Hay House Writer’s Community offers a chance to enter a contest to win a book contract. Members work their way through a series of modules, online webinars, live Zoom sessions, and more to write a proposal for the contest. One of the requirements is to find books similar to the one you’re proposing Hay House publish. My nightmarish Tell All Book about the Vegas’s Notorious Doc entailed searching for authors of books about serial adulterers, narcissists, spousal abusers, and psychopaths. I found a few. One is Why Can’t I Just Leave: A Guide to Waking Up and Walking Out of a Pathological Love Relationship by Kristen Milstead. Another is Jen Waite’s A Beautiful, Terrible Thing: A Memoir of Marriage and Betrayal.
Mildred Muhammad’s Scared Silent details how she was abused. She escaped and went into hiding from her abusive monster only to have the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives knock on her door to let her know her ex-husband was the DC Sniper! Nevertheless, nothing prepared me for Mary’s story. There were elements similar to mine. Mary’s savings accounts, 401K, etc were drained until there was nothing left. William Allen Jordan’s other “wives” – legal and on paper were bled dry until each was facing homelessness. I escaped that fate by an unusual stroke of divine intervention!
So, what makes this book so special? Why should YOU read the book? For one, it’s scary. Parts read like a psychological thriller. Two, Mary lets the reader get inside both her head and the heads of Jordan’s victims. And three, it’s got a lot of great resources and insight into how psychopaths live amongst us. They are beguiling just like Tom Cruise’s portrayal of Lestat!
Mary’s first book about this ruthless predator was published in 2008. I skimmed it when they both arrived because I really wanted to read the Psychopath and couldn’t wait.
I recommend that anyone interested in true crime stories buy both books, watch the documentary, watch interviews with Mary, browse her website, and keep both books and go back and forth. Read one chapter in the Psychopath and then jump to a chapter in the Bigamist. William Allen Jordan was able to pretend to be a husband to two women then three then four etc at the same time, why not read two books simultaneously?
Well, thanks to Express VPN, I just discovered the YouTube will not let you watch this video in the UK but if you switch are in the US, you can!
Notice the chains on the left rising up to a soaring bird? Brilliant. I hope my readers FEEL what it’s like to be free from an abuser. Mary lived in fear – you can see stories all over the news about how she battled the effects of being gaslighted and treated like a piggy bank.
Mary became famous for losing the weight you see in this photo all because of the stress, humiliation, and constant news and interactions with women who all “married” Will thinking he was THE ONE, and that they were his ONE!
The ONLY criticism I have, and I have not discussed this with Mary before writing it, is the belief in THE ONE. It appears that all of Will’s targets and eventually victims believed in this concept of THE ONE.
When the book arrived, as the Universe would have it, I started seeing articles debunking the myth of “the one” I swear I bookmarked a couple but now I can’t find them. Never fear, Google retrieves older ones. Pun intended.
https://www.cosmopolitan.com/uk/love-sex/relationships/a18346062/finding-the-one-myth/
Mary does an excellent job of detailing how Jordan mirrored everything back to her so that she was totalling snookered into believing that he was THE ONE – the perfect boyfriend, the perfect lover – apparently sex was amazing – a fabulous father, a great cook the few times he ever did cook, a GREAT conversationalist, a romantic, and someone with a super dangerous job with the CIA!
There are no photos in either book. Mary’s wordsmithing, however, paints photos. For example, on page 123 in The Bigamist, Mary writes
“When I arrived at the office, it was very barren and rather shabby. There were plastic chairs and a pile of well-thumbed magazines detailing true-life stories of murder, deception and the inhumanity of the human race. . . . . The social worker was friendly but cautious, and arrived with an enormously thick file that she carried in both arms”.
This excerpt from http://udleditions.cast.org/craft_intro.html spells out how to identify a SKILLED author.
Just as a woodworker uses many tools and techniques to craft a piece of furniture, a skilled author uses tools and techniques of language and storytelling to craft a piece of writing. We have organized author’s craft into two categories, Narrative Elements and Literary Devices. We use the term Narrative Elements to describe aspects of storytelling. The term Literary Devices refers to specific tools of language that can appear in any genre of writing.
Our Narrative Elements are setting, foreshadowing, and characterization. They apply to most texts that tell a story, fiction or nonfiction, and they tend to be closely linked to an overall narrative arc. Although we have not focused on them here, other elements of narrative include theme, plot, conflict, and point of view.
Our Literary Devices are alliteration, personification, simile, metaphor, allusion, irony, and parallel structure. These are some of the techniques authors use to convey meaning. There are many other literary devices, including understatement, hyperbole, and onomatopoeia.
Mary Turner Thomson is, without a doubt, a skilled and entertaining writer. You definitely feel her fear, self loathing, horror, gut wrenching realizations, sheer desperation, mother instinct to protect her children at ALL COSTS, disbelief, more self-recriminations, compassion for the other “wives”, fear as she went to get tested for STDs, unrelenting drive to research everything ever written about psychopaths, and mental exhaustion!
It’s not funny. There is ONE sentence in the Psychopath that is humorous. It’s on page 88 and it’s a quote from her daughter. You have to buy the book to find it.
What I found infuriating was Mary’s descriptions of all the efforts to get Jordan locked up for good. What was worse were her attempts to get him on the sex offender’s lists in the United States once he got deported. All of her efforts, and the fact that he was still walking around free harming others, pissed me off. As I sat down to write this, I did ONE last search and Found JUSTICE! Note I did not find this on a news site.
And one last creepy glitch in the Matrix since this is a website about the MULTIVERSE.
The Notorious Doc, during an act of desperation, took a job with the Camden Department of Health in New Jersey in 2006. I had prayed for him to somehow get a job so he’d move out of our house in San Benito, Texas. I couldn’t take another beating while working full time. I found him an apartment in Cherry Hill, New Jersey. When he moved to Nevada, I had to fly to Philadelphia and rent a car to clean out the apartment. Read the article. You’ll see why I got goosebumps. I was born in New Jersey and didn’t leave until October 2000. My dad’s father’s parents were both born in Scotland. My mother’s mother’s father was born in Scotland. Mary is Scottish and lives in Edinburg!
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Correction: Mary’s last name is spelled without the “p”. Thomson NOT Thompson.
Librarian's Guide to the Multiverse! 