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This is exactly right. Well, we're so excited to be sharing the trailer for our brand new show, Brief Recess, a legal
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podcast with Michael Foote and Melissa Malbranch. You may know Michael as the immigration lawyer from TikTok who gives an insider's perspective
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on the legal system, usually with way more humor than it deserves. And Melissa has spent her career as a nonprofit leader, a writer, and most importantly, Michael's
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best friend. And together they discuss real-life legal issues that affect us all.
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It's smart, hilarious, and it makes the law accessible in a time when we all need to know what's going on.
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So stick around after this episode of My Favorite Murder to hear the trailer for Brief Recess, premiering Thursday, November 13th.
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And you can follow Brief Recess now on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.
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Goodbye. Goodbye. Hello! And welcome to My Favorite Murder. That's Georgia Hartstark.
00:01:11
That's Karen Kilgareth. And we're back for a moment from the road. We are in the midst of our tour.
00:01:18
Let's see, when this goes up, we'll only have two cities left. Can you believe that?
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We're just on LA, which is insane. Yeah, it feels like it was just a gleam in our eye. And now it's almost over.
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What's your favorite moment? I know what your favorite gift is from the road. You do?
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Yeah, we haven't talked about this yet for some reason. Favorite moment. I did enjoy kicking that stuffed animal back out into the audience after they threw it at us.
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That's right. Someone threw up like a big plushie and it rolled on to the stage like a grenade.
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It was very scary. It was very surreal, quiet moment that we just stared at it and we didn't know what to do.
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And then Karen just took two steps and punted it back into the audience. I mean, one of my proudest moments.
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What about yours? Well, I was going to say to you, do you remember when someone in the meet and greet very early on was a dentist and brought you the little scrubby toothbrush toothpaste thing from after you get your teeth clean?
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It was the most meaningful gift. Like what, you know, the real gift is people actually hearing you when you say things.
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Right. He came up and he's like, I'm a dentist. So I brought you the gift that only I can give you or whatever, you know, his little speech was.
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Yeah. That you asked for an episode like 200 something. Yeah. Where the story of me asking my own childhood dentist that when I was like 10 years old and he just started laughing.
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He's like, what are you talking about? And then he was like, I'm a dentist and I got it for you.
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He gave you a baggie like full of dental scrubs. The scrubbiest tooth polish that I can't really use at home.
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I don't have a polisher, but I'm so glad you reminded me of that. That was so incredible.
00:02:52
That was really good. Yeah. Well, thanks to everyone for coming to the show so far.
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They've been just absolutely incredible to come back. Just having not done that in six years,
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I forgot what it was like to walk on stage with people screaming at you. And it is just like unlike any feeling you'll ever have.
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I'm assuming what giving birth is like that. I don't know. I'll never know. I think it's a lot louder than giving birth.
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Although, who am I to say? A lot more fun. So good. So like, I do think it's that electricity that you can only get in that situation. It's easy to go like, oh, yeah, I remember and whatever. But it's like, once you're doing it, I don't know, I find it addictive. I love it.
00:03:33
Yeah. I'm worried I'll be like chasing that high for the rest of my life once this in 20 years when this all ends. All right. What do you got?
00:03:40
Well, let's see. Oh, can I read you this email that's from a listener from a story I told about pulling up behind somebody that actually had an SSD GM bumper sticker? So I got to see it in real life. And yeah, it was the first time. Well, someone wrote in and the subject line is Karen honked at me. And it says, let's get into it. It was a weird day. I was rushing home from work because I got a call that my wife was in a bike accident. And then it says she's okay, banged up and bruised, but okay.
00:04:07
I was just focused on getting to her at the urgent care off pass avenue. I exited the 134 pass and was letting my mind go to dark places when honk honk. Huh. That was weird. Who's honking? I look in my rearview mirror and the woman behind me is waving. Okay, weird. The light turns green and I'm making my left turn and honk honk honk. Now said woman has her window rolled down and she's waving emphatically. She's smiling so she must not be pissed at me for something I've done.
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And in my confusion, I waved back because it's the polite thing to do. Oh, my God.
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This person was having an actual emergency. And you were like, you were concerned as to why they weren't paying attention to you.
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But they were literally having an emergency. I demand that you talk to me about my podcast, no matter what's happening in your family.
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Okay, it says, I turned left into the parking lot and she kept going. I figured I'd never know what the hell that was about.
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Oh, didn't even know it was you? Oh, my God. No, that's this is hilarious. So cut to a few weeks later and I get a frantic text from my friend Anne.
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And then it says, quotes, was this you? And then she sent me an Instagram post where Karen describes her version of this encounter.
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I wish I'd realized it was Karen, even though I was in the middle of a weird damn life sucks
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sometimes moment. It would have lifted my spirits even for just a passing moment.
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Oh, that's nice. Karen, if you see me again and you honk, I promise to be as joyful and excited as you
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looked last time. Oh, my God. I can't believe we're getting the other side of this story.
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hilarious. And then it says, my friend Amber and I will see you ladies in Pasadena. Can't wait.
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We'll be the ones waving in the middle section. XOXO cat. See, we got to wave at them. We got to
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say hi to them. That is the sweet. I mean, what a horrible and yet, thank God it wasn't, you know,
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it turned out okay Yeah man But just to have that happen while you having a panic attack essentially Oh my God It a real act out of you never know what other people are going through And it like honk honk honk
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Hey, honk, honk, honk. Are you all right? Honk, honk. Oh, that's amazing. All right.
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Should we do some highlights? Yeah, we have a podcast network called, what's it called?
00:06:15
Exactly Right Media. That's right. I'm so tired. Here are some highlights. Okay, so tomorrow, Buried Bones.
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we'll have a very special bonus episode from the high seas, live from the Virgin Voyages crime crews.
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Paul and Kate take on one of their most requested cases ever, the Black Dahlia. Whoa.
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Yeah. You can watch the full episode on the Exactly Right YouTube channel, youtube.com slash exactly right media,
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or you can listen to the audio wherever you get your podcasts. Wow, what a show.
00:06:44
Speaking of YouTube, a brand new Halloween episode of MFM Animated premiered yesterday.
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Head over to the Exactly Right YouTube channel, Again, youtube.com slash exactly right media to watch Child Devil out now.
00:06:59
We got to see Nick Terry in Seattle. He's the greatest. And episode five of our newest series, Hell in Heaven, produced with Blanchard House and
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iHeart Podcasts is out today. It is a hit podcast. It's so exciting. This thing shot up the charts and you should listen.
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One gunshot, one body and a mystery that only gets stranger from there. It's Hell in Heaven.
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And in honor of this week's episode of Rewind, we're re-releasing our classic Triflers Need Not Apply merch design from 2017.
00:07:29
You can pre-order a ladies boxy tee, which you guys seem to love, a unisex tee or a hat, now until November 4th at exactlyrightstore.com.
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You guys love that design, so we're bringing it back. All right, Karen, you're up and only?
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I'm the only one up. You're sitting up with me. so thank you for that and thank you for everyone else doing it too i'm going to tell you guys a
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little story in honor of halloween tomorrow it takes place in lake geneva switzerland in 1918
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and that summer is remembered for two big things one gray skies and very little sunshine and two
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the birthday of a very very famous monster the real story of his creation is fittingly gothic
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There's death, disaster, a lot of drama, and a handful of bohemian literary heavyweights huddled in a room, drunk and fawning all over each other while thunder and lightning rages outside.
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And among those bohemians is our famous monster's true creator, and she is only a teenager.
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This is the story of Mary Shelley and that gloomy summer vacation when she created Frankenstein.
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Holy shit. Okay, so the main sources that Marin used in this story today are works of several Mary Shelley biographers, including Charlotte Gordon, Fiona Sampson, and Miranda Seymour.
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And the rest of the sources are in our show notes. So truly, to really set the scene, the story starts in 1815 in Indonesia on the island of Tsumbawa.
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And that is where the volcano Mount Tambora erupts in a deadly series of blasts.
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There is a book I was just going to tell you that I am obsessed with called The Year Without Summer, 1816, and the volcano that darkened the world and changed history.
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And her story, she's in it. Mary Shelley. Yes. Yes. This is it. It's by William Klingman and Nicholas Klingman.
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It's so fucking good. I'm about to retell you this story that you know. No, but I had never heard of it before.
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And people don't know it. Me either. And it changed history. And it's such a big, like the kickoff disaster event is such a gigantic disaster.
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It's like beyond belief. Yeah, the volcano. But the thing is, that's cool too, is that nobody knew why everything changed, that it
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was a volcano until the future because they didn't have just like weatherman telling you
00:09:59
what was going on. Oh yeah, yeah. That makes sense. A mystery. So they're just like, it's rainy.
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It's just summertime, but it's thunderstorms and craziness. Not only that, it's like none of the crops are growing.
00:10:09
Why is this happening? No one knew. Okay. Oh my God. I'm so excited. This is so widespread. I feel very dorky about loving this book. And now I'm
00:10:17
so excited to hear this. No, it's so good. Okay. So then tell me and jump in when you know stuff,
00:10:22
please. If there's like details or whatever. So it's Mount Tambora erupting in a series of deadly
00:10:28
blasts. The final explosion happens on April 10th, and it is particularly catastrophic.
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To put it into perspective, it's considered the most destructive explosion in recorded history.
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it is a hundred times more powerful than Mount St. Helen's eruption in 1980. A hundred times.
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A hundred times. And if you want to know how powerful that eruption was, you can go to episode 370,
00:10:51
Necessary Yelling, and I will tell you all about it. Okay. So some reports say that the blast could be heard more than 2,000 miles away.
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So that would mean if you're in Los Angeles, you can hear an explosion in Atlanta, Georgia.
00:11:04
It blows more than 4,000 feet off the mountaintop. and eyewitnesses say that it looks like Mount Tambora has been, quote, consumed by liquid fire,
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a fountain of ash, water, and molten rock shooting in every direction. So this explosion creates fiery,
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hot, extremely powerful gusts of wind that flatten homes, uproot trees, and toss human
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beings around like ragdolls. Pumice stones the size of grapefruits are falling from the sky.
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Oh, pre-pumice stones. Right? Just grab one for your heels and get indoors, please.
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But it won't matter if you're indoors because 15-foot tall tsunamis hit land and destroy everything that is still standing.
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Heavy ash falls from the skies, burying everything within 20 miles of the volcano and most lethally scorching.
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1 debris shoots down the side of Mount Tambora at 100 miles an hour In what look like fiery avalanches that incinerate everything in their paths vegetation homes and of course the people
00:12:07
It's estimated 10,000 people die instantly in this explosion. But then, as you were saying, in the months that follow,
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the nearby villages reel from destruction of crops and all the ash that's still in the air and no clean water.
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and then the death toll in Indonesia grows eventually to 90,000. According to Scientific
00:12:28
American, quote, no other volcanic explosion in history has come close to wreaking disaster of
00:12:33
that magnitude. Wow. So it's obviously humongous and then has all these repercussions because once
00:12:40
that debris is in the atmosphere, it forms a massive cloud of volcanic, you know, junk,
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and it envelops the entire planet in two months. And that causes bizarre, unprecedented weather systems
00:12:53
all around the world. So some places see strange, sudden frosts. Some see unending rain.
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Others suffer horrible droughts. And it all causes the following year, 1816, to go down in history as, quote,
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the year without a summer. So crazy. And if you look at paintings from that time,
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landscape paintings, the sky is a different color in all those paintings because the sky was literally a different color.
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for years it's insane like ashy ashy gray reddish weird yeah ashy oh yeah like when it's sunset but there's been a fire and it turns those crazy colors yeah we know that here
00:13:29
in LA too well yeah but that's not the end of the devastation the eruption sends more than 35 cubic
00:13:35
miles of ash gas and debris into the skies wired magazine will say it was enough to quote bury all
00:13:43
the playing surface of Fenway Park in Boston, 81,544 miles deep in ash. What? I can't even wrap my head around that.
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I know, it's because we're not baseball people. But it's basically like from here to that far into space, essentially, is so much.
00:14:00
That's how much. So much shit was in the air. As far away as the southern United States, snowfall is reported in both June and July,
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with one Virginian note that, quote, On July 4th, water froze in cisterns and snow fell again, with Independence Day celebrants moving inside churches where hearth fires warmed things a mite.
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End quote. Of course, that all makes for very bad harvests, meaning food supplies around the world are much smaller than normal.
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The prices for basics skyrocket, and that leads to a widespread famine. A writer named Gillen Darcy Wood notes that, quote,
00:14:36
villagers in Vermont survived on groundhogs and boiled nettles. Oh, dear. While the peasants of Yunnan in China sucked on white clay.
00:14:46
Wow. Summer tourists traveling in France mistook beggars crowding the roads for armies on the march.
00:14:52
So it's horrible and it's horrible everywhere. Hunger, cold temperatures, and social chaos is all around,
00:15:00
making it hard for the average person to fend off disease. Europe sees a brutal outbreak of typhus that kills 40,000 people.
00:15:07
And the first deadly global cholera pandemic begins soon after that in 1817. There's not an exact global death toll that we can attribute to the Mount Tambor eruption.
00:15:17
But writer Gillen Darcy Wood estimates that it's somewhere in the tens of millions.
00:15:23
That's because of the cumulative issues that cause more and more death. It reminds me of the Spanish flu of 1919, which I love reading about,
00:15:32
where it's just this kind of mystery of where it came from. But the devastation it did is just so fascinating and widespread.
00:15:40
And like, it doesn't discriminate. Like, everyone's fucked, essentially. Right? Okay, so it's a terrifying, disorienting time to be alive.
00:15:50
Death and desperation permeates everything all around. And this is what's happening in the world when we meet our hero,
00:15:56
Mary Wollstonecraft Godwin in London, England. Mary is a quietly intense redhead who comes from a famously radical family.
00:16:04
Her father is a well-known writer and anarchist named William Godwin. And he is also credited with publishing the first English detective novel called Caleb Williams.
00:16:13
Wow, I had no idea. I know, right? Such a good title for a detective novel. Say it again?
00:16:18
Caleb Williams. It's not. Sounds like a seventh grader at a local junior high. And her mother is Mary Wollstonecraft, who is a trailblazing feminist writer and philosopher whose fierce devotions to women's rights inspire the men of her time to dismiss her as, quote, a hyena in petticoat.
00:16:38
So she must have been good. Yeah, yeah, totally. But the sad thing is Mary never knew her mother because in 1797, days after giving birth to Mary, Mary Wollstonecraft dies of infection because the doctors removed her placenta with dirty, unwashed hands.
00:16:55
Ugh, guys. I mean, it's so horrifying. Mary carries the burden of her mother's death from a very young age.
00:17:03
She spends a lot of time in the cemetery where her mother's buried. It's said that Mary learns to write by tracing the letters on her mother's headstone.
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And when she's a bit older, she spends hours sitting on her mother's grave reading her mother's feminist works.
00:17:18
Oh, my God. Heartbreaking. She's like a little Edward Gorey character, like playing in the cemetery.
00:17:24
So then her father remarries. And sadly, her stepmother, Mary Jane Claremont, is a jealous, controlling woman who openly favors her own children, especially her daughter, Claire.
00:17:36
It's a tense, crowded living situation. Mary feels completely cast aside, and she spends even more time at the cemetery
00:17:42
to escape from her increasingly fraught home life. And then it gets worse. As she grows into a teenager,
00:17:49
Mary starts to look exactly like her mother, which seems to be more than her stepmother can handle.
00:17:54
So under the guise of a health treatment Mary is sent off to Scotland to live with family friends So at the time Scotland has a huge arts and literary scene
00:18:05
And there's tons of inspiring revolutionary thinkers. So her stepmom kind of did her a favor by kicking her out.
00:18:12
Yeah. Getting her out of there. And suddenly it's like, ooh, best case scenario.
00:18:17
Yeah. World opens up. Yeah. So one of Mary's biographers, Charlotte Gordon, describes it as, quote,
00:18:22
like going to San Francisco during Haydash Berry. And it's here while in exile from her own home
00:18:28
that Mary really starts developing her creative voice and her interest in writing. So from time
00:18:33
to time, Mary travels back to London to visit her beloved father. And it's on one of these visits
00:18:39
that she first meets a poet named Percy Bysshe Shelley. He's five years her senior. He is now
00:18:46
famous for his sonnet Ozymandias. But when they meet in the 1810s, he's not a famous poet. He's
00:18:53
actually an authority bucking young bohemian from a filthy rich family who spends a lot of time with
00:18:59
Mary's father trying to learn about his philosophical takes on anarchy. Percy also has some notoriety
00:19:05
after being kicked out of Oxford for refusing to admit that he'd circulated a pamphlet entitled
00:19:10
the necessity of atheism. Percy is also a married father, though he's sometimes said to be estranged
00:19:17
from his wife, Harriet Shelley. It seems safe to say Percy is not a particularly present husband to
00:19:23
his wife, and he has actually adopted a non-monogamous ethos that Mary will struggle with
00:19:29
from here on out, as will Harriet, of course. But all this is to say, when Percy and Mary first meet,
00:19:36
sparks fly. She will bring him to her mother's grave. That's where they'll first say, I love you.
00:19:42
They end up running off together not long after. And pretty soon after that, Mary gets pregnant.
00:19:49
She is 16 at the time. And Percy's 21. So that's a huge scandal. So to escape the dirty looks and
00:19:58
the gossip, they leave England and they just start traveling around Europe. Mary's stepsister,
00:20:03
Claire, the one that the stepmother favored, she dabbles in writing and speaks several languages.
00:20:09
So she joins them and acts as kind of a local translator. And Mary is actually very close with
00:20:16
her stepsister, even though she doesn't like her mother. They're like a year apart in age. So
00:20:21
as the three move throughout the continent, Percy encourages Mary to write, but she's so exhausted
00:20:27
from her pregnancy. She feels constantly sick and weak. Her lack of energy is only intensified by
00:20:32
the fact that they are constantly traveling. And then she tries to start projects and then she can't
00:20:37
finish them. And it's all she's just all kind of exhausted all the time. So I sometimes travel and
00:20:42
I'm not pregnant. And I can't fucking imagine. I know writing a goddamn like, and not being able
00:20:48
to take like vitamins or something that it you're just kind of like on a train for four hours.
00:20:54
Okay. So in February of 1815, Mary goes into premature labor, and they lose the baby. She's
00:21:02
overcome with grief and just one week after losing her child she writes in her diary quote
00:21:06
dreamt that my little baby came to life again that it had been cold and that we rubbed it before the
00:21:12
fire and it lived awake and find no baby i think about the little thing all day not in good spirits
00:21:18
so sad but it is a significant moment for more reasons than one so it's two months after this
00:21:27
tragedy that Mount Tambora erupts, and it is a fitting reflection of her grief, the way the skies
00:21:33
all darken and the sun never comes out, everything turns to unending gray. Before long, Mary's
00:21:39
pregnant again, and in January of 1816, as that volcanic ash circles the earth, 19-year-old Mary
00:21:46
gives birth to a boy named William. So now it's May of 1816, and it's the beginning of the so-called
00:21:55
volcanic winter. Mary, Percy, and the baby are cushioned from the worst of it. When their funds
00:22:01
dry up, they just get money from Percy's father who bails them out. So they always have food.
00:22:06
They always have shelter. But the world outside is very bleak for a lot of people. And there's
00:22:11
just a sense of dread everywhere. So it's at this point that Mary and Percy decide that they're
00:22:17
going to go to Geneva, Switzerland. And Claire is the one who actually suggests this idea.
00:22:24
but she does have an agenda. Claire actually knows that 28 year old poet Lord Byron is going to be
00:22:31
in Geneva, Switzerland. She's like, he's totally going to be there and I've got to meet him.
00:22:36
Yes. Well, no, she'd already been having a bit of an affair with him. I've been fucking him and
00:22:41
I've got to see him. Exactly. She is kind of obsessed. She's been writing him witty flirtatious
00:22:46
letters and basically propositioning him. He takes her up on the offer, but then she kind of
00:22:51
won't leave him alone. And he's Lord Byron is infamous for being really awful to his exes. So
00:22:57
he's just like a love him and leave him type of guy. He is also the titan of the romantic movement.
00:23:02
But unlike Percy Bysshe Shelley, Byron is a massive celebrity at this point. Charlotte Gordon
00:23:07
likens him to Mick Jagger at the height of his fame. So one of Lord Byron's most famous literary
00:23:13
works, which is called Child with an E at the end, Child Harold's Pilgrimage. It was published a few
00:23:20
years earlier to serious acclaim, but he's as famous for his private life. He has a reputation
00:23:27
for sleeping with anyone he thinks is interesting, men or women, married or single, even his own
00:23:32
family members. He actually is rumored to have had an affair with his own half-sister.
00:23:37
Jesus. He sounds like a vampire. Is he a vampire? Right? Oh, well, that will come up. That will come up.
00:23:45
Classic vampire moves right there. Classic, just being like, there's no boundaries,
00:23:49
I'm really open, and I love blood. So in 1816, amid accusations that he's engaging
00:23:57
in quote, sodomy and homosexuality, illegal in England at the time he moves to Switzerland. So the problem with Claire's plan
00:24:05
is Lord Byron has made it clear he is not into her and he like doesn't like her, but she can't
00:24:11
help herself. So she basically hopes if they go there, Mary and Percy will be the ones that help
00:24:17
rekindle the connection because Lord Byron will be like obsessed with them because they're two
00:24:22
young writers, you know, doing it all. They're bohemian, they're creative, and they're all
00:24:27
outrunning scandals. So it's there's just a lot of it's very juicy. So in May of 1816,
00:24:33
the Shelleys arrive in Lake Geneva and they rent a house there just steps from Lord Byron's
00:24:38
lakeside mansion, Villa Diodati. Even though it's supposed to be a summer vacation, the weather's
00:24:43
brutal. The fallout from Mount Tambora is hitting Europe hard, especially in Switzerland. It rains
00:24:49
nearly every single day that summer. It floods Geneva with mud and rotting crops from the soaking
00:24:55
wet fields. On June 1st, Mary writes a letter to a family member saying, quote, an almost perpetual
00:25:01
rain confines us principally to the house. One night we enjoyed a finer storm that I had never
00:25:06
before beheld. The lake was lit up, the pines made visible, and all the scene illuminated for an
00:25:12
instant when a pitchy blackness succeeded and the thunder came in, frightful bursts over our heads
00:25:18
amid the blackness. Wow. Moody. So moody. Right? They're like stuck in the beginning
00:25:25
of the movie Frankenstein. It's just like constantly that thing. It was a dark and stormy
00:25:30
night. So one afternoon, amid all this intense gloomy weather, the Shelley household finally
00:25:36
crosses paths with Lord Byron. And Claire was right. He hits it off with Percy and Mary
00:25:40
immediately, and he invites them back to his villa. So they meet his fleet of dogs, monkeys,
00:25:46
and even a falcon and his 20-year-old traveling companion, John Polidori. He serves as Byron's
00:25:54
personal physician. Polidori also has literary ambitions, and he's being paid by Byron's publisher
00:26:00
to keep journals on their travels together, and then they plan to publish them as a book.
00:26:05
So word of Byron and Shelley Camp's linking up makes it all the way back to England,
00:26:09
where they're talked about as like a scandalized supergroup. Newspapers refer to them as,
00:26:15
quote, League of Incest. A gaggle of British guests at a nearby Geneva hotel set up a telescope aimed right at the villa,
00:26:25
but the thick fog makes it impossible for them to be able to look inside. But they're trying to look inside.
00:26:31
If they could see inside, what they'd see is everyone drinking tons of wine and laudanum, which is diluted liquid opium,
00:26:38
and then either sleeping with each other or getting into fights with each other or some combination of the two.
00:26:44
So even though Lord Byron openly despises Claire by the end of the summer, he's still sleeping with her,
00:26:51
and so she gets pregnant. I think this is Love Island, UK. It's almost like better.
00:26:56
It's like haunted Frankenstein Love Island. Oh, I'd watch this. It's crazy. I'd watch it.
00:27:01
There are some historians who've speculated, but nothing's been proven, that actually this child is Percy Bysshe Shelley's child
00:27:08
because he and Claire are suspected of having an affair. And depending on which source you're reading,
00:27:14
it's also been said that Polidori is infatuated with either Lord Byron or Mary. Drama aside, it's impossible for these people to enjoy the outdoors,
00:27:23
so they basically spend every night by a fire at the villa reading spooky poems and stories
00:27:29
while thunder and lightning rattle the mansion. They're reading from a book named Phantasmagoriana,
00:27:36
which is a collection of German horror stories recently translated into French. It has a bit of everything.
00:27:42
Ghosts, malevolent spirits, family curses, haunted places, stuff like that. and they are all drunk and high.
00:27:49
So these stories hit pretty hard. One night as Lord Byron is reading, Percy jumps out of his chair and bolts out of the room.
00:27:57
And he later says, quote, he'd seen a terrifying vision of Mary who'd been in the corner nursing their child
00:28:03
with staring eyes instead of nipples on her breasts. Dude, take a nap. He's freaking out.
00:28:10
Go take a nap. Eat some orange slices. Put that Laudan down. stop with the opium for one second eye nipples that fucking a new one that not it not from hate ashbury i don think no that not cool So after a while Lord Byron switches things up and tasks the group with writing their own horror stories It a contest and whoever creates the most chilling
00:28:32
visceral work wins. So by day, they all go to their respective rooms and pull out their ink pens
00:28:38
and they write. And at night, they come back together and they share their works in progress
00:28:42
and they give each other feedback. I love this. I want to do this with my friends, but without
00:28:47
so many drugs and alcohol, but without not as many. I don't want to see eyeballs. Let's not
00:28:54
make a rule right now. Let's just like see what happens. Let's not let's not go. However, we don't
00:28:59
want to go into eyeball territory. But yeah, you're right. Well, here's what I think is kind
00:29:03
of cool. And I'm giving the credit to Lord Byron, which is everyone's fighting and fucking and doing
00:29:08
all this crazy shit. It's like, how about everyone gets creative and puts their work on the paper
00:29:12
and just puts their energy that way. And then look what comes out of it. It's wild what comes
00:29:17
out of it. So it doesn't seem like Percy Bysshe Shelley or Claire contribute much to this little
00:29:22
writing group, if anything. Instead, they're working on their own projects that have nothing
00:29:27
to do with the horror genre. Lord Byron, meanwhile, takes inspiration from stories he's heard while
00:29:32
traveling in Eastern Europe of vampires. But those ones are a little different than our modern
00:29:38
vampire. Per the folklore that he heard, they were grotesque undead corpses that would rise out of
00:29:43
their graves at night like zombies and suck the blood of the living. Different kind of monster.
00:29:49
Sure. Different flavor. More of a Roquefort situation with those ones. So he starts a story
00:29:55
that he never ends up finishing, but in it, he takes the concept of a vampire and makes it a
00:30:00
little sexier. His vampire is a socially intelligent British aristocrat who also has a thirst for
00:30:06
blood, but he is able to blend in with the upper class and he's a romantic. Imagine that. Who are we talking about? And he's so hot. He's so sexy.
00:30:16
So hot. But essentially, this version of the vampire is actually the one that sticks in our culture from Dracula to Twilight. So that does come from Lord Byron's original idea. So when the rest of the group hears this, they tell Lord Byron he's onto something, but he doesn't listen and he scraps the story. Basically, he doesn't enjoy writing horror or gothic horror.
00:30:40
But John Polidori takes it and he makes it his own and he eventually releases a novella called The Vampire, P-Y-R-E.
00:30:48
And that is said to be the first English language vampire story ever published. Was Byron pissed that he fucking copied him?
00:30:56
He doesn't seem like the type. He seems like he's like, you've had a mild idea, whatever.
00:31:00
And he's got like a kerchief in his hand at all times. but obviously the inarguable winner of this writing contest is 19 year old mary shelley
00:31:09
whose entry starts as a short story it's so compelling that the others urge her to expand
00:31:15
it into a novel and it eventually becomes frankenstein or the modern prometheus which
00:31:21
is the full title i never knew that the condensed refresher that no one needs but it will be fun to
00:31:26
do is that frankenstein's about a young scientist who makes the very risky decision to play god
00:31:31
designing a creature that looks somewhat human and using electricity to jolt it to life.
00:31:37
Frankenstein's creature is born with a kind heart, but he's very lonely and he longs for connection.
00:31:42
And he's beaten down by people's fear as well as their cruelty toward him. And he's abandoned by his own creator.
00:31:48
All the poor treatment hardens the creature until he becomes a monster. Just as Frankenstein's abandonment of the creature turns the scientist into a monster.
00:31:58
And if you watch young Frankenstein, that's exactly what happens. There's a Frankenstein bar that we went to in Edinburgh.
00:32:03
That was fucking incredible. Edinburgh, Scotland. Ooh, did like, did a thing go up?
00:32:09
Every like hour, whatever the monster would come out that like music would go down and
00:32:13
like the crazy ass creepy shit would happen. There was like all these lights. It's a fucking rad bar.
00:32:18
Yes, that sounds so good. Okay, so as this group leaves Lake Geneva at the end of the summer, Mary does keep working
00:32:25
on the story when she gets back to England, but her writing is sidelined once again by
00:32:29
even more tragedy. And I have to tell you, there's so many more things I'm going to tell you that are sad that happened in her life.
00:32:35
It's like kind of devastating how much bad shit happens to this woman. So her half sister Fanny who is a daughter of her mother from a different relationship takes her own life And then weeks after that Percy estranged wife Harriet also dies by suicide Oh my God
00:32:52
So as horrible as all of that is, it does allow Percy and Mary to finally get married,
00:32:57
which they weren't, they had kids together and stuff, but they weren't married, so they finally get married.
00:33:01
But Mary is consumed with guilt over Harriet's death. The next year in 1817, she finishes Frankenstein.
00:33:08
It's published in January of 1818 on New Year's Day when she's 20 years old. It's released anonymously.
00:33:16
So her name is not on the book in the beginning. And it's a small publisher, not particularly well known.
00:33:23
There's only about 500 copies that they put out on very cheap paper and with no fanfare.
00:33:28
But people still end up buying it. And then the people who buy it and read it talk about it.
00:33:33
And so the word spreads that because it's just that good. And some critics love it.
00:33:38
Some find it distasteful, but it captivates the public's interest and nothing like it has ever existed before. Frankenstein is as romantic and philosophical as it is horrifying. And it's often called the first science fiction novel. And it just keeps growing in popularity, even getting adapted into incredibly popular stage plays.
00:33:57
and because the book includes a dedication to mary's father william godwin and a preface that's
00:34:04
written by percy rumors swirl that one of these men are the ones that actually wrote this book
00:34:09
mary meanwhile stays in the shadows she doesn't make much off of the popularity of her book it's
00:34:16
not clear how much she actually earns from it we do know that the bulk of the money goes to the
00:34:21
publisher and of course there's no copyright protections at the time so the theatrical
00:34:26
productions that use her story don't pay her for it. Wow, what a bummer. Yeah. And then in 1818, a year after Frankenstein's published, Mary loses another daughter.
00:34:36
One-year-old Clara dies in Mary's arms after contracting dysentery. The year after that, Mary's son William dies of malaria.
00:34:45
So these losses compound Mary's existing grief. She goes into a deep depression with Percy writing around this time, quote,
00:34:51
my dearest Mary, wherefore hast thou gone and left me in this dreary world alone? That's a Percy
00:34:57
Bysshe Shelley line. So sad. But the same year, Mary will give birth again, this time to a son
00:35:05
named Percy, and he will be the one child that they have that lives to adulthood. Yeah. Tragedy
00:35:11
seems to follow the whole villa crew from Lake Geneva. In 1821, John Polidori, the author of The
00:35:17
vampire and Lord Byron's one-time physician takes his own life, he's only 25 years old.
00:35:23
It's been speculated he was suffering from depression and felt buried under the weight
00:35:27
of his gambling debts. Then the Shelleys continue to cross paths with Lord Byron,
00:35:32
though he does refuse to see Claire, Mary's sister Claire, and he treats her with hostility,
00:35:39
even though they have a child together. They have a daughter that Claire named Alba. Lord Byron
00:35:44
takes custody of the baby, renames her Allegra, and then cuts Claire off from ever seeing her.
00:35:51
It's just like a horrible thing. He takes custody of the baby, but then puts her in
00:35:54
foster homes, like rotating foster homes, and then in a convent. And when Allegra is five years old,
00:36:00
she dies from typhus at the convent. And then Lord Byron dies two years later of a fever.
00:36:08
So Claire herself lives to be 80, and of course mourns her daughter for the rest of her life.
00:36:13
then in 1822 three years after their son percy is born 29 year old percy baschelli drowns in italy
00:36:21
when his sailboat gets caught in a storm so mary's widowed she's 25 years old jesus and
00:36:27
she will live another three decades she dies when she's 53 of a suspected brain tumor but she never
00:36:33
remarries the year after percy's death is when mary finally reveals that she is the author of
00:36:39
Frankenstein. She basically needs money and they're reissuing the novel so she can get some cash.
00:36:45
She only receives a small allowance from Percy's family as a widow and she mostly supports herself
00:36:50
and her young son by writing and taking on editing work. But the reveal that Mary is the one who wrote
00:36:57
Frankenstein is literally unbelievable to some people, aka men. Critics immediately try to give
00:37:03
the credit to her late husband thinking there no way a woman could have written something so dark and layered But Frankenstein is so unmistakably hers It is about grief alienation and guilt things Mary has felt since childhood And she
00:37:17
even lists passages from her own personal journal, particularly dispatches about the wet, stormy
00:37:22
weather in Lake Geneva during the year without a summer. Even the premise itself of generating life
00:37:28
from something not living echoes the dream Mary had after her first daughter died.
00:37:33
Wait. Yeah. Oh, my God. I dreamt that my little baby came to life again, that it had been cold and that we rubbed it before the fire and it lived.
00:37:41
Oh, my God. Right? Both Mary and Frankenstein's monster yearn for the type of unconditional love, a motherly love that they've never had.
00:37:50
Frankenstein has been interpreted by many modern scholars as a feminist text and one that's clearly shaped by Mary's grief and longing for her own mother.
00:37:58
I know, right? It's so sad. As biographer Charlotte Gordon puts it, quote, Frankenstein is actually a book about women.
00:38:06
I would say it's a dystopian novel about a world without mothers and a world without strong women.
00:38:11
Unchecked male ambition, says Mary Shelley, is going to wreak havoc on the world.
00:38:16
Wow. And that's the story behind one of the greatest works of gothic fiction, Mary Shelley's Frankenstein.
00:38:22
Wow. What a fascinating story that I didn't know I didn't know. Right? Right? Oh my God. That's incredible. So good. So great job. Good job for Halloween, especially.
00:38:36
Thank you. And great job marrying Mulgashan once again, just killing it. So good. That was
00:38:41
incredible. Great job. Thank you. Well, happy Halloween. Thank you. Happy Halloween. What are
00:38:46
you going to be for Halloween this year? Home? I think this year I'm going to be a person who's
00:38:52
at home. I told someone what I was going to be the other day and now I can't remember what it was.
00:38:57
What a great joke that I can't remember. What are you going to be for Halloween?
00:39:00
I'm going to be me in a cute Halloween dress with maybe cat ears on passing out candy to
00:39:05
all the little kids in our neighborhoods. My favorite. Nice. Oh, yeah. You have to go on full on candy duty.
00:39:10
Yeah. It's the best. Well, enjoy. Thank you. Last year we counted on a clicker and there was 998 kids before we ran out of candy and
00:39:21
had to turn the lights off. I know. It could have kept going. It's fucking insane.
00:39:26
I love it. That's so crazy. Well, I hope everybody that's listening is going to trick or treat their asses off and really enjoy themselves.
00:39:34
That's right. Have so much fun. Be safe and watch out for spooky. Watch out for volcanoes.
00:39:41
Yeah. Watch out for teenagers trying to egg your house. It's real. And stay sexy.
00:39:46
And don't get murdered. Goodbye. Elvis, do you want a cookie? We come to this legal system for justice.
00:39:57
But we don't always get it. I'm Melissa Malbranch. And I'm Michael Foote. You might know me as everyone's favorite lawyer from TikTok.
00:40:05
I'm sick of this whole like my life is separate from my job. It ain't. I'm a fierce diva in the courtroom as well as at home.
00:40:11
Every week on our podcast, Brief Recess, we take the legal world out of the courtroom and into real life.
00:40:16
Like, can your boss actually fire you for what you post online? What happens if ICE knocks on your door?
00:40:21
Or what should you do if you get arrested at a protest? We break down insane headlines, answer real questions from listeners,
00:40:27
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00:40:35
Unless you want to hire me. I mean, that's a different thing. I am for everyone that has a price, and I'm actually pretty cheap.
00:40:40
From the Exactly Right Network, Brief Recess premieres on November 13th with new episodes Thursdays.
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