Back Seat Witness-Bearing

Anna Marie Cain interviews Sarah Gerard about “Carrie Carolyn Coco: My Friend, Her Murder, and an Obsession with the Unthinkable.”

By Anna Marie CainOctober 2, 2024

• Nonfiction

• Biography & Autobiography

MY COLLEGE YEARS were a long time ago; these days, I’m no longer routinely looking to make new friends. But wandering the streets of Ridgewood, Queens, this summer, I found myself really wishing I could meet Carolyn Bush. I know with blazing certainty that we would have been friends. And that’s exactly what Sarah Gerard wants. Her new book, Carrie Carolyn Coco: My Friend, Her Murder, and an Obsession with the Unthinkable, is an investigation of the murder of her friend, Carolyn Bush, by Carolyn’s roommate Render Stetson-Shanahan in 2016. Carolyn, a 25-year-old former student of Bard College who, at the time of her death, lived in Ridgewood, wasn’t just a talented writer—she was also someone with a singular capacity for connection, for friendship. As Gerard explained when we spoke over Zoom in August, her father had a similar reaction to encountering Carolyn on the page: above all else, he was sad that he never actually got to meet her.

The book, which begins with the crime itself, isn’t just a portrait of a warm and magnetic woman. It’s also a damning indictment of ubiquitous, entrenched networks of—to quote the title of chapter 17—extremely “shitty men.” A private investigator as well as a novelist and essayist, Gerard brings her highly sensory yet effortless (achingly so, at times) writing style and scrupulous research abilities to bear on an astonishing web of money, and on societal and institutional failures. She draws on diaries and stories from Carolyn’s friends and family, tossing aside conventional true crime formulas in favor of deftly woven, conversational complexities. The resulting assemblage is heartbreakingly immersive; at times, it can feel all too easy to forget that Carolyn is gone.

Like Carolyn, Sarah Gerard is someone you consider yourself extraordinarily lucky to meet. It has been weeks since we talked about Carrie Carolyn Coco, and I’ve been replaying our conversation—which touched on everything from the book’s inception and afterlife to the peculiarities of Bard admissions and the sheer scale of systems in place that enable violent men—in my mind on walks through my, and Carolyn’s, neighborhood ever since.

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ANNA MARIE CAIN: You and Carolyn were new friends when she died. What I find so beautiful is that your excavation of her life and this expertly crafted prose make it feel like we’re meeting a heroine in a novel—and both you and the reader want to keep getting to know her.

SARAH GERARD: I wanted the book to read like a seamless sort of fiction about this really interesting heroine—like a bildungsroman, you know? I wanted her to feel real, and making a character feel real is all in the details. Whenever someone mentioned her reading a certain book, I put that in my book. And when someone talked about discovering music together with Carolyn, I put that in there; I included the names of the bands. I think it speaks to her taste, her style, her personal philosophy, her aspirations, her state of mind, the things that really shaped her, points in her life when she made a deliberate choice to go in a certain direction.

At the same time, you bring in all these other women who suffered at the hands of violent men. The line of Bard women who had been victimized and the Bard men who hurt them … You spoke their names and found a way to connect them. It gives anyone who reads this book, especially women, the ability to see themselves in it, to see their friends in it.

I like what you’re saying about bringing in other women who have had similar experiences on this spectrum of gendered violence and placing them in a continuum within this book—placing them all alongside each other, so that you can see their interlocking mechanisms, the ways that perpetrators are enabled and supported and defended on a cultural level. Like at Bard College—somebody at the top of that school sets the culture, permitting certain activities and punishing others in ways that are biased and dangerous.

Your research revealed a microcosm of such a bigger issue, especially within these elite colleges, of how they handle—or rather, don’t handle—anything that has to do with Title IX or violence against other students. Anything to protect the money that’s coming into the school.

Someone reached out to me since the book came out who went to Bard and also worked in the admissions department. There’s an admission category in which those who are flagged did poorly in high school but their family has money, and there’s something sort of special about them. Like they might actually end up feeling special enough at this school that their families would continue donating, and they can pay full tuition. They actually receive different admissions letters than regular admits.

Seriously?

And it helps if you have famous parents or successful parents. Known society people from New York.

The Bard connection to this runs deep. Bard College’s president Leon Botstein has maintained that Render’s association with Bard is tenuous since he is no longer a student, that the school is not a part of this, and yet, most of his letters of support in the trial were from people associated with Bard and were written on Bard stationery.

Yeah, it was nine letters, including his mom’s. Other letters came from the superintendent of Rhinebeck schools [in New York, where Render attended in his youth] and several local, small family-owned businesses in the community. I unwittingly found myself in the middle of this Hudson Valley community, with Bard at its center. I didn’t know that this was a thing before Carolyn died. I found myself thinking about it as a setting and trying to learn their inner workings a little bit, enough to write about them. Not that I’m an expert or an insider or anything, but I just wanted to learn about it—their system of belief, I guess, and infrastructure.

When did you realize how much the influence of Bard affected the story and people involved?

It was gradual at first. I knew that Carolyn had gone there and that a couple other friends I had made recently also went there and a few of them were working at McNally Jackson [a New York–based bookstore chain]. I might have to credit [Carolyn’s old co-worker] Adjua with this because she pointed it out. At one point, Adjua and I shared a psychoanalyst.

That’s so New York.

It is the most New York thing I could possibly say. We both stopped seeing him at more or less the same time. He had been on his way to getting a PhD, and then once he got it, he abruptly changed my hourly fee from $40 to, like, $250. So, I couldn’t afford to see him anymore and neither could Adjua. Maybe six months later, I googled him, and he appeared in an article on this ultraconservative website, and I emailed him very angrily. The subject of the article he’s quoted in is how liberals are all insane. And they’re interviewing my psychoanalyst. And he said something highly offensive about presenting trauma the right way.

Soon afterward, I was interviewing Adjua, and Bard came up because Carolyn and Render had both gone there, and we knew other people who had gone there. She pointed out that our psychoanalyst, who turned out to be some kind of alt-right figure, was also a graduate of Bard College at Simon’s Rock, and she kind of raised an eyebrow. I guess I took that as a turn in the story, like maybe I should be paying more attention to this. She described it as a very weird place—and then I discovered that Render’s mom also worked there. Slowly, I realized the school itself might be part of the problem. It especially hit me at Render’s sentencing. I didn’t know there was a coterie of people who had written letters of support for him who all had a Bard association until maybe two years later.

You raise multiple instances in the book where Bard flat-out refuses to discipline horrifying, criminal behavior. You describe a serial rapist on campus who, according to one former student, everyone knew, but his dad was a big donor. So he was never disciplined and graduated. I screamed at my book.

Thank you for saying that. I mean, it’s been scary, honestly.

We’ve seen so many times where all it takes is one person to tear at the armor of these powerful institutions, or where people have, and suddenly things begin to break down—others begin to speak out.

I guess that would be my hope. The book went through a very extensive legal read and fact check. And since the release, people have approached me saying that they went to Bard and that they agree with all of it. And they’ve been hoping someone would say this.

I don’t have a dog in the fight. I didn’t graduate from Bard. I don’t work at Bard. I don’t blame Bard for Carolyn’s murder, but I guess, if I had to choose a position, I would say it’s kind of shitty to come forward and support Render in this way. It’s not fair, and it was dishonest and deceptive.

The sourcing was immaculate and mapped an intricate web of wealthy and connected people involving themselves in nefarious situations. I can’t imagine how much time went into researching all those pieces, or the pressure to make sure you were spot-on.

I’m glad that it had to go through this close read, which took several weeks, because I could show my work. I need to be able to do that. We need to be talking more about why Carolyn died. I mean, we knew right away who did it. There’s no mystery there. I obviously feel invested in this story, and I care what people say about it, so I don’t want to embarrass myself in public. I have seen people say online and other places that, because there’s no mystery, it didn’t need to be a story. But I think there’s a deeper mystery. I think people really want to understand why something like this could happen—and when the killer is saying he doesn’t even know why, you feel a little frustrated and start looking for answers, right?

I don’t know. I don’t know if it’s fair to talk in the collective first person. I mean, that’s what I do … I guess that’s my way of coping.

I wonder, who do you think you were writing for when you first began? Has that changed now?

Yes, I viewed this in various ways as a sort of committee effort, a group effort, and I think I still—to an extent—view it that way, and more in the moments at, say, readings that I’ve given recently, where people who are in the book have come up to me, and we haven’t seen each other in a long time … I feel that community feeling again, like in a real way, you know? I’m very grateful to so many people that helped me with this. But I think, especially towards the end of the editing process, I really had to make the decision that I was writing the book for Carolyn, and I had to—how do I put this—check in with myself and ask what I really thought Carolyn would want. And not to say that I didn’t talk to various people about that decision too, but I don’t know. Maybe it’s narcissistic that I would say that—that I think I know what Carolyn wanted—but ultimately, I guess my name has to be on the project.

There’s such a remarkable level of restraint regarding your personal feelings. You, as her friend, take the back seat. I can only imagine the emotions that unfolded the more you learned about Bard, Leon, and the Stetson-Shanahans.

I really wanted to honor the polyphony of voices that contributed to this text. I think that by taking a back seat, I am better able to bear witness to that. I didn’t want my own voice to shout over anyone else’s. I also didn’t think I really had anything more to say than what had already been said. I shared a lot of my interactions with Carolyn. I mean, there are scenes in the book where I’m there, and I guess this limited number of meaningful or special interactions that I’ve had with her definitely contributed to the direction of my research. It shapes the narrative in a way. There’s a whole chapter called “The Circle,” right? Because this was year by year, this is something that happened in 2014, and so the year 2014 in the narrative is organized around this circle scheme that she had invited me into, but I think that also told me something important about her: that she wanted a community of women helping each other and that she was close to Lizzy Crawford that year. She was interested in this sort of female mysticism. She’s a very spiritual person.

Losing people in a way that necessitates answers that you may never receive triggers something for many of us in a way that means closure can never fully be satisfied. For you, how did you know you had reached the end of your investigation and writing? Did you know it was time to stop, or did you need help to stop?

Both. I had a deadline, so I knew that I had to stop, but I haven’t really stopped either. There’s still more that I’m learning and writing, but I had to turn in the book. My editor was asking for it, and I was going to cost the publisher a lot of money if I didn’t just turn it in. So, I had to do it, and I had help. The time was kind of a mystery to me. I wasn’t really sure how to order the chapters. I knew I wanted the book to start with Carolyn alive and end with her still alive. That was important.

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Visit the Carolyn Bush Living Archive; donate to the Carolyn Bush Fund to support women and trans people taking classes at Lighthouse Writers Workshop.

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Photo by Josh Wool, courtesy of Sarah Gerard.

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Sarah Gerard is the author of the essay collection Sunshine State (2017), which was a New York Times Critic’s Pick and NPR Best Book of 2017, as well as a finalist for the Southern Book Prize, and was long-listed for the PEN/Diamonstein-Spielvogel Award; and the novels True Love (2020) and Binary Star (2015), which was a finalist for the Los Angeles Times First Fiction Prize. Her writing has appeared in The New York Times, Granta, Guernica, McSweeney’s, BOMB Magazine, and more. She is a private investigator and a graduate student in the criminal justice program at CU Denver, focusing on gender-based violence.