Over the past ten years, Judy Shepard’s response to the hate crime murder of her son Matthew has been nothing less than inspiring. She launched The Matthew Shepard Foundation and has been a tireless soldier in the fight for LGBT equality.
And, now, eleven years after the death of her son, Judy Shepard has written “The Meaning of Matthew: My Son’s Murder in Laramie, and a World Transformed.”
From a review by the San Francisco Chronicle:
Privy to such an intimate portrait of a loving, imperfect, everyday family, readers may be shattered when Shepard then proceeds – methodically, specifically – to trace the sickening slide toward Matthew’s anguished death. And as Detectives Rob DeBree and Jeff Bury piece together the order of events, Judy Shepard is learning details no mother should possess about her son: that a hard strike of a Smith & Wesson .357 magnum pistol butt crushed his skull, that he was discovered slumped on the ground and caked in blood except for the tear streaks down his face, that he screamed for mercy.
The book tour for “The Meaning of Matthew” begins September 9 and ends December 31. Judy Shepard will be in New York on Sept. 9, and I plan on being there. For a full list of cities and dates, click here.
“The Meaning of Matthew” will be released September 3.
UPDATED: Excerpt of the “The Meaning of Matthew” in Newsweek here.
Entertainment Weekly review of the book here.
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