Yours for Eternity
A Love Story on Death Row
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4.0 • 3 Ratings
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- $19.99
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- $19.99
Publisher Description
From one of the greatest legal injustices of our time sprang one of the most unlikely - and unforgettable - love stories. For anyone who followed the case of the 'West Memphis Three', or read Damien Echols's memoir, Life After Death, there is one lingering question: Who was the woman - courageous, affected, or just plain crazy enough - to fall in love and marry him while he was on death row?
Lorri Davis was a landscape architect living in New York City when she saw Paradise Lost, a documentary about the three young men imprisoned in Arkansas for an unspeakable crime they didn't commit. When her first letter arrived in Echols's cell in 1996, hers were some of the first kind words of support he had heard.
Over the course of a remarkable sixteen-year correspondence, Echols and Davis grew to know each other, fall in love, and marry - all without ever being able to touch each other freely or be alone together. In Yours for Eternity, they describe also how they overcame the enormous challenges and heartbreaks throughout the years - personal setbacks, legal complications, and much more. Astoundingly, thousands of their personal letters have survived, to create a singular portrait of their marriage told in alternating voices by Echols and Davis both.
Yours for Eternity reveals a relationship unfolding in the most exceptional of circumstances. Powerful, unique, and incredibly intimate, it is a modern-day love story for the ages.
Damien Echols and Lorri Davis met in 1996, and were married in a Buddhist ceremony at Tucker Maximum Security Unit in Tucker, Arkansas, in 1999. Echols spent nearly eighteen years on death row until his release in 2011. He is the author of the New York Timesbestselling memoir Life After Death. For more than a decade, Lorri Davis spearheaded a full-time effort toward her husband's release from prison, which encompassed all aspects of the legal case and forensic investigation and, with Echols, served as producer of the documentary West of Memphis. Echols and Davis live in Massachusetts and New York.
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'Damien Echols suffered a shocking miscarriage of justice. A nightmare few could endure. An innocent man on death row for more than eighteen years, abused by the very system we all fund. His story will appal, fascinate, and render you feeble with tears and laughter. A brilliant memoir to battle with literary giants of the calibre of Jean Genet, Gregory David Roberts, and Dostoevsky.' Johnny Depp
'This is a stunning piece of work. Such hope while faced with injustice. Damien teaches us how to live.' Eddie Vedder on Life After Death
'Wrongfully imprisoned by willfully ignorant cops, prosecutors and judge, Damien Echols draws on all his wits and his unique view of humanity to survive eighteen years on death row. My admiration for him, and the strength of his spirit, increases with every page.' Peter Jackson, Academy Award-winning director, producer and screenwriter
'Even for this remarkable young man, every day was a struggle, and his survival, his sanity, is won on every page. This is a deeply moving book, almost Dickensian in its moral scope: religion, hypocrisy, evil in office, with virtue and good fellowship finally triumphant. And no irony.' Weekend Australian on Life After Death
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
Echols (Life After Death) was on death row in Arkansas in 1996 when he began to correspond with Davis, a landscape architect living in New York City. Over the next 16 years, they wrote each other thousands of letters. The letters trace the evolution of their relationship through friendship to romance and marriage, and also address the complexities of Echols's appeals. Echols had been convicted for the murder of three young boys in West Memphis in 1993, and the case of the "West Memphis Three" became a cause c l bre, generating documentary films and books. Forensic evidence and claims of jury tampering led to the release of all three men in 2011. Echols and Davis are both competent writers (and postscripts and footnotes add some context to the correspondence); however, as intelligent and passionate as the lovers are, there's little for a reader not already engaged with Echols's odyssey. In the end, it's the quotidian details that leave the greatest impression: Echols's description of his Buddhist practice, or Davis's story of how she smuggled fruit into prison via a string tied to her underwear.
