[spoilers]
I took my time in reading this one, trying to go slow and remember just about everything I could. Overall, I would say that this is a good book, but out of 5 stars, I’d rate this a 3.5. It’s good at times, and it drags on at times. I felt like the book started out interesting and I couldn’t put it down. I was shocked in a way that her parents were the ones that essentially started her on the path to ending up with the Manson family. I was shocked for sure when I read that her grandfather molested her. I was disgusted that someone would do that.
When reading about how her father had an itch to express his creative self and get away from the ‘nuclear family’ life, I could understand in a way. I know what’s it’s like growing up in the Midwest, and there’s not to do, let alone feel like you can thrive creatively. What I don’t understand is why was her father such a complete…air head? He was a misogynistic, self centered, cheating, lying asshole that put himself instead of his family first. The fact that he really thought that there wasn’t something fishy with exchanging their house for a trailer to travel to California to just shows how gullible both parents were. I feel like Dianne’s mother essentially went along for the ride with Clarence/Chance, since back in the 50’s it was still taboo to be a single mother.
When Clarence eventually left Dianne’s mother for another woman and bailed to California, I felt that was a sign, a gift even, for her mother to have the freedom from the loser that Clarence was. It is unfortunate that he essentially came wallowing back, and I wonder if he only wanted his wife and kids back because the other woman was tired of him. Later on when they lived in Santa Monica and their dad started doing all the pseudo-intelligent hippie things (like chopping down the table’s height) I couldn’t help but roll my eyes. What bothered me the most was that the dad would have ‘intelligent discussions’ while high with the other hippies, and yet didn’t seem to think anything significant with the idea of feminism? I’m surprised for someone that ran all the way to California to leave the Midwest life didn’t open himself up to other open minded concepts of the time.
I won’t lie and say that the majority of the blame doesn’t lie with Dianne’s dad. If he was a stable partner, and didn’t encourage Dianne’s mother to be so submissive, then none of the family members wouldn’t have turned out the way they did. I can’t say that Dianne’s mother isn’t at fault though, since she was part of the problem too. If her mother never went back to her dad, Dianne wouldn’t have turned into a mess.
What I, and other people, find disturbing with the book is how much Dianne talks about sex. It’s one thing to bring it up when it’s part of the story, but once she brought up how she lost her virginity, it was like the floodgates were down and there were anecdotes about sex everywhere. Underage stuff. Dianne was about 15 for majority of the stuff in her story, give or take. The fact that she went from essentially a shy young teen to describing how she’d “seduce” men to appease charlie or something was just so...bleh. I’m sorry, I just don’t want to read that stuff.
There were interesting bits in the story that I hadn’t learned anywhere else. With Dianne’s book I learned who apparently was Susan Atkins’ baby daddy ( a guy named old bruce), of which was a totally different person that what other people have said. For example, Jeff Guinn wrote that apparently Susan thought that the father was “probably some guy that she met in Arizona” while the family were first traveling around in the black bus. Also, apparently Dianne bit the umbilical cord for Susan’s baby? That’s something that I had never known before. Which honestly, is interesting, because there was always the rumor that Charlie had bit the umbilical cord for when his baby Michael was born (but according to Dianne’s book, Charlie used a scalpel).
There were things that I wish she would have brought up, that didn’t seem to appear at all. For example, she didn’t bring up how did Susan find out she was pregnant, and what did the other family members do? What was Charlie’s reaction? Also, she briefly mentions that Sandy Good had her baby...and that the women nursed on Sandy’s breasts so that she’d still make milk while they were locked up in Inyo. Disturbing. But Dianne never brought up that Sandy was even pregnant until after she had had the baby. I wish that perhaps moments like these would have been talked about, because one of the points of the Manson family was for them to apparently make as many babies as they could. Ironically, only a few of the members seemed to have had any. I’ve read that Sandy’s baby was actually Bobby’s, and I hoped that perhaps Dianne could have confirmed that.
When the book got to the point of Dennis Wilson’s appearance, it started to drag. It was like that part of the book was in a super slow mode, and there’s details there too that were also not gone over. For example, it’s Manson lore that the family used up so much money from Dennis while they overstayed their welcome. And yet, Dianne really only mentioned one hospital visit because Sadie gave them all gonorrhea.
It is apparent that Dianne is a woman of faith, and near the end of the book, it kind of just starts ramping up. I wasn’t disgusted, but it seemed kind of too much. Surprisingly, her book ends at her having testified in court, and not talking about much after. I feel like her book suffered the same pitfall that Jeff Guinn’s did, where both books seemed to have sort of rushed near the end to just be done with it. For example, Guinn’s book didn’t go over the trial as much as I would have expected, and Dianne’s is the same way. There’s also so much more to the book that I would have liked to know about past her Manson experience, that she didn’t talk about at all.
The epilogue talks a little bit about how she traveled Europe with a guy named Jim and that relationship sort of faded away. She eventually met her husband and had her kids, and that fateful night that she told her kids that she used to be a Manson girl was one of the biggest parts of the after part. Unfortunately her husband passed away from cancer about five years ago now. She’s found love again. I’m unsure what she’s up to now, and if she’d ever write another book again.
Considering how much focus there was on her childhood and the wrongs that her father did in the first half of the story, I was expecting to see some sort of follow up on that. Unfortunately we never hear about her father again after the one visit her parents were allowed when Dianne was in the mental hospital. All I know about her mother is that she moved to Oregon and had another baby. I’m really curious what happened to her father, what did he ever end up doing in his life, and what ever became of Dianne’s siblings? Did they harbor any resentment to their parents?
What I think that this book is good for, is understanding how the dynamic of the family worked, to some extent. I feel the same way about Guinn’s book too. Whereas Helter Skelter was much more about the legal proceedings, the two former books gave a pretty good insight as to how the family worked, and why some people felt too hypnotized to get away.
My only two gripes are that, the “descent into madness” that Charlie started to exhibit kind of just came out of nowhere, and the writing seemed to depreciate near the end of the book. There was just a lot of weird ways that things were worded, like as if no one bothered to re-read it to ensure that it made sense. Would I recommend this to someone that has never read anything about Manson before? No. I think that this is one of those books that you read if you are deep into the rabbit hole, know who everyone is, how most of the dynamics already were. Otherwise, I feel like reading the things that Dianne wrote, especially in the first half of the book, may be lost on you.
[SCORE: 3.5/5]
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