Everywhere I Look: A Memoir

To classify Everywhere I Look: A Memoir as a memoir (as stated on the cover) is, in this case, an over-simplification. As other reviews have stated, Ona Gritz’s book about her quest to discover the truth of what happened to her sister Angie, her toddler nephew (baby Ray-Ray), and her brother-in-law Ray is, in many ways, genre defying. Yes, it is a memoir. Yes, it’s narrative nonfiction. It’s also a true crime story and a coming-of-age story. It is also the poignantly told tale of one family’s twisted knot of painful secrets going back decades, the kind of secrets that cut and wound in life-altering ways.

Trigger warning: this is a deeply tragic story and a very sad one. I cried, though the writing is never over-blown or self-indulgent. Everywhere I Look is skillfully, beautifully written and crafted; the author’s background as a poet, her love of language and knowledge of craft, are evident. Writerly concerns aside, the research that went into finding the true story of her sister’s life and tragic end rival the work of any detective and must have been excruciatingly painful on a personal level.

The author’s older sister (only 26, very much in love and pregnant with her second child), baby nephew, and brother-in-law were murdered in 1982 in a San Francisco apartment. At the time, the author was visiting her sister with a friend while on a break from studying poetry at the Naropa Institute in Florida. She won’t learn all of the awful details of what exactly happened to that hopeful young family for another thirty years. Nor will she learn the truth of the circumstances of her sister’s birth and childhood—or her own. Not until she begins the difficult, painful research that eventually becomes this book, a process that she likens to peeling the paint off an old building.

The known facts were that three bodies were discovered jammed into a crawl space and, thanks to two intrepid San Francisco homicide detectives, the murderers (who were living in the same apartment with the young couple) were apprehended in Florida, tried, and convicted. But the story, as the author discovers decades later, is much more complicated, and steeped in the past, than that.

Since childhood, the author had accepted the facts about her big sister—whom she loved dearly—her parents, and herself as they had been explained to her and as they had always appeared. That her sister was adopted, and that she grew up to be a troubled runaway, a drug-addicted teenager, that she deserved the punishments she received, and that her dangerous lifestyle likely had everything to do why she was so brutally murdered and then virtually forgotten (there was never a service or grave markers for her sister or nephew, who were buried alongside Ray by his family).

Ultimately, page by page, discovery by discovery, interview by interview, secret by secret, through reviewing court documents, school records, speaking to remaining family members, and more, the author finds her big sister and herself. In the book’s final chapter, the author finds closure by adding her sister and the child’s names to Ray’s gravestone:

“Of course it was heartbreaking, a gravestone for an entire family who had died violently. At the time, I also saw it as a kind of mending. So much had been withheld and taken from you in your brief life, and I’d been incapable of doing anything about it. Now, finally, I’d figured out a way to stand up for you. and soon I’d do it again by writing our story.”

Everywhere I Look is dedicated to the author’s sister, Angie Boggs, who died far too young. I recommend it highly, as a moving tribute to a beloved sister and a chilling reminder of the fundamental role of the parent to love and protect the children—all of the children.