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What To Read When You're Living in A Female Body - The
What To Read When You're Living in A Female Body - The
As a young girl, I was afraid of becoming a woman. The development that came with puberty filled me with shame, and I quickly learned that the male appetite for
female bodies was dangerously insatiable. No one taught me how to honor the needs of my corporeal self, to see it as beautiful, or to protect it from harm, and so as
a teen, I tried to become all mind. I studied and read and thought and ignored my physical being.
I wanted to escape my female vulnerability. In my attempt to avoid harm, I neglected to consider women’s abundant psychological and physical resilience. It was only
when I began reading memoirs by women writers that I started to see the female body as a wondrous thing, worthy of close, respectful attention. Through these
memoirs, I came to understand that the experiences of our flesh matter deeply.
I found inspiration and validation for my first book, Mercy: A Memoir of Medical Trauma and True Crime Obsession, in the following titles.
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An Iranian American whose family came to this country as refugees, Khakpour explores the ways in which trauma might cause or exacerbate illness, and how
dealing with a broken medical system is itself traumatic. I was working on the final draft of Mercy when I read Sick. I’d wondered if I’d said too much about my
conditions and their treatment in my memoir, and this book helped put that fear to rest. I was fascinated by her incredibly vivid descriptions of her symptoms,
indicators of what is eventually diagnosed as late-stage Lyme disease. In minute, breathtaking detail, Khakpour discusses her headaches, joint pain, fatigue,
intractable insomnia, and all of the other Lyme symptoms that defy Western medical intervention. Sick explores what it means to be a patient at the mercy of a
healthcare system that sometimes harms us before it heals us, and in some cases never heals us at all.
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And to close out this wonderful list, we just had to include Marcia’s debut book, Mercy: A Memoir of Medical Trauma and True Crime Obsession, out now from
Barrelhouse Books! – Ed.
Mercy: A Memoir of Medical Trauma and True Crime Obsession by Marcia Trahan
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 had 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.
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Marcia Trahan is the author of Mercy: A Memoir of Medical Trauma and True Crime Obsession (Barrelhouse Books, 2020). She earned a master of fine arts in
writing and literature from Bennington College. Her essays and poetry have appeared in the Brevity blog, Fourth Genre, apt, Clare, Anderbo, Blood Orange Review,
Connotation Press, Kansas City Voices, and the LaChance Publishing anthology Women Reinvented: True Stories of Empowerment and Change. Marcia lives in
South Burlington, Vermont, with her partner, Andy, and their crazed feline companion, Bela. More from this author →
Tags: Alice Sebold, audre lorde, Christa Parravani, Elissa Washuta, Her, hunger, I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings, Lidia Yuknavitch, Lucky, Marcia Trahan, Maya
Angelou, Mercy, Mercy: A Memoir of Medical Trauma and True Crime Obsession, My Body Is a Book of Rules, Nancy Mairs, Porochista Khakpour, Remembering
the Bone House, Roxane Gay, sick, Strange Piece of Paradise, Terri Jentz, The Chronology of Water, What to Read When, Zami: A New Spelling Of My Name
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