The Run of His Life: The People v. O.J. Simpson
Jeffrey Toobin
Read this because apparently I am obsessed with the OJ Simpson trial, and watching the ESPN and FX miniseries wasn’t enough for me. The story (in this telling and elsewhere) is filled with larger than life characters and holds up a mirror to America and LA in the 80s and 90s. I enjoyed reading it, but the FX series is a very faithful rendition of the content of the book. I was curious to know, since the FX series was a dramatization, what details were real vs. artistic license. The answer is that almost all the details in the series are in the book, down to Marcia Clark getting ribbed by a convenience store clerk for buying tampons. The only thing of consequence in the book that didn’t come up in the series (mild spoiler alert) was the near-romance between Clark and Chris Darden. It’s hard for me to imagine that FX would have added such a detail as mere artistic license, so I assume this is something that either became public after Toobin’s book was published, or was known to Toobin who decided not to include it for editorial reasons.