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15 Episodes
457 Minutes Total
Synopsis
<em>November 4, 1971</em> Jennifer Rose Cooke, a girl from California, just turned 18, goes missing in a frigid forest in West Germany. She has been hitchhiking. First she caught a ride with a trucker, then with a West German soldier. Maybe she was trying to visit a young professor she had met on the boat over from New York. On that trip, he had heard her say she might throw herself overboard.
<em>April 28, 1972</em> Another girl, just turned three, lives with her parents in a house in Laurel Canyon that lets the California rain in. Her biggest fear is of the brown snails in the garden; she will not cross the brick path if one is there. It is her father's twenty-sixth birthday; on this day his sister Jenny's remains are found. Officially, she died "of exposure," although a murder investigation is begun and the file remains permanently open.
This is the tale of a relationship only half lived. I have no memories of my Aunt Jenny as a living person. For all of my younger years I knew her only as someone who had died, and the only lessons her story held for me were about death and the probability that the worst would happen. Then I began to write about her. This was the next logical step since for me she was pure story already. While I started trying to find the truth of what had happened to her, I began to see that each person in my family had a different version of the story that suited their particular worldview and satisfied their particular needs. I was no different.
In a sense, Jenny's story has become the instrument that I'm singing along to–singing about a childhood in gorgeous 1970s-era L.A., about a friendly divorce; about the changing California landscape, its violent beauty; about traveling with my dad to try to get closer to what happened; and about getting to know something about a living girl who, it turns out, preferred to be called "Rose," not Jenny.
I've left Rose alone for a few years, but now we're traveling together again.
Knowledge Elements
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