Mercy: A Memoir of Medical Trauma and True Crime Obsession by Marcia Trahan (review)

Though this memoir, A Memoir of Medical Trauma and True Crime Obsession, is Marcia Trahan’s debut, she’s both an accomplished essayist and poet and an editor with almost two decades of experience under her belt. The book’s subtitle implies a straightforward pairing of two trendy themes, but the intricacies of Trahan’s singular perspective elevates the topic. The non-linear narrative follows her journey through battles with thyroid cancer and pulmonary embolism, as she interrogates preconceptions about her safe existence as a mid-thirties white woman, that shifted beneath the surgeon’s scalpel. This book is methodical and precise in drawing comparisons between surgical procedures and violent crime; suggesting that true crime viewers aren’t always looking for cheap thrills, but for confirmation of their own neuroses.

Trahan isn’t alone in suggesting that one’s understanding of illness, violence, and the body is influenced by upbringing. Trahan’s relationship with her mother was tinged with fear by her mother’s absences: “Throughout my childhood, my mother kept vanishing. Mysterious illnesses took her away to the hospital . . . She drank herself into a ghost.” But it is Trahan’s stark honesty about her longstanding relationship with her partner, Andy, a bluegrass musician and a selfdescribed hypochondriac, to whom the memoir is dedicated, that makes Mercy deeply personal. Trahan paints Andy as vividly as she does herself, including flaws alongside strengths and snippets of hard conversations that feel like eavesdropping on the page. She is honest about her own romanticism, acknowledging that, “I still thought marriage would mean that Andy was finally ready to be my endlessly self-sacrificing partner.” In the same breath, she reminds herself: “bad things can happen even with Prince Charming standing by your side.” The relationship fields half a dozen curveballs in fewer than 160 pages, and Trahan rises to the challenge of honest presentation. Though Andy is one of two central male figures in this work, his presence is an inviting one—a companion in the waiting room, a warm body waiting patiently in bed at home. Trahan only realizes the unfulfilled threat of her partner when he cuts her hair in their home, holding sharp shears close to the healing wound on her neck.

Trahan’s poetry shines in her prose, through turns of phrase that are appropriately isolating. She watches shows like Deadly Women on a TV that acts as a “thirteen-inch eye onto every possible way of hurting every kind of woman.” Her scar is a “three-and-a-half-inch Frankenstein pucker . . . the mark of a middle school English teacher’s angry red pen.”

Amemoir like this runs this risk of being just another spiel about a serial killer obsession, glamorizing violence and dwelling on how dreamy Ted Bundy was. Instead Trahan offers a no-holds-barred exploration of the impact of violence upon female victims. She writes: “Women are supposed to be silent anyway . . . with a rope, a knife, his bare hands. He takes her voice away forever.” In the lines that follow that one, Trahan covers the surgical incisions on her neck with scarves in shades of purple. Her surgeon—a kindly, respected man whom she nicknames Dr. Sixtysomething—becomes only “the guy with the knife.” Trahan draws deft parallels between the threat of this man’s power and the men who featured in her childhood: her parents’ neighbor Randy who asked repeatedly to date Trahan’s adolescent sister, or Trahan’s own father, who fell on top of her in a drunken stupor. Her mother, a perpetual bystander, is her introduction to the cruelty of men. In one striking scene where the two are alone in Trahan’s childhood bedroom, the frightened young girl asks if her father will be coming into the room, and her mother admonishes her. Trahan writes: “She knew I was asking about something I couldn’t yet imagine.” These observations will feel recognizable to most women who have encountered some form of violence, easily transmittable...