Arrested Development

A review of Gypsy-Rose Blanchard’s post-prison memoir My Time to Stand, Benbella, 2024

Artwork by Anja Segmueller

‘That Bitch is dead!’ Dee Gyp Blancharde, the shared Facebook account of mother and daughter, Clauddine “Dee Dee” and Gypsy-Rose Blanchard, announced to its friends  on the 14th of June 2015. Dee Dee was full-time caretaker (and seemingly model mother) to her terminally ill daughter, Gypsy, who moved via wheelchair, ate via feeding tube, and subsisted on a painstakingly administered cocktail of drugs. In the devastation of Hurricane Katrina, they lost everything, including Gypsy’s medical records. Yet over the following years, the persevering pair reaped a plethora of charity: countless commiserating gifts, a Disney trip, a chance to meet country singer Miranda Lambert—even their home, built by Habitat For Humanity, was recompense for Gypsy’s sickness following Katrina. Though Gypsy’s teeth had been removed, she maintained a gummy-mouthed grin despite it all.

 In the comments below the menacing Facebook status, worried friends fretted: ‘If anyone hears anything please let me know.. these two precious people are so sweet and doesn’t [sic] deserve this.. they’ve been through enough!’ A later comment curtly breaks the news to an inquirer asking if Gypsy is okay: ‘I’m sorry to tell you but Gypsy and her boyfriend have been charged with first degree murder.’ 

An equally shocking reveal accompanied ‘Gyp's’ brutal severance from ‘Dee’: Gypsy was not gravely, or even slightly, ill, and never had been. All she had truly suffered (besides a lazy eye) was Munchausen syndrome by proxy—the imposition of fabricated illness on another—and abuse at Dee Dee’s hand. Believing her mother’s death was the only way of standing up for herself (it was, after all, literally the only way in which Gypsy would be permitted to rise from her confining wheelchair), through the murder, Gypsy was also killing the sickly image of herself. While it would place her behind bars, it would be paradoxically emancipatory. 

Gypsy met Nicholas Godejohn on a Christian dating site out of sight from her overbearing mother. Following online courtship, Gypsy let him into their home while she and her mother attended a medical appointment, handing him the duct tape, gloves, and knife he would use to kill Dee Dee. He stabbed her seventeen times, with one laceration so forceful that Dee Dee was almost decapitated. Gypsy heard her mother’s screams from another room. After, when the couple had fled to Nick’s family home in Wisconsin, the thought of her mother’s mutilated corpse alone in their home in another state gnawed at Gypsy. Drug addled on the tranquilising medications she continued to take, Gypsy wrote the Facebook status in the hope that someone would find her mother. Writing in her memoir that she was ‘Worried that nobody was concerned enough’, Gypsy followed the post with its lesser-known sequel: ‘I fucken SLASHED THAT FAT PIG AND RAPED HER SWEET INNOCENT DAUGHTER. HER SCREAM WAS SOOOO FUCKEN LOUD. LOL.’ It meant that the police found not only Dee Dee’s body, but her, too. She pleaded guilty to second-degree murder in 2016 and was sentenced to ten years, of which she served eight and a half. Godejohn was convicted of first-degree murder and life in prison without parole in November 2018.

‘People really want to know: What was the final straw? When was the moment when I decided it was her or me? Here you go, y’all, on page three’, Gypsy confides in her reader. The next unnecessary procedure Dee Dee was courting for her was an invasive throat surgery which, Gypsy believes, intended to impede her ability to speak (and, so, to speak out against her). A photo floats on the internet of Gypsy at Disney World on her 21st birthday dressed as Ariel from The Little Mermaid. She is clad in a fire truck red wig, a crown, and a frown in her wheelchair. While Ariel is willing to trade her voice to have legs and the land, Gypsy knows that if she stayed at the whim of her mother, she would be left with use of neither. When she subsequently asked her internet boyfriend if he would kill for her, he agreed.

 In revealing the catalysing why of the murder so early on in the memoir, its true intent is shown not to be capitalisation on the sensational whats and whens of the well-known case. Instead, with Gypsy’s entire life a scripted fiction by her mother, she calls on her readers—her jury who she constructs as 'y'all’— to listen to her testimony and read her in her own words, in the very voice Dee Dee would have had taken. Like Nickelodeon star Jennette McCurdy’s memoir I’m Glad my Mom Died (2022) mulls over her narcissistic mother’s abuse in order to mitigate the pain of it, Gypsy’s memoir re-moves through experienced trauma to, at last, free herself from it.

While Gypsy’s memoir is her attempt to reclaim the narrative of her life, in many ways, her life was never hers. She shares that her redundant ‘feeding tube kept me connected to [Dee Dee] the way an umbilical cord does’, keeping her forever an infant inescapably chained to and reliant on her mother. Dee Dee gave Gypsy life, and Gypsy took Dee Dee’s but, as in the hybridisation of their names in their joint Facebook account, their identities were also knotted together. As Gypsy remarks ‘she certainly saw my life as “ours,” at best’. Even in the documentation of her ‘medical mayhem’, Gypsy is furious to find a note reading ‘Our favorite mother-daughter patient’; even her patient identity was not hers alone. She reflects on the strange subsumption of her identity into Dee Dee’s in how ‘for years we were each other’s companions. We bathed together, slept together, watched the same daytime television programs. Her interests [...] became my interests’. Within this eerie symbiosis, individual identity melts into an inescapable ‘we’. In an unsettling dialectic, Dee Dee existed to be Gypsy’s caretaker mother and Gypsy existed to feed that desire (in part, by being fed through the tube). Inside the cute exterior of their pink bungalow, amidst the piles upon piles of hoarded and shoplifted items and the five strewn, unneeded wheelchairs, the pair referred to each other as ‘Honey’ and ‘Baby’ like a bizarre sitcom couple. This is perhaps a microcosm of the script Dee Dee bid Gypsy to follow—Gypsy’s entire life entailed playing a role. In an inescapable performance that never lapsed, ‘Even when nobody was there, the act was still on.’ Such unrelenting ‘speaking for […] and scripting [of] every interaction’, Gypsy believes, ‘deprived me of finding my own voice.’ In My Time to Stand, Gypsy explores what her own voice, ‘squeaky as it might be’ can say when liberated from her mother’s stage terrain.

Dee Dee was not just a playwright or screenwriter in Gypsy’s life. In Dee Dee’s construction and creation of Gypsy, she was ‘like a god.’ Besides acquiring the prescriptions, she wrote the scripture that governed Gypsy’s life; ‘What she falsified became fact with just the pen stroke.’ Upon Gypsy’s discovery of her Medicaid card which revealed her to be four years older than she believed, Dee Dee declared it a ‘typo’. With that speech act, Gypsy swallowed her doubt, force-fed lies in the same way sustenance through the feeding-tube was non-negotiably ingested. After leaving prison, Gypsy rooted through her many, many medical records hoping to find answers to how it was that her falsified illnesses could have been unquestioningly acquiesced to for years by ‘so-called medical professionals’. Yet, after all her searching, all she finds is ‘“Mom reported tooth pain.” Always, her word was gospel.’ While Dee Dee was the all-powerful, all-seeing creator to Gypsy, her mystical sway extended beyond the pink bungalow to convert even the skeptics and experts who should have known better. Even the superfluous ‘e’ Dee Dee added to their surname in the Facebook account (and many of Gypsy’s medical records) is an embellishment—some inconsistencies were glaring, but some were so minute as to be barely discerned.

But if Dee Dee was like a god, she was also like a little girl. Just as children might play nurse with toys and teddies, diagnosing them with ailments and illnesses to be treated, Dee Dee did so with her daughter. Transcending the pretend, Dee Dee shaved Gypsy’s head to give the appearance of a cancer patient (one of her many professed maladies was leukemia), had her daughter’s salivary glands and teeth removed and, through the concoctions of pills, played pharmacist, too. Interestingly, Gypsy received dolls in exchange for being a living one for Dee Dee, ‘My early memories are of my mother promising a new doll to me if I would just […] see a new doctor, have a new procedure’ and  ‘not ask “why”’. Dolls became ‘commerce’. Dee Dee’s efforts to infantilize Gypsy and deprive her of her autonomy even manifested in how she was forbidden to see dolls’ anatomy, ‘If I were to undress a doll to change its clothes, I was to see a baby’s body—without bulges or bumps. “Clean,” she’d call it.’ Just as Gypsy’s was Dee Dee, ‘The baby doll’s companion was its mommy.’

Long before the memoir, Gypsy made efforts to improvise within Dee Dee’s scripts. In secretive flirtations with men online, Gypsy ceased her performance as defencelessly sickly little girl, probing desires which rebelled against her mother’s for her to be her sexless doll. In online roleplay with Nick, she was not Gypsy but, variously, Demona, ‘who was half-werewolf, half-human’, Kitty, ‘who was childlike’, Candy, who was ‘slutty’, and Ruby, the ‘evil one’. But Nick was ‘master’ and with him she once again found herself ‘a mechanical doll, taking instructions and acting them out.’ On a doll pendulum which swung from either completely desexualised and infantilised to over-sexualised and objectified, Gypsy lacked autonomy regardless. Although she dreamt that men could rescue her from her mother’s control, this still ultimately left her trapped, this time to male fantasies. Some of the memoir’s most poignant moments revisit Gypsy believing herself to have at last been rescued, just for a moment, before being forced to behold what the achieved escapes actually constituted: filthy houses teeming with bugs, stale bongs, men who allured through the laptop screen but who in person were perverse (who, in Nick’s case, did not even seem to shower). After Dee Dee’s death, although Gypsy is no longer consigned to her wheelchair, she is still held captive in Nick’s room in a constant state of nakedness. Although she escapes being s(mother)ed, there is no love in Nick’s cruelty. While she no longer must perform her mother’s fantasies of her sickness, they are supplanted by Nick’s sick sexual ones where she is his virgin-whore at his BDSM behest. 

‘I won’t know anything until you tell me what happened. Why did you do this?’ Once arrested, Stan Hancock, one of the detectives, prompted Gypsy to explain her motives. ‘This is your chance to write your own story,’ he goaded her, ‘You’re the pen.’ Even as her arrest prompted media intrigue which would rehome her life sensational headlines ripe for speculation, for a moment, and for the first time, testifying granted her narrative control. In the act of writing the memoir, and not acting as sick daughter, or sex slave, Gypsy claims autonomy in that she can ask her readers—‘ya’ll’—to read her correctly in her own words (in the way that multiple institutions failed to). Even if it is also with her ghostwriters, Melissa Moore and Michele Matrisciani, Gypsy delivers her narrative in the voice that she alleges Dee Dee sought to steal—not as her mother scripted her, not as her medical records assemble her, not as tabloids have sensationalised her, nor as Joey King portrays her in The Act. Though, Gypsy recognises the gaps even in her own narrative of events; she routinely describes herself as a ‘detective’ trying to accrue explanatory evidence, speculating ‘I wonder if’. Ultimately there are some answers Gypsy will never get, since Dee Dee hoarded possessions as well as lies: ‘I anticipate I will continue to uncover thousands’. 

The memoir makes clear that invisible bars might be far more confining than real ones; Gypsy notes ‘I was freer in prison than I ever had been.’ In Chillicothe Correctional Institution, Gypsy could grow freely from girl to woman. Here, she experienced a speedrun of a belated adolescence as her malnourished body developed, her permanently shaved hair had the opportunity to grow, she earned her GED, worked her first jobs, and explored her sexuality. However, while personally growing in prison, Gypsy’s celebrity grew outside of it. The Act revived attention surrounding the case and subsequently, Gypsy ‘went from being “known” to being a pseudocelebrity’. In the public ‘invasion’, she was there for a greedy true crime public to ‘feast’ on. Gypsy regularly emphasises that she has not seen the television show (‘I still haven’t found it necessary to watch’), or Joey King’s acclaimed, baby-voiced performance ventriloquising her life. She frequently interjects, however, on how The Act portrayed it, versus how it truly was and is resolutely committed to ‘The way I remember it’. With the memoir, she ‘wanted to take my story out of the sole hands of Hollywood’. Perhaps you don’t need to see the Hollywood version of the horrors of your life, when you can already remember the way it was when you performed it the first time around.

 Upon her release, the excessive attention and parasocial prying was especially abundant. Markedly absent from the memoir is Gypsy’s tumultuous foray into social media following her freedom. She indulged the millions of fans (and haters) following her on social media who, in a haze of irony-tinged valorisation, treated her not as a survivor of abuse, or even a person, but as pop culture icon and as flippantly as any trend cycle. On socials, Gypsy was just as candid but less introspective than she is in her memoir. In a comment under an Instagram selfie of her then-husband Ryan Anderson (who she married in a prison ceremony with no guests) , she implored him to ignore ‘the haters’ writing ‘besides they jealous because you are rocking my world every night…yeah I said it, the D is fire’. In My Time to Stand, she reflects that once released from prison ‘even though I was no longer behind prison walls of barbed wire, I still felt a sense of being trapped by my negative image’ and sought to remedy it through engaging with the public. Perhaps the memoir might be a better medium than social media’s facetiousness to ask the public to recognise you as a person, and not a spectacle.

The epilogue of the memoir makes a stark departure from where its final chapters leaves us, married to Ryan—in the turn of the page, Gypsy is divorced, is back with her former fiancée, Ken Urker, who she was briefly engaged to while in Chillicothe, and is about to have his baby. With this child, Gypsy believes she can at last snip the umbilical cord binding her to Dee Dee, the trauma she has been tethered to. In taking on the role of the woman who abused her, mother, she believes this poignant, full circle moment will rupture the cycle of abuse. Undoubtedly, we will watch and see what happens—season 2 of her docuseries Life After Lock Up is airing now on Lifetime.

By Mia Walby for CRoB Digital, edited by Daisy Stewart Henderson

Artwork by Anja Segmueller