It’s a Thursday morning and I’m barely awake when my phone greets me with a disturbing response to the fourth episode of : tweet after tweet expressing anger, even hatred, toward Reena Virk. Someone saying, “I’m not even mad she gets killed.” I’m upset, but I wish I could say that I’m surprised.
Sometime around 2004, as the book I adapted was being published, Rebecca Godfrey made the decision not to include the story of how Reena ended up in foster care. She was concerned that this particular fact would make Reena too unlikable to garner sympathy from a reader. This choice, within the context of a book that largely relied on readers’ ability to sympathize with Reena’s murderers, is worth examining.
No doubt pressured by the media environment at the time, which had even less tact than now when it came to discussions about murdered young women, Rebecca removed the detail of Reena falsely accusing her father of abuse and the circumstances that led to it. Like waving a wand, Reena was transformed in the narrative from a deeply complex and flawed girl into, well ..
. just a girl. A girl who died.
Her mistakes were erased in the name of likability, but with them, pieces of her story and her family’s story disappeared as well. Lost was the account of the racism her father faced at the hands of local police. Also lost was the context for Reena’s rage and loneliness, what might have fueled her to spread the rumors that ultimately led to her death.
Perhaps most imp.
