time. And one of them said, ‘If that man was out now, I’m a forgiving man but I couldn’t forgive him. I’d kill him.’ That’s in Frozen. I was thinking about that. Then my mother went into hospital for a very simple operation, and the surgeon punctured her womb, and therefore her intestine, and she got peritonitis and died.”
When Lavery started talking about her mother, she stopped, and had to collect herself. “She was seventy-four, and what occurred to me is that I utterly forgave him. I thought it was an honest mistake. I’m very sorry it happened to my mother, but it’s an honest mistake.” Lavery’s feelings confused her, though, because she could think of people in her own life whom she had held grudges against for years, for the most trivial of reasons. “In a lot of ways, Frozen was an attempt to understand the nature of forgiveness,” she said.
Lavery settled, in the end, on a play with three characters. The first is a serial killer named Ralph who kidnaps and murders a young girl. The second is the murdered girl’s mother, Nancy. The third is a psychiatrist from New York, Agnetha, who goes to England to examine Ralph. In the course of the play, the three lives slowly intersect — and the characters gradually change and become “unfrozen” as they come to terms with the idea of forgiveness. For the character of Ralph, Lavery says that she drew on a book about a serial killer titled The Murder of Childhood, by Ray Wyre and Tim Tate. For the character of Nancy, she drew on an article written in the Guardian by a woman named Marian Partington, whose sister had been murdered by the serial killers Frederick and Rosemary West. And, for the character of Agnetha, Lavery drew on a reprint of my article that she had read in a British publication. “I wanted a scientist who would understand,” Lavery said — a scientist who could explain how it was possible to forgive a man who had killed your daughter, who could explain that a serial killing was not a crime of evil but a crime of illness. “I wanted it to be accurate,” she added.
So why didn’t she credit me and Lewis? How could she have been so meticulous about accuracy but not about attribution? Lavery didn’t have an answer. “I thought it was OK to use it,” she said with an embarrassed shrug. “It never occurred to me to ask you. I thought it was news.”
She was aware of how hopelessly inadequate that sounded, and when she went on to say that my article had been in a big folder of source material that she had used in the writing of the play, and that the folder had got lost during the play’s initial run, in Birmingham, she was aware of how inadequate that sounded, too.
But then Lavery began to talk about Marian Partington, her other important inspiration, and her story became more complicated. While she was writing Frozen, Lavery said, she wrote to Partington to inform her of how much she was relying on Partington’s experiences. And when Frozen opened in London, she and Partington met and talked. In reading through articles on Lavery in the British press, I found this, from the Guardian two years ago, long before the accusations of plagiarism surfaced:
Lavery is aware of the debt she owes to Partington’s writing and is eager to acknowledge it. “I always mention it, because I am aware of the enormous debt that I owe to the generosity of Marian Partington’s piece.…You have to be hugely careful when writing something like this, because it touches on people’s shattered lives and you wouldn’t want them to come across it unawares.”
Lavery wasn’t indifferent to other people’s intellectual property, then; she was just indifferent to my intellectual property. That’s because, in her eyes, what she took from me was different. It was, as she put it, “news.” She copied my description of Dorothy Lewis’s collaborator, Jonathan Pincus, conducting a neurological examination. She copied the description of the disruptive neurological effects of prolonged periods of high stress. She copied my transcription of the television interview with Franklin. She reproduced a quote that I had taken from a study of abused children, and she copied a quotation from Lewis on the nature of evil. She didn’t copy my musings, or conclusions, or structure. She lifted sentences like “It is the function of the cortex — and, in particular, those parts