At around 8.30 a.m. today, emergency officials responded to a 911 call from East 56th Street and Farragut Road in East Flatbush.

They found the alleged shooter, Rosette Samuel, 43, lying in bed next to her son Dylan and her boyfriend, identified by reports as Dason Peters, 33, shot to death in the front doorway.

"She shot those two then took her own life," a police source told the Daily News.

Ms. Samuel’s 19-year-old son, Dondre Samuel, escaped unharmed out a back window and called 911 after hearing an argument between the two adults. According to witnesses cited in the News, he fled the scene wearing only a pair of blue boxers and a windbreaker.

"He was jumping from the second floor to the first. He was frantic,”  Anthony Beckford, 18, said to the paper.

"His knees, elbows were scrapped, bloodily. He couldn't really talk. He was running, for his life. He just said, 'Look, look,' and pointed at a body. We saw a body on the first floor, facing up and blood all over."

By the time police arrived on the scene, three people were dead.

Rosette Samuel was an off-duty police offer from Queens’ 108^th Precinct, and a 13-year veteran of the NYPD.

Police are currently investigating the cause of the dispute. No motive for the shooting has been determined.

According to an annual NYPD report released yesterday on the state of murder in New York City, 36 percent of the 419 homicides in the city in 2012 took place in Brooklyn, making it the bloodiest of the five boroughs.

Most of the 419 murders took place in north and east Brooklyn. Three eastern Brooklyn neighborhoods—East New York, Brownsville and East Flatbush—are typically considered the most dangerous areas in Brooklyn.

The number of Brooklyn victims declined slightly as compared to 2011, a year in which the borough saw 38 percent of murders. Queens, which saw 20 percent of murders in 2012 experienced a slight increase, as did Manhattan, which had 15 percent in 2012.

While Staten Island saw just two percent of murders last year, distribution can be correlated to population size. Brooklyn has the most residents of any borough (2.5 million) compared to just 470,000 in Staten Island.

The NYPD also reported that 42 percent of murders in New York were motivated by a dispute or revenge, and 57 percent were the result of gun violence. Thirty-seven percent of homicides took places between 11 p.m. and 5 a.m.

Race certainly played a role in the homicide rate. The NYPD notes that 60 percent of victims were black, though black New Yorkers make up 23 percent of the population. Of all victims, nearly 40 percent were black males aged 16 to 37, and 86 percent of those black males were aged 16 to 21 and were victims of gun violence.

Mayor Michael Bloomberg presented the NYPD’s data at a press conference yesterday.  He spoke about reforming the controversial stop-and-frisk policy in New York, and remarked that teenagers in New York City are far less likely to carry handguns than teenagers in other big cities. Mr. Bloomberg called New York the safest big city in the country.

“It really is quite remarkable, the job that the NYPD and everyone else that works with them, from the public on up, is doing,” Mr. Bloomberg said.

Julie Patz, on the Today show, two years after her son Etan's disappearance.

A New York grand jury has indicted Pedro Hernandez in connection with the 1979 death of Etan Patz. Mr. Hernandez, a 51-year-old resident of Maple Shade, N.J., has been charged with murder in the second degree. He was arrested in May 2012 after reportedly confessing to killing the little boy.

Etan Patz was on his way to school when he vanished from Soho on May 25, 1979. His disappearance became national news, his image eventually appearing on milk cartons across the country.

At the time, Mr. Hernandez was a stock clerk at a bodega near the Patz residence. According to a statement from NYPD Commissioner Ray Kelly, Mr. Hernandez said he lured Etan into the basement of the bodega by promising the boy a soda.

The New York Post reports that some investigators don't believe the state can win its case against Mr. Hernandez, and they have good reasons:

Hernandez has been described by his defense lawyer as bipolar and suffering from auditory and visual hallucinations. A six-month investigation has yielded no additional evidence beyond Hernandez's four, original arrest confessions plus the word of six of Hernandez's church and family members, who have told cops that Hernandez made incriminating statements about having killed a child or "done something bad" in the past, according to sources.

Mentally stable or not, Mr. Hernandez may have been confessing to the crime since Etan Patz disappeared. Detectives investigating the case in 1979, however, dismissed those confessions as the ravings "of a lunatic" at the time.

Johnny Lewis. (Getty Images)

Johnny Lewis, a 28-year-old actor known for his role as Kip "Half Sack" Epps on FX's Sons of Anarchy, has died. Los Angeles authorities tell TMZ that Mr. Lewis is also their only suspect in the murder of 81-year-old Catherine Davis, from whom the actor rented a room.

TMZ reports on the awful scene discovered after cops arrived at Ms. Davis's Los Feliz home:

According to our law enforcement sources, 28-year-old Lewis was found in a driveway Wednesday morning in the Los Feliz neighborhood -- and the elderly woman who owned the home was found dead inside ... the victim of a homicide. Investigators say they believe Lewis beat the woman to death.

Mr. Lewis, who once dated pop star Katy Perry and also starred in films such as AVPR: Aliens vs Predator--Requiem and The Runaways, also allegedly attacked two men at the scene with his bare hands and a 2X4. TMZ reports the actor seemed "phenomenally strong" and may have been on PCP or meth at the time of his death.

The Los Angeles Times reported that Catherine Davis was indeed bludgeoned to death.

It isn't clear whether Johnny Lewis died while trying to flee the scene or committed suicide.

Hirsch and McConaughey in Killer Joe.

Director William Friedkin has always been attracted to lurid movie material. From the gruesome, overcooked The Exorcist to the vile and unhinged Cruising, he craves plots about deeply conflicted characters who are hopelessly alienated, disconnected from both the society that surrounds them and even their own lives. One craves another well-crafted action nail-biter like his Oscar-winning The French Connection, but at 76, his view of the world just gets darker than ever. Small wonder, then, that he has found his literary soulmate in Pulitzer Prize-winning playwright Tracy Letts, whose twisted, controversial and fascinating work has found its way to the screen through Mr. Friedkin’s jaundiced camera twice—first in the repellant schizophrenic thriller Bug, and now in the toxic trailer-trash thriller Killer Joe. When this sick, ludicrous cocktail of sex, violence and mayhem was first unveiled a year ago at the Toronto International Film Festival, one wag aptly described it as “the ghost of Tennessee Williams meets the spirit of Quentin Tarantino.” For shock value, cut to Gina Gershon, crawling across a filthy kitchen floor covered in blood to perform fellatio at gunpoint on a Colonel Sanders drumstick, and you have a high-water mark in tastelessness that gives depravity a bad name.

The inbred lowlifes in this B-movie black comedy are members of the Smith family, a clan of troglodytes in a seedy Texas trailer park replete with vicious barking dogs on chains, who swing into ruthless high gear from the very first scene, when penny-ante drug dealer Chris Smith (a game turn by Emile Hirsch, who has grown from the appealing, open-faced kid in The Emperor’s Club into a scabby, hirsute roughneck) arrives in a torrential rainstorm and is greeted at the screen door by his father’s new wife Sharla with a female full-frontal. Following a drug deal that went sour when his own mother stole the cocaine and kicked him out of her house, Chris is broke, desperate and not exactly lit by all four burners on the stove, on the lam from the good ole boys on motorcycles who want money or murder. But Chris has a plan: his mother’s $50,000 life insurance policy. If his mentally challenged, beer-swilling father Ansel (Thomas Haden Church), who works as a grease monkey at Bob’s Muffler Shop, and his sluttish stepmom Sharla, a former stripper who works in a pizza parlor, will help, they can knock off Chris’s drunken mom (and Ansel’s ex-wife), pay off the debt, split the profits, and have enough dough left over to improve their lifestyle—maybe get out of the trailer and move up in the world, to a tract house with aluminum siding near a 7-Eleven.

To make sure the job goes off without a hitch, Chris has even hired a contract hitman who never fails—a psychotic cop in a Stetson hat and skin-tight jeans called Killer Joe Cooper (Matthew McConaughey) who moonlights as an assassin. The first problem: they can’t pay his $25,000 fee until they collect the life insurance, so Killer Joe agrees to take Chris’s nubile, thumb-sucking, baby doll sister Dottie (Juno Temple) as a retainer for his services. Chris and his dad are reluctant to pimp out their nubile Lolita for a killer’s bounty, but their survival instincts outweigh all feelings of morality and guilt. Besides, her daddy says, “It might just do her some good.” Second problem: What they don’t know is that Dottie’s mom (who is talked about but never seen) has made her the secret recipient of the insurance policy, and Dottie has her own ideas about what to do with the money. Nor does she completely mind the idea of losing her virginity to the swaggering, seductive and studly Joe and keeping the money herself. As the plot turns brutal, the psychopaths turn greedy—especially Ansel’s wife and partner-in-crime, Sharla (Ms. Gershon, shedding more than just her underwear and baring all)—lying, ruthlessly cheating each other and facing the ultimate consequences, in a curdled, rampaging splatterfest finale that sprays blood all over the walls and leaves almost the entire cast on the floor with their guts hanging out. Because the characters are all equally loathsome and stupid, you are never sure if the hilarity is intentional, but I guarantee you the antics of this dysfunctional chicken-fried family will make you gasp and laugh at the same time. Oddly enough, it’s the juxtaposition of comedy and horror that keeps Tracy Letts’ screenplay balanced between entertainment and nausea and highlights the highs and lows of Mr. Friedkin’s fast-paced, pulp fiction, film-noir direction. They can both thank the fearless cast for their passionate willingness to do anything—and everything—for maximum effect. Kicked and beaten by a man’s fists to human hamburger, Ms. Gershon is both amusing and appalling as she pushes the degradation of women beyond the boundaries of political correctness. Even Mr. McConaughey, a terrible actor with no craft or range who whistles through his teeth like a tea kettle until you climb the wall, seems more natural than usual, staggering around in his birthday suit, with his whining Texas accent used to good advantage. He even manages to give Killer Joe a mix of kink and tenderness, finding unexpected down-home joy in something as simple as a home-cooked tuna casserole. Ms. Temple’s thumb-sucking Dottie has erotic moments, but nothing Carroll Baker in a nightie didn’t think of first in Baby Doll. Mr. Friedkin imparts an ugly Texas landscape of convenience stores, pizza joints, auto repair shops and cheap motels to show the downfall of decaying blue-collar America with harrowing effect.

In the final analysis, the atmosphere overwhelms the logic. There is no subtext to the carnage; we hold out no hope that these clueless wretches will learn or grow or stretch beyond the depth of a mug of Lone Star draft. The narrative ideas come from better movies as varied as Double Indemnity, Tobacco Road and Fargo. I confess I found the uncompromising trashiness perversely riveting, until the ending, which pours on the gore like barbecue sauce. It sends you home reeling, but wondering what the point of it was, and why so many worthwhile people bothered to do it in the first place.

rreed@observer.com

KILLER JOES

Running Time 103 minutes

Written by Tracy Letts

Directed by William Friedkin

Starring Matthew McConaughey, Emile Hirsch and Juno Temple

2/4

In a formidable and well-staged opening sequence, a six-year-old boy is kidnapped from the peaceful safety of his own front yard, and brutally abused by a wacko pervert in a dark basement surrounded by stuffed monkeys, caged animals and children’s toys. When the child is found murdered and dismembered, the distraught parents have a psychological need to blame someone, but after the cops find numerous remains buried in the killer’s back yard and the jury gives the defendant an easy 25-year plea bargain, the boy’s parents seek a level of justice betrayed by the court by taking the law into their own hands. Embarking on a daring plan to highjack the transport van taking the killer to prison and then give the monster a dose of his own medicine by carrying out their own death penalty, the movie turns from tense to preposterous. The upper middle-class married couple, played by Metcalfe and Christensen, is too beautiful and camera-ready to be believable as grizzled, emotionally destroyed shadows of their former selves. The husband is a doctor, so he knows all about the devastating effects of injectable poisons. All the viewer can do is squirm as they burn their victim with lighted cigarettes, soldering irons and boiling water, slice him open alive with knives, jam hypodermic needles into his organs, and indulge in other horrors too diabolical to describe. The savage and relentless torture eventually overwhelms any sympathy the couple might get from the battered audience, and the continuing horror endured by the chained and blood-soaked captive finally seems pointless. What begins as a valid thriller ends with a contrived ending that is supposed to leave you stupefied (Is it possible they tortured the wrong man?) but will only leave you giggling because you’ll figure out the trick long before the naïve characters do. There is nerve-wracked tension in the inner struggle as their decisions affect their marriage and sense of morality, and the performances are compelling—by the two leads, who deserve better roles, and by the torture victim, although mostly all he is required to do is scream. The audience screams too, although not many will survive The Tortured with their eyes wide open.

rreed@observer.com

THE TORTURED

Running Time 79 minutes

Written by Marek Posival

Directed by Robert Lieberman

Starring Erika Christensen, Jesse Metcalfe and Bill Lippincott

1/4

Black and MacLaine.

One of the many delights of Bernie, the offbeat new comedy by Richard Linklater, is that it is fresh, surprising and funny without going for sitcom punch lines or ridiculous, contrived situations inserted for guffaws. It’s not hilarious. It’s just warm and real enough to keep you smiling and awed at the same time. It is also the only movie I have ever liked Jack Black in, one of the few times Matthew McConaughey, a terrible actor, has ever come anywhere close to giving a tolerable performance, and features Shirley MacLaine’s best role in years. A lot to like here, and I liked it all.

Bernie, based on a Texas Monthly article by Skip Hollandsworth called “Midnight in the Garden of East Texas,” is the eccentric true crime story of a 1997 murder in Carthage, Texas, in which 81-year-old Marjorie Nugent, the richest, meanest and most hated woman in East Texas, was found stuffed in the bottom of her freezer, hammered to death by her lover, best friend and devoted heir, a porky mortician named Bernie Tiede. It was a headline-making scandal, but the friends and neighbors of the beloved Bernie rallied to his defense and turned him into a hero. This is the story, told in a mock documentary style that derives most of its humor from interviews with actual citizens of Carthage who showered Bernie with support and rallied no sympathy for his murder victim. It is quite a story, and an unusual movie more merry than morbid.

From his arrival in Carthage, Bernie was a hands-on, give-it-all-you-got kind of guy, tending his corpses at the local funeral parlor with loving care—shaving facial hair from their nostrils, inserting super glue on their eyelids to avoid embarrassing last-minute surprises in the coffin, even filling their mouths with rubber balls to prevent drooping jaws in open-casket viewings. Bernie won kudos for his tender talent for body removal and his artistry for embalming and cosmetology. With no experience, he was a fast learner and in no time became an expert on car wrecks, heart attacks and household poisons, making his clients feel special. Business boomed and everyone went to Bernie. Then he met his match in a monstrous old trout named Marjorie Nugent.

When her husband, a Texas oil man named Bubba, passed on, “Miss Margie” went through the motions of a funeral like everyone else, hating everything and every mourner, cutting her relatives out of the will, and living up to the town’s assessment of her as a “mean old hateful bitch.” When we first see Shirley MacLaine, scowling with venom, her face screwed into wrinkled ridges of sour dough, her eyes slits of reptilian fury reducing everything in sight to ashes, she looks like a pterodactyl. But Bernie was determined to win her over. Considering it part of his job to visit widows after their husband’s memorials, he delivered gifts to her gated manse only to get the door slammed in his face. But eventually she started to thaw when he took her to events like the Van Cliburn piano competitions in Fort Worth. (This is Texas. Expectations do not run high. You do what you can to hold on to your sanity.) Soft as dough, fastidious to a fault, smelling of cologne and more than a wee bit androgynous, Bernie even sang show tunes in local stage shows and collected men’s fitness magazines. Was he gay? Small-town rumors dominated front porch gossip, but Miss Margie didn’t care. She had found a devoted new slave, appointed him her business manager, and even took him on vacation trips, platonically sharing the same bedroom. Her appalled relatives grew more aghast when she left her entire estate to Bernie in exchange for pedicures, makeup applications and Lysoling her kitchen counters. Whenever he got out of line, she would chew her food 20 times, noisily and annoyingly, to drive him to distraction. But as Bernie grew more disillusioned with his meal ticket, the citizens of Carthage cemented their affection for Bernie as he bought them gifts, offered financial advice and paid for a new prayer wing at the Methodist church. Growing more jealous by the day, Miss Margie turned possessive and so unbearable that convenient garden tools became irresistible. But Mr. Linklater’s talent for drawing out the most intimate, unedited and inadvertently charming responses from people in coffee shops and wicker rocking chairs turns even tragedy into chuckles of joy.

Jack Black displays an unctuous, mustachioed sweetness punctuated by a welcome restraint he’s never shown before. (He even sings “Love Lifted Me.”) It can’t be easy for the great Shirley MacLaine to find juicy roles at this time and place in movie history, but she is both fearless and miraculous in her total concentration on playing a human dragon. Age and the weather have robbed her of nothing in the way of comic timing and technique. The events in Bernie are tied together by interviews with corny down-home locals who, without knowing it, could easily do skits on Saturday Night Live. When Bernie goes to trial, the State of Texas even moves to change the location because the defendant is so popular the prosecutors fear they can’t get a conviction. The only person who seeks justice (for highly suspicious personal reasons) is the district attorney who acts like a sheriff, Danny Buck Davidson, played by Matthew McConaughey with his usual tongue-swallowing drawl but more charisma than usual. Even his questionable dedication to law and order has limits; the town turns the trial into a picnic, selling pimento cheese sandwiches on the courthouse lawn.

It’s a delectable slice of Southern Gothic humor, a side show of rednecks and Bubbas and Aunt Tooties—probably actors, but so convincing they seem like real people playing themselves. But it’s all true, and so is the dialogue. Mr. Linklater has always demonstrated a keen ear for what people say and his direction, of both pros and amateurs, has compassion and insight for details. Actual newspaper clippings act as visual guides, illustrating the mayhem. Even in prison, Bernie’s indefatigable adventures continue. Would you believe he now gives cooking lessons to the other inmates and conducts Bible studies behind bars while his friends await his return to Carthage? This is all public record, and the story is far from over. I, for one, eagerly await the sequel to Bernie.

rreed@observer.com

BERNIE

Running Time 104 minutes

Written by Richard Linklater and Skip Hollandsworth

Directed by Richard Linklater

Starring Jack Black, Shirley MacLaine and Matthew McConaughey

3.5/4

Jenkins, Amy Acker and Whitford in The Cabin in the Woods.

On the advice of a friend who described The Cabin in the Woods as the next cinematic “happening” in horror and mayhem, I bit the bullet and suffered through a creepfest so stupid it makes trashy slash-and-burn epics like Humans Versus Zombies and I Spit on Your Grave seem like Molière and Proust. Some films have to seek their own audience like oil seeks its own level in water. Others arrive with a preordained sort of word-of-mouth anticipation that cannot be explained. This is one of them.

A testament to the wonders of writing under the guidance of crystal meth, this nightmare spoof of everything from The Texas Chainsaw Massacre to the Scream franchise totally defies logic, and pretty much eludes description. Five college kids take a motor van to a country weekend cabin. Stopping at a crumbling shack on a deserted road to buy gas, they encounter a cretin with rotting teeth and one eye who insults the women and spits tobacco juice at the men like a cross between Yosemite Sam and the winner of a talent show for troglodytes. Just behind the bloodstained glass window stands a barrel of meat hooks. Oh, I get it. It’s a send-up constructed from old movies and the clichés in Tales From the Crypt comics. Instead of heading back to civilization, onward they plunge, across a narrow mountain pass to the cabin of cobwebs. Rooms with two-way mirrors, grotesque paintings of brutality and massacre, and the creaking door to a cellar of corpses are just the beginning of a set that looks like the haunted house at Knott’s Berry Farm.

One by one, the visitors learn the meaning of “gotcha.” Zombies rise from the swamp and eat the sexy chick’s flesh. Vampires circle the moon and suck the hot stud’s blood. Only the smart girl who reads “Soviet Economic Structures” and the reefer-smoking doofus, so stoned he has to struggle to make complete sentences, manage to survive the monsters crashing through the ceiling, windows and floors. What they fail to notice is the hidden cameras. Yes! The rooms are all being monitored on a wall of video screens in some kind of remote science lab where an army of scientists like the security teams in Russian attack movies shift the course of the game with switches, including one labeled “Zombie Redneck Torture Family,” conjuring fresh hordes of killers from childhood nightmares to rise from their graves and gnaw, stab and mutilate the screaming victims. It’s all part of an elaborate video game that allows paying customers to watch real people slaughtered according to the horror of choice. The five kids in the cabin are innocent pawns to test the mechanics of the game, the way fiends in a horror movie test the sounds of screaming babies as they feed them to the jaws of mutated crocodiles.

The game, like the movie, is a meaningless absurdity. If it sells, people with a passion for gore can experience real terror while the players are shredded, one by one. What the game testers didn’t count on was luring a pair of victims smart enough to outwit them. The game ends only if the virgin survives. Somehow miraculously managing to figure it all out, the stoner and the brainy girl (who is also a virgin) crawl into a grave and get to the other side of the “ritual.” Then the real hell breaks loose and the whole movie collapses. It’s not a movie about acting, so ignoring the unfortunate people in it is an act of charity, but somehow Sigourney Weaver shows up in a neat spin on herself and her own sad contribution to horror movies to warn that if the virgin doesn’t survive it will mean the agonizing death of every human soul on the planet. But why say more? The Cabin in the Woods has died already in a boring finale full of metaphysical explanations that filch from every horror genre ever invented.

This is a first-time effort for director Drew Goddard, who developed a loud camp following by indulging his wacko imagination as producer and writer of numerous TV episodes of Lost and Buffy the Vampire Slayer. The only imagination on view here is the creature effects. From snarling werewolves and humongous cobras to a faceless child in a ballerina costume whose entire countenance above the neck is nothing but a round hole filled with snapping razor-sharp teeth, the mythical monstrosities are awesome. The rest of the movie is the kind of time-wasting drivel designed to appeal to electronics nerds and skateboarders addicted to Xbox 360 video games whose knowledge of the arts begins and ends with MTV2. Instead of electronic wands like Nintendo’s Wii controllers, the master fiends working the control panels tap buttons and pull levers right out of Dr. Strangelove. As their victims plunge deeper and deeper, the narrative gets sillier and sillier. Maybe that’s why an entire row of what they call “fanboys” at the screening I attended laughed all the way through the movie, although I failed to see anything remotely amusing. I doubt if these people even know who Sigourney Weaver is.

At the risk of inviting a monsoon of unwanted hate mail, I admit it is indeed a brand-new world out there. I’m so glad I don’t have to write for it.

rreed@observer.com

THE CABIN IN THE WOODS

Running Time 95 minutes

Written by Joss Whedon and Drew Goddard

Directed by Drew Goddard

Starring Richard Jenkins, Bradley Whitford and Chris Hemsworth

1/4

Charles Snelling (from Mr. Snelling's Facebook page)

Charles Darwin Snelling, a noted Pennsylvania Republican who wrote a "Life Report" published by columnist David Brooks in the Times last December, killed his wife and committed suicide in Pennsylvania on Thursday. Mr. Snelling was 81. He had been married to wife Adrienne for 6 decades. Mr. Snelling had been caring for his Alzheimer's-afflicted wife for six years and  in his long essay published by the Times on December 7, 2011, expressed what seemed a fundamentally positive view of the situation:

Six years ago tragedy struck our household. My dear, sweet Adrienne was diagnosed with Alzheimer’s disease. This relentless wasting disease destroys the mind. I have now seen many people with Alzheimer’s, and it is a terrible disease. Many, besides losing their memories and their cognitive abilities, also get downright ugly and hostile. Not my sweetie. Although she is a very, very sick puppy, she remains to this day a sweet, happy, loving and generous person. How lucky for both of us. To have such an affliction in the household is a very learning experience. Some people quite promptly disappear from your life. But others, indeed most, rally around in caring and support. It’s quite touching.

Mr. Snelling, a one-time chairman of the Metropolitan Washington (D.C.) Airports Authority and holder of multiple patents described in his Times piece all the support received from his community but concluded "real care for a loved one with Alzheimer's cannot be delegated."

"It's not noble, it's not sacrificial, and it's not painful," he wrote, "It's just right in the scheme of things."

Pennsylvania television station WFMZ quoted a portion of a family statement released by Mr. Snelling's family after the couples' bodies were found early Thursday in which they said that Charles Snelling apparently "could no longer bear to see the love of his life deteriorate further."

The Snellings had five children and 11 grandkids.

Anthony.

I hesitated to ask the question. “Does anyone relate to Casey Anthony?” I said to a group of 20-something women. “I mean, at all? If she did plot to kill her child, can anyone understand where she’s coming from?”

I’d rather have asked the group if they felt a close personal kinship with Jeffrey Dahmer. “No,” was the universal consensus.

But more quietly, individually, each pointed out that they could understand that motherhood could be exhausting, and how nice it must have been for Casey to be able to go out and get a tattoo just because she felt like it.

“Look,” a friend of mine whispered, “Jen, you have to remember how young she was. She’s only 25 now.”

“Oh, for heaven’s sakes,” I replied, “we’re 25. She was out competing in a ‘hot body’ contest a few weeks after her daughter died. Who does that?”

“But that’s what your 20s are generally for,” she answered softly. “For competing in hot body contests.”

I did start to think about what I had done the previous day and how much of that I could have done if I had a child. Assuming I could sink most of my salary into a full-time nanny or day care, I could still go to the office and eat lunch. But it’s hard to justify saying you’d rather see X Men: First Class than spend time with your infant.

But isn’t motherhood supposed to fill you with so much joy that those desires become nonexistent?

My friend Koa, an editor at parenting site Mommyish notes, “The Casey Anthony case reminds us that mothers typically move through our culture with certain one-dimensional identities.”

Sure. You’re supposed to take on a gentle, vaguely angelic identity.

But maybe motherhood isn’t your life’s greatest moment. Maybe you still dream about what it would be like to compete in hot body contests. Does that make you terrible?

When I was 11, my English class was given an assignment to go home and interview our parents about the happiest day of their lives. I believe my father said, “The day I married your mother,” which was the right answer. Gold star, Dad.

Then I asked my mother.

“Well,” she said, “I was living in New York. I was in my 20s. And I went outside—it was the fall—and bought a pretzel at one of the vendor carts. And the pretzel man let me have it without the salt, because I don’t like the salt. And it was good. And I just loved my job. And I loved being in New York. And I realized, even at the time, that at that moment, I was just totally happy.”

I explained helpfully, “You’re supposed to say, ‘The day you were born, my beautiful daughter.’”

“Oh,” my mother said, after which she paused from reviewing my math homework for a second and considered.

“No,” she replied cheerfully, “no, that wasn’t it. Definitely the pretzel thing. Go with that.”

At the time, I told her she was a bad mother and went off to scrawl an angry essay about how she loved a pretzel more than she loved me.  Of course, if I had read the article in The Daily Mail last week entitled “Am I a Monster for Wishing I’d Never Had Children?” I would have known that she was not a bad mother for thinking wistfully of a more free and breezy life. I would have known that she was a monster.

The article was about a 50-something woman who raised two boys but never had time to develop a career or go to university. Now she wondered what life would be like if she’d done things differently.  This seemed like stuff that Robert Frost pretty much covered in 1920, but I checked the comments.

“I am disgusted by this woman. If your life was ‘not what you wanted,’ you should have either a) never had children or b) been brave enought to give them to familys that love children unconditionally.”—Rachel, England 7/2

If motherhood is that much of a black-or-white proposition—if you’re never allowed to feel anything but abject gratitude to be blessed with the care of miniature people who, let’s be honest, can’t really make witty conversation and frequently defecate on themselves—then maybe it’s understandable to want to escape.

I called my mom. Did she ever want out?

My mother paused. “There was one time I wanted to leave you. You were 3. We were at a Chinese restaurant. Everyone was tired. It was tense. Dad hadn’t liked the food. And we finished and I said, ‘We’re going to the car, now,’ and you walked in the other direction. And I said, ‘No, no, no, it’s this way,’ and you lay down on the ground and just started screaming. And I seriously thought, ‘I will just walk away and not turn back.’ And at that moment I wanted to. But I didn’t.”

I told my mother that as a belated reward for not leaving me 22 years ago, the next time she comes to New York I will buy her all the pretzels.

editorial@observer.com