Popular Culture Review Vol. 11, No. 1, February 2000 | Page 65

The Autobiography of Expiation

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a significant step in the making of ethical decisions. Accordingly, they argue, it is
essential for people to articulate very precisely where their loyalties lie in the making
of a final judgment or adopting a policy. “And in this domain,” they add, “we tend
to beguile ourselves very quickly” (2-7). It appears that the decision-making process
involving loyalties on the part of Dean and Colson could have benefitted from a test
of publicity rather than simply peer consultation. After all, their peers in the Nixon
White House included H.R. Haldeman, John Ehrlichman, and G. Gordon Liddy—
top-level aides who lacked the necessary impartiality for ethical decision-making
and whose lives were intrinsically tied to the fate of the president.

Murder
Of all the autobiographers of expiation, the crimes committed by Susan Atkins
stand as the most egregious. As a member of the notorious Charles Manson family,
Atkins was convicted of first-degree murder in connection with the Tate-LaBianca
slayings in August 1969. While serving a life sentence in California, Atkins announced
that she had become a born-again Christian. In her memoir, Child o f Satan, Child of
God (1977), she describes herself as a young woman in desperate search for happiness
when she first met Manson. Before meeting Manson, as a teen runaway, she cavorted
with ex-convicts and strippers, and even flirted with the notion of devil worship.
With Manson, Atkins lived in a world of drugs, thievery, and sex orgies, culminating
in her participation in mass murder (1-45, 70-76, 90-112).
Atkins maintains, however, that she didn’t kill anyone with her own hands,
but she is guilty of being an accomplice. Here, Atkins’ ethical justification is
conscience-based in that she believes her culpability to be lesser than Tex Watson’s
because, unlike him, she did not engage in any “first-hand killing” (124-136,254).
And like other autobiographers of expiation, Atkins’ reliance on peer consultation—
in this instance, the rootless, troubled members of the Manson cult—led to her
justification to join in activities that eventually resulted in her imprisonment.
Atkins further seeks atonement for her crimes by emphasizing how rampant
drug use clouded her judgment and led to her self-deceptive belief that Manson was
a messiah (94, 124). She also claims the death of her mother in 1964 sparked her
restless search for a real family — a journey that led her to such “counterfeit gurus”
as drugs, sex, mind control, and Manson (pp. 22-34). Although conceding that Manson
turned out to be one of the “worst counterfeits in modem history,” Atkins writes that
becoming a bom-again Christian has delivered her from all other counterfeits and
has given her the family she has yearned for—“the family of God” (267).
Each of the autobiographers examined in this article is attempting in narrative
form to atone for misdeeds in the name of rehabilitating soiled public images.
Their accounts of wrongdoing hinge on explanations of ethical justification; that
is, using the literary genre of autobiography to reveal the influential factors behind