Visiting Hours: A Memoir of Friendship and Murder

I have a hard time with this book. It would have been interesting if I didn't find out that much of Butcher's account is fiction (as claimed by other friends of Kevin's). I feel like this is one of those girls who is touched by something horrific and scandalous and wants to insert herself more into the story to give herself more importance. I noticed how she was already trying to defend herself against these sort of accusations by stating “some may say Kevin and I weren't really friends, certainly not best friends”. She goes on to describe in detail the first time she and Kevin met. Then much later in the book talks about how the “trauma” she has experienced has caused her to make up “false memories” and now she doesn't know what was real and what she made up, including that first encounter with Kevin. Whaaaaat? She repeats several times that she was the last person who saw Kevin before he murdered Emily, but later acknowledges that he had actually spent a half hour with a friend named Wilson, watching TV before he went home that night.

Though I don't doubt that she experienced some horror and, because of her own issues, some PTSD from something like this happening to a student at her school by an acquaintance of hers, I think the fact that she wrote a book about it is insulting.

So at this point when, all of a sudden, she reveals she herself had been contemplating suicide as a young child, I didn't buy it. And then trying to say somehow that her suicidal imaginings and Kevin's complete and utter breakdown were pretty much the same was the icing on the very fake cake.