at the university’s mental health center, and got it — one day a month. (Her therapist is under a gag order from the university.)

Thernstrom builds a case against Harvard by arguing that the university is ill-equipped and even negligent in dealing with students’ mental problems. As part of that argument, she characterizes Sinedu as mentally ill, bringing in a host of psychiatrists — none of whom ever met Sinedu — to make diagnoses based on her diaries. And this is where Thernstrom loses her compassionate voice. Her discussion of Sinedu’s diaries is proscriptive and mechanical; it almost seems as if she’s willfully ignoring the emotional sense Sinedu makes, trying to interpret it according to a definition of sanity that does not brook human extremes or even metaphor.

“Her imagery is bizarre,” says Thernstrom of a diary passage. “She writes that what keeps her from acting out her murderous desires is the feeling of being ‘being hand and leg cuffed to a couch stuck in the ground.’ And then she adds, as if by way of explanation: ‘Sometimes even if a bomb falls beside me, I would be scared at first, and then not even bother to see what happened.’

I don’t understand why Thernstrom finds any of this “bizarre.” It reads to me like an accurate metaphoric expression of exhaustion, entrapment and pain. It is not rational because it is not describing rational feelings. I find Thernstrom’s pedantic, ham-fisted attempt to decode it stranger than anything in the passage itself. Her weirdly literal-minded insertions (“perhaps a therapist’s couch”) would be funny if they were not so soulless and so blind.

Sinedu may in fact have been mentally ill and I don’t mean to argue with any certainty that she was not. But the letter and the diaries presented by Thernstrom don’t convince me that she was. She says extreme, scary things, the most striking of which is her statement that “the bad way out is suicide, the good way killing, savoring their fear and then suicide.” This is an ugly, vicious and desperate thing to say, but human beings can be all of those things without being crazy.

One of the kindest, sanest people I know once told me that when her girlfriend was blatantly conducting an affair with another woman, she often made a point of putting kitchen knives away because she was afraid that if a knife happened to be on the counter at the wrong moment, she would kill her girlfriend. I’ve never had to hide knives, but I have experienced similar impulses, albeit fleetingly. Those impulses may be grotesque, but they are also human; people can feel that way when they are very, very hurt and very, very scared, and I do not believe pain and fear equals illness, even if the pain and fear appear irrational. It’s true that when I had those feelings, I didn’t even come close to acting on them — but I had far greater internal support than Sinedu did. This is because when I was growing up I was given a sense of myself as a loving person who could receive love. If I had not had that, I’m not sure what I would’ve done, and it is clear that Sinedu did not have that.

Thernstrom compares Sinedu’s pain to Trang’s, saying that, unlike Sinedu, the hardship Trang experienced seems to have strengthened her. She fails to see the obvious; Trang was loved. In contrast, Sinedu writes, quite rationally, about how she felt hated and attacked by her mother, how there was no feeling in her family, how they constantly ridiculed her as ugly and “very black.” Thernstrom notes repeatedly that Sinedu’s childhood did not feature unusual abuse. But lack of feeling can be the greatest agony of all, especially for someone with a profoundly emotional nature. What Sinedu describes sounds to me like pure hell.

“While Sinedu’s childhood was clearly not ‘good enough’ for her,” says Thernstrom, “it may well have been good enough for someone with a different biopsychic makeup, and indeed it was apparently adequate for her siblings — none of whom became murderers.” Well, yes, and they didn’t go to Harvard either. They didn’t come out of a cookie cutter mold. Yes, Sinedu’s family may’ve been good enough for others — so what? What does that have to do with her? How does that make her biopsychically ill?

It’s isn’t that I think mental illness doesn’t exist; I know it does. I’m not sure exactly what it is though, nor does it seem to me that many people do. Even if Sinedu was mentally ill, I think if we could have truly looked inside her, we might be shocked to see how like us she really was. This is why I am disturbed by Thernstrom’s eagerness to lock her into standard-issue categories out of a diagnostic manual; she seems to want to put Sinedu in a place of otherness, somewhere far away from us and our normal lives, in the province of doctors, where we can feel sorry for her, then dismiss her.

I fully understand this impulse; I even share it to some extent. Truthfully, I would like to believe that a person who would act as Sinedu did must be insane because it would make life a lot safer if it were so. But reality does not support that belief. The Serb soldiers who raped, tortured and murdered their Muslim neighbors were ordinary citizens, family men who had lived in peace with Muslims for years. The rapists and murderers known as the Klu Klux Klan were average citizens too — people who may have loved their children and had moments of kindness like the rest of us. Does anyone believe that these people would’ve behaved differently if only there had been enough doctors on hand to prescribe medication? Literature, from Dostoevsky to Russell Banks, is full of stories about average people who commit terrible acts, and they are not stories of mental illness. They are stories of human frailty and suffering.

Finally though, my argument here may be semantic. Whether you call it illness or suffering, Sinedu clearly needed help. It does seem possible that a gifted therapist or pyschiatrist could’ve saved her — and thus saved Trang. I may not like the way Thernstrom discusses mental health, but in fact, if all she wanted was to define Sinedu’s behavior as mentally ill, I wouldn’t be writing this. However, Thernstrom goes farther than that. In an attempt to place the event in a deeper moral context, she blurs Sinedu’s “illness” with evil, almost equating one with the other, creating an artificially profound effect. She doesn’t even do this directly. She takes the equation from other people’s mouths, and then, instead of questioning it, supports it with manipulative descriptions of the two women’s grave sites. Here are the mouths, with Thernstrom’s commentary woven in:

“We can never say why certain patients — rather than other patients with similar or more serious diagnoses — are the ones who actually commit some terrible act,” Dr. Longhurst says. “Sinedu’s diaries are clearly very disturbed, but they are less disturbed than other patients who didn’t commit murder and suicide.” If she wasn’t more disturbed than others all along, then, at some point she crossed over. What caused that crossing? “If you push psychiatrists far enough,” Dr. Longhurst says, “you’ll find most of them believe in evil.”

Thernstrom follows this with a clergyman talking about the evil “out there” as opposed to within, and then checks in with the law:

Assistant District Attorney Martin Murphy says that if Sinedu had lived she would have been charged with first degree premeditated murder. There would’ve been a trial, he says, in which the defense would have argued that she was insane and his office would have argued that she wasn’t and the jury would have made a decision as to which of those two boxes to put her in.

If she wasn’t mentally ill, what was she? What is the second box?”

He flounders momentarily. “Bad,” he says.

A paragraph later, Thernstrom is at Sinedu’s grave in Ethiopia: “On either side of Sinedu were finished graves: long white marble mausoleums, guarded by a cage of iron to keep the marble from being stolen. The head of each mausoleum is inlaid with a small black and white photo of the dead face. Forty days after the burial, Sinedu’s gravestone was to be put in: I pictured the familiar photo of her, glimpsed between bars, caught for all time under a swirl of thick glass.”

On the last page Thernstrom closes with an image of Trang’s grave and a final summation: “I walk for a long time through the labyrinth of plots and flowering hedges, birds calling to each other in every direction, but it’s Trang’s grave I find my way back to. The earth has closed over now, the gravestone inlaid, flat as a jewel. I remember the grave at the funeral, the tear-shaped blossoms sifting slowly down over the onyx casket. I pluck a flower and stand staring down at the grave. The reality of the loss is so overwhelming that all reflection seems to collapse into a sense of inevitability: Sinedu was possessed by spirits or psychosis; Trang was perfected and ready to enter the Pure Land; Harvard couldn’t prevent anything.”

“Collapse” is an appropriate word here; Thernstrom threw away the care with which she painstakingly drew the two women and opted for a cartoon of good and bad in which one smiles down from heaven and the other is consigned to hell, “between bars, caught for all time.” It’s a very easy resolution, and one that many readers will doubtless approve of, and even experience as moving. But think about it: How does Thernstrom dare to comment on other people’s souls?

It’s a heavy way to put it, especially since Thernstrom doesn’t make any such comment directly or use the word “soul.” However what she does is actually trickier because it’s less conscious; it’s emotion-based in the shallowest sense. All the stuff about birds, flower petals and floating blossoms juxtaposed against the “dead face … under a thick swirl of glass” — it goes right under the thought-wire and heads straight for prejudice. To say directly what she aggressively suggests would require that she ask a lot of hard questions, and for whatever reasons, Thernstrom didn’t choose to do that.

And she is not the only one. “Evil,” as some mysterious force beyond the scope of normal people, is invoked with increasing frequency in the media as an explanation for crimes ranging from Jefferey Dahmer’s cannibalism to the terrorism of Timothy McVeigh. We seem to have a hearty appetite for hearing about such crimes, yet we don’t want to think they have anything to do with us. It is true that for a society to feel safe, such mental boundaries around that which seems unthinkable are necessary, to a point. But if we are going to look at such crimes with any real depth, we need to be able to look past those boundaries; to do otherwise constitutes a kind of moral irresponsibility. Many of the reviews of “Halfway Heaven” have lauded its “compassion,” and in the context of the current hellfire mood, it is relatively compassionate. But to me, the compassion in the book seems like a thin, sugary layer. It is not deep enough or tough enough for the subjects it raises — especially the subject of human evil.

It’s one thing to call a person’s behavior evil — and I do call murder evil — but to call someone evil in their entirety is a judgment we as fellow humans are not qualified to make. Most of us will never commit murder. But who of us has not been cruel? Who has not inflicted pain on another, even if just with words or with an expression in the eyes? On a practical human scale, there is a huge difference between murder and verbal cruelty. On a cosmic scale, I’m not sure the difference is as vast as we would like to think. Two of Christianity’s most powerful precepts are that sin felt in the heart is as bad as sin acted upon, and that, without divine grace, we are all equally guilty, even those of us who appear perfect. Even non-Christians secretly feel the truth in this — but it is a hard truth which we find convenient to forget.

On the night I finished “Halfway Heaven,” I lay awake, thinking of Trang and how terrible her last moments must have been. My body grew rigid with fear and when a cat screamed outside my window, I nearly jumped out of my skin. I turned on the light, but the horrible images were still in my mind. I thought, maybe Sinedu really was evil. Then I thought, Sinedu isn’t here. Whatever evil you are feeling is in your own head. That realization was harder to face — and sadder — than my fear.

It is true that we live in a practical world. We can, and should, protect society from people who murder, and that usually means locking them up. But we should never lock these people out of the common humanity, “under a swirl of thick glass.” We should not pretend that they are so different from us, that they can only be understood in terms of diagnosis and illness because when we do that, we lock out a part of ourselves, the part that most needs our guidance and love. We lock ourselves into smugness. We cheat ourselves of the tenderness and humility that comes from allowing ourselves to feel the depths of human fallibility, including our own.