At the end of the fourth episode of the HBO documentary series, I’ll Be Gone in the Dark, the voice of comic Patton Oswalt is frantically heard speaking to a 911 operator. Michelle McNamara, his wife and that of I’ll Be Gone in the Dark – the best-selling genuine crime novel on which the six-episode television series is founded – died in her sleep at the age of 46.
The series explores editor Michelle McNamara’s investigation into the dark global of a violent predator she called the Golden State Killer and who was also known as the East Area Rapist. Joseph James DeAngelo, who was arrested last year, terrorized women and men off the Coast of California in the 1970s and 1980s, leaving dozens of rape and murder victims on his trail. I’ll Be Gone in the Dark – directed through Oscar-nominated Liz Garbus and Emmy Award-winning director with Elizabeth Wolff, Myles Kane and Josh Koury – is a desirable investigation into the macabre preoccupation of genuine crime and a woman’s determination to do so the bloodless matter in the gentle ended up costing her life.
But McNamara – the user who wrote the definitive ebook that contriyeted for his eventual arrest – and his death is a lesser-known facet of black history. In tonight’s fifth episode, “Monsters Recoil yet Never Disappear,” McNamara’s death is unpacked and exploited through his family, friends, colleagues and the utmost heartbreak through Oswalt himself.
“If you don’t talk about grief it can set up and fortify its position inside of you and begin to immobilize you,” Oswalt says in the episode. “But the more oxygen you give it, [it doesn’t get the chance to do that].”
Episode director and series producer Wolff tells Observer it was an especially cathartic episode to create. The directing and producing team always knew they wanted to build up to McNamara’s death wherein they were going to have to grapple with both the known and unknown aspects of the situation. What is known is that McNamara died in her sleep on April 21, 2016 from a mix of prescription drugs. All indications point to it being accidental. But her long-standing, self-medicating habits are also displayed throughout. “Painkillers equal joy,” she writes in her journal at one point after suffering from postpartum depression. And in 1993, she wrote: “I probably do have a chemical-based depression.” Wolff doesn’t believe that was the writing on the wall for McNamara, but rather that it points to the harmfully casual self-medicated society that she was unwittingly a part of.
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Looking to unpack this penultimate episode of I’ll Be Gone in the Dark, Observer chatted with Wolff about building suspense in documentary storytelling and how, in this case, the series was designed to build toward McNamara’s death and its aftermath.
This interview has been amended for clarity.
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