Squeaky
The Life and Times of Lynette Alice Fromme
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- $8.99
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- $8.99
Publisher Description
In the early 1950s, Lynette Fromme's world was more or less a paint-by-numbers existence that millions of other suburban children were living in Southern California. Red-haired, freckled, and convivial, she was the child of an in absentia workaholic father and a reclusive mother. She sang in the school choir and her dance troupe performed before President Eisenhower. As a young teenager she wrote forlorn poetry. Beyond her neighborhood, the counter-culture of Los Angeles was thriving. Lynette began getting interested in, then became attracted to, the freedoms of that world. Little by little, she began losing her way.... That day on the beach marked Lynette's introduction to the world of shade. Charles Manson, freshly released from prison, became her guide to illegal drugs and social outcasts. Over the course of a decade, Lynette would change until she found herself imprisoned for the term of her natural life in the custody of the Attorney General of the United States for attempting to assassinate then-president Gerald Ford. Meticulously researched for over three and a half years, with hundreds of interviews and thousands of pages of testimony to review, in Squeaky author Jess Bravin has created a psychosocial masterpiece of one American girl who ran away, and ran too far.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
Though by no means a master criminal, Lynette "Squeaky" Fromme has, in her criminal career, managed to violate F. Scott Fitzgerald's axiom that there are no second acts in American lives. For Fromme has captured public attention in two separate and highly publicized crimes: the Manson-Tate slayings and the attempted assassination of President Ford. Law student and first-time author Bravin begins his lively bio of Fromme with a reconstruction of the events of September 4, 1975, the day that Fromme shot at Ford; only then does he trace her path from her suburban youth and teenage years in Westchester, N.Y., and Redondo Beach, Calif., through her time with the Manson family. Bravin does a commendable job describing Fromme's youth, tracking down her high school teachers and classmates and providing a serviceable family portrait of a brutalizing father and a withdrawn mother. Young Fromme, he explains, was held in high regard by her contemporaries for both her writing abilities and her penchant for rebellion. Her route from an emotionally troubled upbringing to her acceptance of Manson's twisted philosophy of love is well delineated. Less clear is what drove her to point a pistol at Ford. Fromme, currently serving a life sentence in the federal prison in Marianna, Fla., didn't want to be interviewed for the book. Trial transcripts dominate the last quarter of the text, and although Bravin's tone suggests that he feels Fromme's sentence for the attempted assassination was excessive, clearer explanations on this and on other scores would have been welcome. Still, Bravin's report, which launches the Buzz Books line, is an excellent attempt to capture an extraordinarily elusive person. Photos not seen by PW. First serial to Buzz magazine; author tour.
