Mercy - by Marcia Trahan (Paperback)

About the Book

Mercy tells the story of the author's battle with cancer and her simultaneous obsession with true crime TV. With candor and dark humor, Mercy examines the costs of existing as a woman in a world where men have the power to save or end her life

Book Synopsis

One of BuzzFeed's 15 Books from Smaller Presses You Won't Be Able to Put Down. One of Book Riot's 10 Best New Indie Press Books of Summer 2020. Literary Nonfiction. Women's Studies. When Marcia Trahan began watching true crime television, she did so in secret. She felt ashamed by her fascination with these violent stories, and how hungrily she consumed one gruesome tale after another. Only years later did she start to connect the dots between her true crime obsession and the series of invasive medical procedures that left her feeling victimized and violated. Can the body tell the difference between an attacker's knife and a surgeon's? This is the central question in MERCY, a question that leads Trahan to re-examine her body's reaction to lifesaving medical treatment, the childhood experiences that first made her feel unsafe in her own skin, and the true crime genre's most common tropes. Part searingly honest memoir, part incisive cultural criticism, MERCY explores the appeal of true crime and the way so many of us live our whole lives bracing for an attack.

Review Quotes

"Mercy is a bracing account of the perverse satisfactions of true crime. Marcia Trahan unravels the threads of her own fascination with stories of violence against women, and they lead to unexpected--and darkly thrilling--places."-- Rachel Monroe, author of Savage Appetites: Four True Stories of Women, Crime, and Obsession

"Mercy is a harrowing exploration of Marcia Trahan's lifelong fascination with true crime despite her best efforts to escape its dark pull. By turns cultural criticism and personal journey, the book is a painful reckoning with the realities of living in a female body under the specter of the male gaze." -- Carolyn Murnick, author of The Hot One

"Searingly honest and deftly written, Mercy is the story of a unique psychological journey that ends in satisfying self-revelation." --BookPage

"Written with polished craft and sly wit, Marcia Trahan's memoir Mercy offers the reader the genre's best: a compelling personal narrative of peculiarly dark obsessions elegantly tethered to the wider culture. Mercy ultimately reveals as much about the reader and her world as it does about the narrator. Trahan's gift for embedding ultimate questions within subversive reflections on medicine, murder, and marriage, makes this memoir a fascinating read from a brilliant writer. Lovely."-- Kelly J. Beard, author of An Imperfect Rapture: A Memoir, winner of the 2017 Zone 3 Press Creative Nonfiction Book Award

"Mercy is a double-barreled narrative of health scares and murder stories. By combining these, Trahan highlights the fragility of both our physical and emotional lives. With surgically precise prose, she examines the push and pull of death--wanting one's own survival while being drawn to the tales of others' demise. This is a book about violation: the sanctioned violation of the body during surgery, and the unsanctioned violation of bodily harm. Trahan does a masterful job of showing how, psychically, these two kinds of violence overlap. In the end, this is a beautifully written book about being merciful. Especially to ourselves, which sometimes can be the hardest kind of mercy to give."-- Sue William Silverman, author of How to Survive Death and Other Inconveniences