Memoir of friend’s murder is a lurid read

Titillation overshadows search for truth

Carolyn Murnick’s The Hot One: A Memoir of Friendship, Sex, and Murder has a subtitle that sounds like a recipe for a gripping summer read.

Instead, The Hot One (Simon and Schuster, 242 pp., eeEE) tells a troubling story that seems more intent on titillation than uncovering any truths.

Murnick, an online editor at New York magazine, says from the start that she is not an investigative reporter. But she is drawn to tell the story of her girlhood best friend, Ashley Ellerin, who was brutally murdered in her Los Angeles apartment in 2001. She was 22.

Ashley had visited Carolyn in New York eight months earlier, but the reunion between onetime besties was rocky. Carolyn couldn’t help but notice that Ashley — “the hot one” of the title — was irresistible to men, including one of Carolyn’s closest buddies.

As Carolyn wrestles with the sense of competition that arises between women vying for male attention, Ashley reveals matterof-factly that between work at a makeup counter and transferring to fashion school, she is a parttime stripper who dabbles with crystal meth and has an older man paying her car lease. The friends part, making plans to meet again, but the bond they once shared over secrets and sleepovers is strained.

Murnick the memoirist wonders how Ashley went from confident risk taker to drug taker and pole dancer. But her book doesn’t dig deeply enough to answer that question.

Instead, Murnick wallows in self-absorption, conflicted feelings about her friend and guilt she feels as she notches touchstones of adulthood while her friend lies dead.

She seethes when the lawyer defending Ashley’s accused killer hammers her friends with questions about Ashley’s sex life at a pre-trial hearing. Yet Murnick is equally prone to revealing salacious details (Ashley had a date with actor Ashton Kutcher the night she died! Ashley could be aggressive in bed! She and Ashley took playful photos as girls that the photo lab rejected as “smut”!) that seem to cast a similar portrait of her friend.

Michael Gargiulo, a handyman, is expected to face trial in California this fall for the deaths of Ellerin and Maria Bruno and the attempted murder of a third woman. He is suspected of killing as many as 10 women.

Murnick is an engaging writer and her story of the seamy side of young Hollywood sucks you in like a link to TMZ. But her exploration of her friend’s young life and lurid death reads like exploitation.

CAROLYN MURNICK Carolyn Murnick, left, recalls what her childhood friend, Ashley Ellerin, at the piano, was like before she was murdered in Los Angeles.

CELESTE SLOMAN