Mercy: A Memoir of Medical Trauma & True Crime Obsession, Marcia Trahan
I’ve viewed the growth in popularity of memoir as one of postmodernism’s less fortunate sequelae. Human lives in a given culture are more marked by similarity than they are by difference. Your troubles are likely similar to my troubles, or at least to the troubles of many, many others. Everyone has a story, but not all stories need be told. Still, I must come out of my skeptic’s closet and acknowledge myself as, at least, memoir-curious.
Enter Marcia Trahan’s Mercy, A Memoir of Medical Trauma & True Crime Obsession (see endnote). Trahan, the unexpected and bookish youngest child of an infirm, indifferent mother and an alcoholic, sexually inappropriate father, spends her formative years as an unwilling audience to her mother’s fascination with violent crime. So raised and regaled, she finds herself in adulthood battling depression and beset by fear of violence and rape, particularly by knife-wielding assailants.
Diagnosed with cancer of the thyroid, Trahan undergoes surgery to remove part of the affected organ, then submits to a second visit to the surgeon’s table when examination by pathologists shows the gland to be diseased throughout. These interventions leave her unaccountably rage-filled, leading ultimately to a shame-beset fascination with true-crime TV, an unwelcome reprise of her mother’s appetite for reports of violence and gore.
Trahan’s writing is by turns elegant and quirky, and her irony and self-knowledge inform every page.
Being angry and doing nothing about it except screaming killed my mother, inflaming her insides until her body gave out. Fury was a growth devouring me cell by cell. I would have grabbed a kitchen knife and excised it with my own hands if I could. Too late. It was in my throat. Blood, lungs, hair, brain. The blackened walls of my atria and ventricles. The exploded red star of my solar plexus. At night, tears and small, stifled screams, writing it down all-caps furious. Nothing could kill this motherfucker. Not until the day something finally killed me.
Ultimately, Trahan finds relief in the writing of Stanley Fisher, a psychologist who contends that the anesthetized body cannot distinguish between a blade wielded by an attacker and a surgeon’s healing scalpel. I saw now that my body had indeed registered the scalpel as a dire threat, that it had not recognized the surgeon’s benevolent intentions. I allowed myself to see what I had always known on some level: I sought out true crime programs because my body had experienced surgery as violence... I wasn’t crazy. I hadn’t overreacted.
En route to this epiphany, Trahan contends with the fear and anger experienced by her life-partner, Andy, who finds himself at times overwhelmed by her illnesses and the depth of her need. What neither of us could face was the fact that Andy was not only angry at doctors or fate or illness. He was angry at me, for becoming ill, for requiring even more care. He was angry that his fear of disease had been realized in the person he loved.
I find much that’s familiar in this telling—and much that isn’t. Like Trahan, I was diagnosed with cancer in my thirties, a time when life seemed sufficiently lived to make death thinkable, yet insufficiently complete to render my extinguishment welcome. Counting that and other interventions—some occasioned by a life that’s been both active and, well, clumsy—I’ve been scalpeled and probed too many times to count on both hands. No doubt I’m weird (or obtusely male) but I’ve worn my surgical scars with something like pride.
Yet Trahan’s experience rebuts my unease with the popularity of memoir as a genre. It is the particularity of her reaction to the healing blade—and her unsparing acknowledgement of it—that make her story compelling. And it’s her willingness to dissect the sputtering of a relationship under stress that raises a forgiving mirror to all of us who’ve fallen short when a partner needed us most.
The victories that Trahan achieves are partial ones. During my own cancer treatment, I was convinced that suffering would winnow away my capacity for unkindness and human evil. I felt sure that I would emerge from my sickness a saint. The real result was more modest—in most respects I’m pretty much the same faulty unit I’ve always been.
Trahan does not overcome her fear of the blade or her anxiety about potential attackers so much as she forges an uneasy truce with them. Haircuts are self-administered, dental visits remain a hardship, showers are best not taken in an empty home. But this is the way of things, and, to me, this is what makes Trahan’s story rewardingly universal—we do not defeat that which challenges us. At least, not often. We make peace with it. We learn to exist in the face of it.
And this, I think, is what memoir can do best, directing our attention to the ambiguous and contingent nature of these lives we lead. Stories of improbable victory have their place, I suppose, but most of us will never set aside our crutches to win the thousand-yard sprint. For us, more typical folk, Trahan speaks of adversity as it is actually met, life as it’s actually lived.
Buy Mercy at your independent bookshop or bookshop.org, an online retailer that devotes part of its profit to supporting local booksellers.
Endnote: A disclaimer: Marcia Trahan and I were at the Bennington Writing Seminars together in the early 2000s, though we specialized in different genres. I’ve always liked her. What are the ethics, then, of my reviewing her book? I can only say this—if I didn’t like the book, I’d simply not review it.
