What the Hell Was I Thinking?

I’ve written novels. I know writing a book isn’t easy. But nothing quite prepared me for writing narrative nonfiction.

Good Lord.

Writing The Girl on the Billboard, the story of Susan “Su” Taraskiewicz, may actually fry my brain.

It’s like math. And I hate math.

Outlines, timelines, dates, facts, court documents, grand jury testimony, interviews, newspaper archives, citations. More dates. More timelines. Just when I think I’ve got something figured out, I find another piece of information that sends me right back to the beginning.

It’s a never-ending term paper. Except nobody is grading it, there’s no due date, and I can’t just hand it in and be done.

With fiction, I could move things around. Change the sequence of events. Create a conversation. Decide something worked better happening on a Tuesday instead of a Friday. I had the freedom to tell the story the way I wanted.

Not here.

Every date matters. Every statement needs to be accurate. Every allegation needs to be attributed to the right person or document. There’s a difference between what someone said, what investigators believed, what prosecutors alleged, and what was actually established in court. And I have to keep all of it straight.

Then I have to somehow turn all of that into a story people will actually want to read.

I don’t want to write a police report. I don’t want to write a textbook. I want readers to know Su. I want them to understand who she was, the world she lived in, the people around her, the workplace she walked into every day, and what was happening in the years leading up to her murder.

I want it to read like a novel, but I don’t have the luxury of making anything up.

Some days I spend hours working and feel like I’ve accomplished absolutely nothing. I’ll go down a rabbit hole researching one detail, only to discover three more things that need checking. I’ll move a paragraph from one chapter to another, then move it back the next day. I’ll stare at a timeline until I can’t remember what year I’m even in.

And don’t get me started on organizing thirty-four years of investigative history.

There are days when I wonder what the hell I’ve gotten myself into.

I also feel an enormous responsibility to get it right. Not just for Su, but for the people who have trusted me with their memories, their documents, and things they’ve sometimes carried around for decades. There are people who have spent years trying to get answers, and others who have never spoken publicly about what they know or remember.

I can’t afford to be careless. I can’t fill in the blanks because something makes for a better story. And I can’t ignore something simply because it doesn’t fit neatly into the chapter I’m working on.

It’s exhausting.

But here’s the thing. At least I have the chance to do this. To challenge myself. To do something hard, like Su did. And I find inspiration in that.

So I’ll keep plugging along and try to remember that the next time I start complaining about timelines, footnotes, and the pile of papers taking over my desk.

Because someone took away her life. Someone decided they had the right to do that, and then went on living their own.

Pretty wild when you really wrap your head around it, isn’t it?

I wonder what they think about. I wonder if it bothers them. Do they sleep well at night? Have they justified it somehow? Learned to live with it? Or maybe they’re sociopathic and it doesn’t bother them at all.

I’ve found, in my decades on this earth, that people can justify just about anything. And they do. So many of them. It’s astonishing what people can convince themselves is acceptable.

“She should have just left.”

“She should have taken the money.”

“She should have kept her mouth shut.”

She should have this. She should have that.

So what? She got what she deserved?

Nah. I don’t think so.

Spin it however your mind needs to. Tell yourself whatever story allows you to sleep at night. The rest of us call bullshit.

Maybe you really don’t care. Maybe you never did. Maybe you convinced yourself a long time ago that what happened to Su was somehow her own fault.

But if you do care, even a little, you could do the right thing now.

Thirty-four years later.

For an 84-year-old woman who is still waiting for answers. A mother whose anger has slowly given way to a monstrous kind of pain and grief.

I’ve thought a lot about anger and how it can keep a person going. It gives you something to fight against. Something to focus on. A reason to get up and keep pushing when you might otherwise fall apart.

And what happens when that anger starts to fade?

There’s the pain.

Pain that I imagine is almost impossible to comprehend, especially when you’ve spent decades pursuing answers and justice, perhaps never really allowing yourself to feel the full weight of what happened.

Marlene has lived thirty-four years without her daughter. Thirty-four years of birthdays, holidays, family gatherings, and ordinary days when she should have been able to pick up the phone and call her.

Think about everything that has happened in your own life since September 1992. Everything you’ve experienced. The places you’ve gone. The people you’ve loved. The opportunities you’ve had. The things you’ve complained about, celebrated, taken for granted.

Su got none of that.

And whoever took her life has had all those years. You’ve lived a whole lot of life since then. You’ve had opportunities and experiences that Su never got to have. You got to grow older. She didn’t.

Marlene’s life changed in an instant. Yours continued.

I wonder if you ever think about that.

Maybe you’ll finally man up. Maybe you’ll find whatever courage you haven’t managed to find in thirty-four years. Maybe you’ll take out the trash or deliver yourself, in more ways than one.

Or maybe you’ll just keep doing what you’ve been doing.

Who knows.

But I do know this. Su didn’t deserve what happened to her. She didn’t deserve to be threatened, harassed, or made to feel afraid in a place where she was simply trying to do her job. And she certainly didn’t deserve to die because someone decided her life was theirs to take.

No amount of rationalizing, blaming, or rewriting history will ever change that.

So I’ll get back to my outlines, my timelines, my court documents, and my never-ending term paper. I’ll keep checking dates, rearranging chapters, reviewing testimony, and trying to make sense of things that happened more than three decades ago.

I’ll probably change the outline another fifty times. I’ll question my sanity more than once. And there’s a very good chance this book will fry whatever is left of my brain.

But I get to do this. I get to challenge myself, learn something, struggle through it, and hopefully come out the other side having accomplished something that matters to me.

Su should have had that same opportunity. To grow older, make mistakes, change her mind, pursue her dreams, complain about her job, fall in love, or decide one day to do something completely different with her life.

All the ordinary things the rest of us take for granted.

Someone decided she wouldn’t get to do any of them.

So when I’m sitting at my desk, frustrated beyond belief because a date doesn’t line up or a chapter isn’t working, I need to remember that.

I have the privilege of doing something difficult.

Su never got the chance to finish living her life.

And Marlene is still waiting to find out why.

The least I can do is keep going and get the damn story right.