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.

ISBN-13: ‎ 978-0988994577

Advance Praise for MERCY

“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

“Marcia Trahan treats television the way it should be treated — as worthy of deep intellectual and emotional investigation, a companion inseparable from the pain and joys of our own lives. She writes with as much sharp insight as she does beautiful vulnerability. Mercy is memoir, it's criticism, it's a light shining into all the hard places that are easier to avoid.”

— Lucas Mann, author of Lord Fear: A Memoir, and Captive Audience: On Love and Reality TV