The Most Wonderful Terrible Person

In 1966, Joan Didion wrote about Lucille Miller’s murder trial in her iconic essay “Some Dreamers of the Golden Dream,” casting Lucille as a cautionary symbol of California ambition gone wrong. Decades later, Lucille’s daughter Debra Miller has written her own account. It’s a compelling premise.

Miller’s take of the trial and its immediate aftermath is the book’s strongest material. San Bernardino County functions as a character itself, just as in Didion’s essay, unforgiving, the kind of place where dreams curdle. The cultural backdrop matters too: Lucille Miller was a woman accused of killing her husband at a time when female killers were treated with a particular kind of cultural hysteria, simultaneously disbelieved and sensationalized. Miller captures that atmosphere.

At the middle of the book, the story shifts. Lucille recedes into the background, popping back up here and there, and we follow Debra through decades of substance use, turbulent relationships, and a pattern of looking to men for rescue. We see the effects of Lucille’s crime and decisions, and Miller’s interpretation of that manipulation etched into every bad decision she makes.

The narration is bracingly honest, raw, sometimes even crass. And on an important note, readers sensitive to animal cruelty should be aware that animal abuse and deaths recur throughout the book and are among its more disturbing passages.

Throughout most of the story, Miller connects themes of her mother’s influence directly, demonstrating connections between abandonment and dependence, emotional stunting, and patterns of mutually self-destructive tendencies. However, one important theme is never properly made whole: her excessive dependence on men, seeing men as her rescuers. Ironically, it’s women throughout the story who she gains the most insight from, though that lens is never widened enough to see the broader picture. This thread of seeking male acceptance, which is woven prominently throughout the second half of the book, goes without her recurring method of resolve, leaving its end floating in the wind.

Miller’s discovery of her purpose is what gets her clean and on steadier ground. There’s something poignant about a woman shaped by damage pouring herself into young women’s lives as a teacher. It gives the story a catharsis of relief– that all of the heartache and headache, substance abuse and destruction, is funneled into something that gives back, that has the potential to help others.

Readers hoping for a sustained investigation about one of San Bernardino’s most prominent crimes will finish it wanting more, yet overall, The Most Wonderful Terrible Person is a challenging but honest read, particularly for those drawn to memoirs of survival and reformation.