This was the afterword to Evelyn Evelyn: A Tragic Tale in Two Tomes, written by Amanda Palmer and Jason Webley, illustrated by Cynthia von Buhler.

Who Killed Amanda Palmer

Like you, I know exactly where I was and what I was doing when I heard Amanda Palmer had been killed. I remember the way the sunlight glittered on the water, and I remember most of all that I simply did not believe it, for it seemed impossible that Amanda Palmer (so wise and mouthy and lovely, so filled with life that it had always seemed as if she had stolen the life that rightly belonged to a dozen other people) could ever have stopped moving, stopped singing, stopped breathing. That she would never laugh that laugh again, dirty and delighted and huge, was unimaginable.

The days that followed were strange days. Rumors abounded. I met a Hells Angel in a bar in Encino who swore blind that he knew the dude who had done the job, a man who claimed to have crushed in Amanda’s skull with lead piping, on behalf of a crazed ex-boyfriend.

It became a national obsession. Who Killed Amanda Palmer bubblegum cards were traded and traded again in schoolyards across America. I still own two of them: one shows Amanda’s bullet-riddled corpse dangling from a wall; the other shows her body washed up on the shore of an unidentified lake, her face blue and puffy from the water, the claws of some crustacean pushing out from between her purple lips.

I remember the candlelight vigils, and the shrines, dozens of them, in cities all over the world, spontaneous expressions of love from people who no longer had Amanda Palmer. They lit candles and left behind telephones, scalpels, television remote controls, exotic items of underwear, plastic figurines, children’s picture books, antlers, love.

“She went as she would have wanted to go,” that was what a white-faced ’Manda, one of the growing number of Amanda Palmer impersonators, told me. Much later that night, swaying and sweating, the ’Manda confided in me that he was certain that the real Amanda Palmer had been “abducted by beings from a higher vibrational plane,” and that the photographs of Amanda’s death were not fakes, pasted and airbrushed in some back-alley studios, but actual photographs of the deaths of her “sister-selves,” creatures grown from Amanda Palmer’s own protoplasm.

Very young children made up songs about the different ways Amanda died, killing her happily at the end of every verse, too young to understand the horror. Maybe that was how she would have wanted to go.

If you see Amanda Palmer on the street, kill her, said the graffiti under the bridge in Boston. And beneath that somebody else wrote, That way she’ll live forever.

Neil Gaiman,

Beat and Pop Magazine, June 1965

These are the liner notes for the album Who Killed Amanda Palmer by Amanda Palmer, 2008, written when we barely knew each other.

VIII

ON STARDUST AND FAIRY TALES

“Those of us who write fantasies for a living know that we are doing it best when we tell the truth.”