Emma Eisenberg: Holding Contradiction

“We tend to treat believability as if it were synonymous with truthfulness,” Emma Eisenberg writes in her nonfiction debut, The Third Rainbow Girl. Suppressing ambiguity in order to reach a familiar narrative, one that’s easy to shape out of the circumstances and thus believable, can look a lot like attempting to arrive at the truth, she tells us. The search for a definitive answer often involves paring down all the ways a story might be told, until a single version of events remains.

Eisenberg’s book, in large part about the murders of two young women on their way to a peace gathering in rural West Virginia in 1980, is engaged in a wholly other project. The book doesn’t whittle away at perspectives to determine who committed the crime, but instead expands increasingly outward to accommodate more and more points of view. Eisenberg makes enough space for a history and contemporary portrait of Appalachia steeped in dualities, and for stretches of memoir centered on the months she spent as a volunteer charged with empowering adolescent girls in Pocahontas County, where the killings happened three decades earlier. Rather than closing these pages off to doubt, she accommodates contradiction, the convoluted politics and machinations of memory, and also, in the words of James Baldwin, “what one does not remember.” At the heart of this enterprise is primary source material—a coroner’s report, trial transcripts—that doesn’t so much add up to an answer as demonstrate how the members of an Appalachian community experienced what happened. “I’m much more interested in how people talk about trauma than the trauma itself,” Eisenberg says in the interview that follows.

inhabits the in-between. It’s billed as a true-crime investigation, but in its first pages reveals all of the facts of the story in quick succession: Nancy Santomero, Vicki Durian, and Liz Johndrow hitchhiked across the United States to a rainbow gathering, a celebration of peace, and only Liz survived; thirteen years after the tragedy, nine Pocahontas County men were accused of the crime; a local farmer thought to be the trigger man was sentenced to life in prison but ultimately freed after six years, because an already incarcerated serial killer claimed the murders. It is a book about West Virginia, a state whose people fought for the Union and the Confederates, a state of the South and yet not of the South, one that has skewed Democrat and Republican, one that has been pillaged for its resources and abandoned by telecommunication companies and that in numerous ways is resistant to laws, self-sufficient, and free. Eisenberg finds herself in this divided space caring deeply about the murdered women and, simultaneously, men whose lives