But the freakiest part, by far, was seeing Shirley MacLaine looking so much like Aunt Marge. There was a natural physical resemblance. Aunt Marge, like MacLaine, had red hair and pale, freckled skin. But what really unsettled me was the look on MacLaine’s face as she went into character, with pursed lips and accusing eyes. I’d seen that face before, whenever Aunt Marge disapproved of something, which seemed to be most of the time. It usually meant she was going to tell you, in no uncertain terms, why you weren’t good enough or smart enough or otherwise worthy of her time. She used it on salesclerks, on waiters, on farmhands, housekeepers and cooks. She used it on my parents. She used it on me. I really hated that face.

After the scene was over, I had lunch with MacLaine in her trailer. She was still in costume, and I was still a little freaked out. She wound up asking me more questions than I asked her. She coaxed stories out of me I hadn’t told in years, how Aunt Marge once threatened to put me in a mental institution because I wouldn’t cut my hair; how she chased me around her yard with garden shears because I wouldn’t clean out a wasp’s nest with my bare hands; how, when I was 14, she locked me in her house for two days and wouldn’t let me call home. Finally, when Aunt Marge went to the grocery store, the maid, sympathetic to my plight, unlocked the bedroom door so I could get to the phone and beg my mother to come rescue me. She did. That was the last time I went to Aunt Marge’s house.

There were darker stories that even I didn’t know until the last few years. Aunt Marge, who loved to sew and shop and didn’t have a daughter of her own, tried to get custody of my sister, Carrie, by having our parents declared unfit. She claimed that my father was an alcoholic — which wasn’t true; he barely drank — and that she could provide a more suitable upbringing. It didn’t work. But apparently she was serious enough to meet with attorneys.

The movie makes a point of establishing how, except for Bernie, most people in Carthage did their best to avoid Aunt Marge, for fear of incurring her wrath. She grew up in Carthage and later moved to Longview, 40 miles away. Her husband, Rod Nugent Sr., made a fortune as an independent oilman, a ruthless operator. They moved back to Carthage in 1989 (just a year before my uncle died), buying a controlling interest in a local bank and building a huge Austin stone house on the outskirts of town, just off Dixie Lake Road. Marge seemed to lord her wealth and status over everyone she encountered. As one character says in the film, “Marjorie Nugent’s nose was so high, she’d drown in a rainstorm.”

Maybe she had an inflated sense of entitlement simply because she was the oldest daughter of a prominent local merchant and landowner, my grandfather, Spencer Midyett. She was 12 years older than my mother and spent a lifetime bossing her around. “She was so demanding,” my mother said. “If you did something she didn’t think was up to her standards, she’d tear it up and make you do it again.”

I always knew that my mother and Aunt Marge weren’t very close. Even so, my mother hosted her wake and said only kind things about her in public. It’s only been in recent months, since the murder, the trial and the making of the film, that she’s been willing to talk about how bad their relationship really was.