I finished listening to Shit Town (spoilers follow!) this afternoon over lunch. It was uncomfortable listening, to go so deeply into another person who is dead. At the same time, John B McLemore was curiously, nihilistically, open about so much in his life so maybe it doesn’t matter.
Anyhow, it reminded me of the slightly half-baked idea of the speaker of the dead in Orson Scott Card’s novels. The idea that when a person dies you try to evoke him or her as a whole. To a limited extent the podcast holds up John B like a soap bubble, complete because he is now dead. When someone close to me died it was important to me not to elide over her faults but to remember her as a whole, not as a virtuous cartoon. Not speaking ill of the dead is, I think, a taboo belonging to those who weren’t close to the person who is gone.