SARAH MARSHALL has made a literary career out of writing about horrible things. So it's appropriate that our meeting is over coffee on a dark, rainy day, and that the first thing we talk about is The Secret Diary of Laura Palmer, which, like some morbidly curious book club, it turns out we're both planning to read.

Marshall, a native Oregonian, lives in Portland, where she writes about true crime, teaches at Portland State University, and co-hosts the literary podcast Late Night Love Affair for Late Night Library. She made headlines last year when she wrote a long-form piece for The Believer about another Portlander, Tonya Harding, that made the case for Harding's innocence in the 1994 attack on fellow skater Nancy Kerrigan. Having grown up with an affection for the off-brand stars of ladies' figure skating (as a six-year-old, I was proudly Team Nicole Bobek in a sea of devoted Kerrigan fans), I was hooked by Marshall's reinterpretation of the events, and became a reluctant, retroactive Tonya sympathizer.

One of the first things Marshall tells me when we meet up is that despite writing about the skater extensively, she's never actually met Tonya Harding. "She's this Northwest figure who everyone seems to have seen but me," she says, citing "like 10" people she knows who've reported their Portland Harding sightings to Marshall. After The Believer piece came out, Marshall was in talks with Harding's manager about interviewing her for a longer piece, but says, "That never really happened." Marshall didn't push for it, because, "I don't think [Tonya Harding] would want to meet some woman who has all these thoughts about her career. She seems happy."

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