Marcia Trahan is the author of Mercy: A Memoir of Medical Trauma and True Crime Obsession. She earned a bachelor of arts in psychology from the University of Vermont and a master of fine arts in writing and literature from Bennington College. Trahan’s essays and poetry have appeared in numerous publications, including 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. “Bloodletting,” a post-cancer narrative, was nominated for a Pushcart Prize. Her work has twice received honorable mention in the New Millennium Writing Awards. Trahan lives in South Burlington, Vermont, with her partner, Andy, and their crazed feline companion, Bela.
EB: Marcia, thanks so much for talking to me during a pandemic. How are you doing?
MT: As good as I can be considering the circumstances, I guess. How are you?
EB: I’m okay. Honestly, reading your book helped me a lot. All I want to do these days is dive into a really engrossing story and not think about the current world for a bit, and Mercy gave me that. Thank you!
MT: That’s so great to hear. I couldn’t ask for a better response than that. I thought right now people might not want to read anything dark, especially anything negative about medical personnel. Doctors and nurses are heroes right now. We need them so much. We really depend on medicine now more than ever, but we also dread treatment, don’t we? I think people are dreading the virus, and they’re dreading having to be treated for the virus.
EB: Yeah, I agree, I thought at first maybe reading about trauma and illness would be too heavy right now, but I actually found your book comforting, because you survived. I find reading memoirs about darkness reassuring—you know the author not only made it through the ordeal, but she was also able to look back on it all, reflect, and write a whole book about it.
MT: I find myself being drawn to reading about grief right now, like Joan Didion’s amazing memoirs. This is the time to be reading about loss because people are going through tremendous loss right now. We need writers to help us get through.
EB: Yes, writers like you! So how did you start writing? And how were you drawn to nonfiction?
MT: I began writing as a kid, and I wrote some really awful short storiesin like high school and college, as so many people do. But then in my senior year of college, I took a course on women’s autobiography, and that just changed my life, because in the class I learned that you didn’t have to be famous to write a memoir—you can be an ordinary person and write about your life. From then on, I knew I wanted to write a memoir, and when I went to Bennington for my master’s, I focused on nonfiction. That was my concentration. But I was writing terrible, self-pitying stuff.
EB: I mean, haven’t we all?
MT: Nothing very interesting had happened to me yet, so I really didn’t have a lot to say then. I wrote some really boring essays. And then in my mid-30s, some interesting things finally happened to me: the thyroid cancer and the pulmonary embolism. Really lucky, right?
EB: [laughter]
MT: I started to write essays about those experiences, shortly after they happened. But I didn’t know that I had a book in the works until a few years later, when I took a workshop with Sue William Silverman as the Postgraduate Writers’ Conference at Vermont College of Fine Arts. At the end of that workshop, Sue turned to me and said, “Marcia, you must write this book.” And I thought, Oh, my god, she’s right. And I also thought, Oh, no. Because I didn’t know if I really wanted to spend years reliving all of my medical trauma. I asked her why she felt so strongly, and she said that I was writing about this medical trauma with urgency. She’d read my previous work and it lacked that quality of I really need to tell you what happened to me.
I went back to the conference year after year, and every time I came away really determined to keep at it. I kept in touch with the writers I met there and we exchanged work during the months between conferences. It kept me going through all the emotional ups and downs of writing about those painful parts of my life.
I spent five years writing the memoir, and only towards the very end of that process, I decided to go it alone. So that I could see what I thought of what I had written without anyone else’s influence. It was very important to me at that point to make my own decisions without considering other opinions just for a short time.
EB: That’s interesting—I had actually wanted to ask you about how you take care of yourself and who you rely on for support when writing, especially about such challenging subjects. Who or what helped you get through spending five years immersed in your past trauma?
MT: That’s a good question. I feel like I was really lucky that I had a lot of help, a lot of really good help. I did get a lot of support from the people who I met through Vermont College of Fine Arts. I’ve gotten support from total strangers on Twitter and Facebook—people commenting on things I’ve written and telling me to keep going. And my partner Andy—he is very supportive of my writing, and I’ve written about some difficult times in our relationship, but he’s just not fazed by any of that. Also Sue Silverman, who told me to write this memoir in the first place! She’s now become a friend aswell as a mentor, andshe’s helped me to not totally lose my mind during the writing process. I also have friends who are willing to trade manuscripts, like if they’d read one of my chapters, I’d read one of their essays, which is so incredibly helpful.
As for self-care? So, to research the book, I requested my medical records in full because I didn’t have anywhere near as much as I should have had. Once I got them, I read through the records, and I came to the reports for my thyroid surgery, and I went through those multiple times to make sure that I was getting things right. And, at first, whenever I’d start to read my medical records, I’d feel like, Oh, those surgeries were so long ago. Like no big deal. But then I’d find after reading the reports that I’d gotten very cold, as if I were on the operating table again. That pesky unconscious mind at work. I felt really vulnerable after reading about all of my surgeries and procedures, especially the ones for the pulmonary embolism. Even now I still don’t want to look at them. I almost don’t want to read the parts in the book about those procedures because I feel the same vulnerability even after all this time. So, what did I do for self-care? I did some crying.
EB: [laughter] Ha, yes. Cinelle Barnes has written about crying all through writing her memoir and how her dog helped her through.
MT: I did certainly take refuge in reading other memoirs about all kinds of subjects. Kind of like what you were saying before—if people could survive these awful things, I can get through writing about my awful things. If they can do it, I can do it.
At certain times I also needed to put a limit on the amount of writing I could do because if I just let myself go, I would write until midnight, and not sleeping enough was not good for my health. So I would give myself a weekly or hourly limit to writing.
EB: That’s so smart. I feel like a lot of writers can underestimate the toll of re-traumatizing yourself for the sake of writing. You need to be really aware of how you are feeling. Before you dive into writing certain things, you need to assess what you can feel like you can tackle. I remember Sarah Perry said she would do this—every morning assess how she was feeling before she would decide what she was up to write about that day.
MT: Yes, exactly. You can’t write at all if you exhaust yourself.
EB: You already mentioned the medical records, but I was interested in sort of other research you did for this book. I love how you blend your personal story with a cultural critique of American medicine and also the American obsession with true crime. How did you go about your research?
MT: When you’re going through a medical treatment, you don’t necessarily understand what’s happening. You don’t have the full picture. They don’t tell you everything, for your own sake. So, I got my own medical records, plus I watched videos of the procedures I had done on YouTube, or I would pull up descriptions of what’s involved in putting in a blood clot filter. I wanted to make sure that I wasn’t just relying on my memory. Also the journals and calendars that I kept during that time were really important, too. Sometimes they surprised me—like I could see visually how I compartmentalized things.
That was how I researched my personal medical experiences. As for the true crime research—every time I watched a true crime show was research, right? That was kind of fun, even if guilt-ridden.
EB: Ha, yes, I feel like sometimes with nonfiction, especially personal writing, you can make excuses for anything to be research. In grad school I had a friend who joked every time we went out for drinks it was “research” for the essays we would all write about going out to drinks with each other.
MT: You can make anything work!
EB: Did you know from the beginning of writing Mercy that you were going to weave together the medical narrative and the true crime obsession narrative? On the surface, at first, they seem so unrelated, but the way you have them play off each other is so smart and it makes so much sense. When did you figure out that structure?
MT: I didn’t know about it from the beginning. At first the memoir was purely a medical narrative with a lot more complaining about doctors. I originally thought of the book as a kind of self-help book. I included journal prompts that the reader could use, and it was sort of tongue-in-cheek and sort of half-serious at the same time. And then I finally realized that that was not working and that I just had to sit down and write a normal narrative.
But as for the true crime part—I did make the connection between medicine and true crime before I started writing the book, but true crime didn’t enter the book until pretty late in the game, like the last year or two of writing it.
EB: Wow, really?
MT: The version of the manuscript I sent to Barrelhouse had the same beginning as the book has now—me watching true crime television—but then I let go of the true crime thread for many chapters and let the violence of the medical procedures be implied. Once Mike Ingram and Lilly Dancyger at Barrelhouse acquired the manuscript and encouraged me to bring the true crime element into the book much more, I realized that there were all these connections that I hadn’t made explicit between medicine and true crime. Only then did I really dig into the true crime aspects, and doing that was an intellectual thrill ride, linking my personal experience to true crime.
EB: I can’t believe it came so late in the drafting. The way the two are woven together feels like you knew from the conception of the book they would blend. Though you capture that experience of discovery—I love feeling like I am on a journey with the author as they figure out connections for themselves.
MT: Thank you. I was worried it would be clunky, because sometimes I’d have to talk about things where, at that point in the narrative, I hadn’t actually made the connection yet. I had to say things like, I would learn later that these things were connected.
EB: I didn’t think it was clunky! And I think that is so necessary in a good memoir—you need a strong balance of both the Then You and the Now You. You need scenes of you then, in the moment, scared and confused so the reader gets drawn in, but you also need the present version of yourself that has all the perspective.
MT: Yeah, definitely. We’re always doing that in writing memoir. Because what’s in it for the reader to just read about someone’s unprocessed chaos? There is really nothing in that for the reader. They need the mature perspective. You don’t usually have a lot of insight while you’re experiencing something. The insights come later.
EB: Of course.
MT: You mentioned liking memoirs that combine outside research with personal experience—have you read Savage Appetites by Rachel Monroe?
EB: No! It has been on my to read list forever. I need to get on that.
MT: It is so great and she does a ton of research but also weaves in her own experience, and the way she does it is really brilliant. The Third Rainbow Girl by Emma Copley Eisenberg is another fantastic one, too.
EB: So, you’ve already mentioned a lot of the things that have been challenging about writing Mercy, but what would you say was the most challenging part about writing this book for you? What about writing nonfiction in general?
MT: Figuring out the structure. I spent so much time moving one chapter here, changing my mind and moving it back; splitting up one chapter into two, just to put them back together again; taking out chapters that I had spent months or years working on.
EB: I can relate to that.
MT: Though once the book was acquired, having Lilly and Mike helping me finalize the structure was a huge help.
The research was hard too. I spent hours transcribing my journals, and then hours doing the medical research. And then more hours on top of that researching true crime statistics and information about women’s interest in the true crime genre. Doing all that on top of already having limited time to write—I would sometimes get panicky watching the time drain away. And, as we already discussed, the research itself can be really painful when you’re researching things from your own life.
EB: What would you say is most rewarding thing for you about writing nonfiction?
MT: After writing Mercy, I feel like I made sense of my life. I see how these events that were seemingly unconnected are actually related, and I see that there’s a weird beauty in how it’s all related. It’s such a relief to see how it all comes together. It allows me to have compassion for myself, because I see all the things that I’ve overcome. And they’re all in this book.
EB: That’s amazing.
MT: I’m nervous, but I’m excited to share these secrets with readers. The book reveals so many of the things I’m ashamed of, like my suicide attempt, my obsession with true crime, the trauma I suffered in my family. But I’m thrilled to think people might read about these things and understand their own experience in a new way after reading my book. I hope Mercy offers solace to people who feel alone, that it tells them that being a misfit is okay. I hope the book gives them a way to frame their pain, and that I’ve given back something of what reading other memoirs has given me. Memoir literally saved my life, both the writing of it and the reading of it. If I can actually reach someone who’s in their darkest hour, I think that will be the ultimate reward.
EB: Yes! That is what I love about memoir—the way it connects people’s stories together. When I spoke to T Kira Madden, she told me about how when she heard this one teenage girl related to her book, that was enough. She could have written the book for that one girl.
MT: Memoir isn’t just about the author. It’s about all of us.
EB: Finally, what is a favorite passage of nonfiction by a fellow non-man writer?
MT: There is a Virginia Woolf quote I love. It’s from a letter dated 28 December 1932, to Hugh Walpole: “Of all literature (yes, I think this is more or less true) I love autobiography most. In fact I sometimes think only autobiography is literature—novels are what we peel off, and come at last to the core, which is only you or me.”