An interview with Becky Cooper, author of 'We Keep the Dead Close'.
Becky Cooper Heard a Rumor About a Murder at Harvard. She Spent a Decade Searching for the Truth
It might have been nothing more than some lurid gossip, had Becky Cooper—then a junior at Harvard—been able to leave it at that. When she first heard about the murder of Jane Britton, it was mentioned as a piece of institutional lore. Harvard is full of eerie and old secrets: underground societies, ancient, archaic rituals, and unsolved puzzles like Britton, who had been a graduate student at the time of her death in 1969.
But Cooper couldn’t drop it. The more she learned about Britton, the more she wanted to know. There were rumors Britton had been having an affair with a professor, who was still teaching when Cooper arrived on campus. The scene of the crime was laced with clues, each of which Cooper wanted to explore. In the end, she spent a decade obsessing over possible suspects, tracking leads in the case, and uprooting her life more than once to find the killer. The result of that all-consuming search is We Keep the Dead Close, which was published in November.
Written in flashes and fragments, the book captures the sometimes frantic feeling that readers of conventional true crime know well—the impulse to tug on disparate threads in one great unraveling. It is to some degree a traditional whodunit, with Cooper leaving no stone unturned in her search for resolution. But the structure is more careful than it seems. Cooper’s search leads her to pick up the smashed pieces of Britton’s life and put them back together—to reconstruct and restore her, to give a person who became a gruesome headline a measure of her wholeness. Here, Cooper talks about the book, the myth of objective truth, and what comes next.
Glamour: This book is so forthcoming about all the things you don’t know. You test theories that don’t turn out to be right. You have a hunch that something will turn out to be meaningful and it isn’t. Harvard as I experienced it was not a place that inspired people to want to be wrong, or to be willing to be wrong in public. I wondered as I was reading the book whether you were ever tempted to be kind of omniscient and not admit to the hunches that didn’t turn out to be right.
Becky Cooper: That’s really interesting—juxtaposing the two of those together. It honestly hadn’t occurred to me that I was kind of rebelling against the confidence that’s encouraged by a certain aspect of a Harvard education. I think, if anything, it was impossible to work on Jane’s story and not feel like you were constantly within a meditation on certainty and on the instability of meaning and the unreliability of memory. And so to offer any kind of omniscience would have felt really disingenuous to the spirit of the project.
In terms of Harvard itself, no one ever remembers their convocation speech, but ours was this man named Jeremy Knowles who just embodied everything that I thought Harvard was going to be—the transatlantic accent, a lot of tweed. He got up and he told us that the purpose of our education should be to learn how to sort out the rot. It just stuck with me. He was charging us with the task of figuring out what was bullshit. And so I think that, more than needing to aspire to a kind of certainty, that’s what I hope I have taken away from my time at Harvard.
One of the reasons that I think people are drawn to true crime is because there’s a temptation to believe that if you know exactly what terrible thing happened to someone else, you can comfort yourself by thinking, “That wouldn’t happen to me because I wouldn’t do X or Y.” But of course, so many of the bad things that happen to all of us aren’t preventable. Did you ever find yourself falling into that kind of false logic with Jane’s story?
AdvertisementJane’s story morphed multiple times over the course of the research. At first, it was a myth and then it was an open secret. And then it was a cautionary tale about the fate of many women within academia—not just like the silencing of one woman on one night, but this kind of allegorical story that spoke to something that was still going on that otherwise had no outlet.
That entire time, the feminist bent of the story seemed very apparent to me. But then, I think, the story slips one more time, which was when I realized that even within that story that people were telling each other, there was a story that put Jane at the heart of her own victimization—that she had had an affair with someone or she angered someone. And so there’s a point in the book where I say I’m sorry to her, because as much as I think that I am pursuing a story that is trying to break free from these patriarchal systems, in fact, in some ways I hadn’t examined how much it was a product of it.
I’m curious what kinds of books you read while writing this book. In some ways, it is a true crime narrative. In other ways it’s a comment on true crime narratives.
I love Maggie Nelson’s Jane and The Red Parts; it’s two parts. There are a lot of eerie similarities, not least that her aunt, whom these books are about, was named Jane and she was murdered in 1969, and the case remained unsolved for decades. It transcends genre, to me, but it’s not just about the murder and the unknown, but also grief and loss. And then after Jane comes out, the case is solved. And she writes The Red Parts, which follows the trial and the proceedings.
I loved Melanie Thernstrom’s The Dead Girl, which covers some of the same philosophical territory that I wanted to give myself permission to explore. I think Alex Marzano-Lesnevich’s The Fact of a Body was also really powerful in terms of combining genres. And then in terms of structure, Rebecca Skloot’s The Immortal Life of Henrietta Lacks weaves together three different timelines. And she as the writer is very vocal in the story. I don’t know her, but she has talked a lot about her process, and I read a lot about it, and it gave me courage to trust my instincts in terms of how the story should be told.
Around the same time as I was reading your book, I read an article about what dining and cleaning staff at Harvard were going through, in terms of being able to protect themselves during the pandemic while doing their jobs. It was another example of what we see everywhere, which is the sort of invisible people who are responsible for holding up very old, very hallowed institutions without much compensation or respect. Having spent so much time thinking about the people who are silenced to protect the powerful, what do you think comes next for these institutions?
You can love an institution and recognize that it is exceptional in some regards, but still want to push it to embody that at other levels, especially when it has such immense power. I don’t think Harvard, for starters, should be allowed to coast on what it’s doing for the undergrads who kind of wash through the population and, through no fault of their own, can only change so much.
AdvertisementThere is a huge degree of responsibility that comes with the kind of influence that Harvard has, and the system just can’t be allowed to continue as it is. Even if, as I write in the book, the members of these bodies are good people and don’t have the worst of intentions for the most part, that doesn’t mean that the system itself shouldn’t be seen and dismantled where appropriate.
You closed a big chapter of your life with the release of this book. I guess that’s true for all writers who publish books, but you were by your own admission very wrapped up in Jane and her life and her death. How does it feel to be done with her?
I mean, it’s a little dizzying. For so long, my life was so single-minded, almost to the point of claustrophobia, which I realize is its own kind of luxury. And during that time and even after I wrote the book, I didn’t let myself look over the wall of publishing it.
I’m only just now—having come through the hurricane of press and talking about the book —starting to allow myself to take stock and to decide what comes next. Working on this book brought me to the frontier of so many other stories that need to be told, whether it’s individual stories that just require a whole lot more reporting or stories about programs like Title IX that need to be explored in depth. That has to happen.
With every story, though, I have to think about whether I’m the right person to do it. And so I think some of the next period of my life will be spent figuring out if I’m the right person to do it. And if not, how do you pass along those stories? How do you make sure they land in the hands of the right person?
The last question I have is about the discipline at the heart of the book. Over the past year, there’s been so much conversation about needing to be honest about the American past, needing to dig it up, sometimes literally, and needing to reckon with it. This book is about anthropology and its blind spots—how even in a field that’s supposedly based on objective fact, there’s some much manipulation and bias. You’ve obviously thought a lot about that. Do you think it still works as a discipline that can help tell the truth?
I think it has to start with an awareness and an admission of the imperfection of it. I think part of it is getting a wider, more diverse set of people to dig up the past and reconstruct it. So that even if everyone, with the best of intentions, is going to kind of influence the narrative that they find, if at least there is a diversity of ideas represented, then that would be a better start. I think there’s also a positive trend in anthropology that’s called “expressing your positionality” at the beginning of ethnography and not trying to hide that.
I think those things are crucial. And then I think we have to figure out how to reward the very unsexy process of trying to dig up as many facts as possible and incentivize people to present their work not only in its synthesized narrative form, but also the data itself so that other people can decide if they would come to the same conclusions themselves. That was part of why my book is loaded with endnotes because I wanted people to be able to do that for themselves. Like, here’s my version of it. It’s flawed. I tried my best, but it’s still influenced by who I am. But here’s all the stuff I read and used because I want you to be able to check my work. I think that attitude, I hope, will start taking over the field.
A little opportunity for some peer review.
Exactly. I hope so.
Mattie Kahn is the culture director of Glamour.
This story originally appeared on: Glamour - Author:Mattie Kahn
