An account of surviving assault mixes horror and humor
In slasher films, there’s a famous convention in which the last woman alive faces down the killer — Jamie Lee Curtis in “Halloween,” for example. Film theorists call her the “final girl.” She lives in order to tell the story.
Myriam Gurba is a self-professed “final girl,” and “Mean” is her testimony: a scalding memoir that comes with a full accounting of the costs of survival, of being haunted by those you could not save and learning to live with their ghosts.
As a college student in the 1990s, Gurba was assaulted by a man who went on to attack several other women, gruesomely raping and killing one— an itinerant worker named Sophia Torres. “She wound up dead. I mostly didn’t,” Gurba writes, in her signature deadpan. “I’m unqualified to tell the story of Sophia Torres, but since she’s dead, so is she.”
Arriving as it does in the thick of the #MeToo movement of women bringing forth their stories of abuse and harassment, this book adds a necessary dimension to the discussion of the interplay of race, class and sexuality in sexual violence. Gurba is gay and half Chicana, and she turns over what it means that she, her attacker and Torres share ethnicity.
There’s not a trace of piety, however. “Mean” calls for a fat, fluorescent trigger warning start to finish — and I say this admiringly. Gurba likes the feel of radioactive substances on her bare hands. She wants to find new angles from which to report on this most ancient of stories, to zap you into feeling. She hunts for new language, her own language, to evoke the horror and obscene intimacy of sexual violence. “Somewhere on this planet, a man is touching a woman to death,” she writes. “Somewhere on this planet, a man is about to touch a woman to death.”
Humor is usually her electric prod of choice. “A stranger chose me to rape. There was no nepotism involved,” she mock-boasts. “Stranger rape is like the Mona Lisa. It’s exquisite, timeless and archetypal. It’s classic. I can’t help but think of it as the Coca-Cola of sex crimes.”
Having provoked uncomfortable laughter, she swivels into seriousness. “After a stranger ambushes you and assails your private parts, everything becomes new. Everything is reborn. Everything takes on a new hue, the color of rape. You look at the world through rape-tinted glasses. You understand that you live in a world where getting classically raped is possible and that classical rapists lurk everywhere.”
She becomes paralyzed with fear. PTSD, she notes, is the only mental illness you can actually give someone else. She imagines she sees her rapist everywhere — at the supermarket absently squeezing the hot dog buns. She diets and exercises to the point of sickness (“death by anorexia is a fail-safe sexualassault prevention technique”).
In a way, her attacker is everywhere. She can’t escape him or the ubiquity, even the mundanity, of sexual threat. (Her rapist, she says, “looked so average it horrified me.”) Gurba grew up in California near Michael Jackson’s Neverland Ranch. He was a major employer in town, and there’s the suggestion in the book that he prowled video arcades “determined to taste what was there.”
The judge and prosecutor from Jackson’s trial for molestation served in the murder trial of the man convicted of killing Torres. On and on, Gurba uncovers these links: A childhood classmate who molested her and several other girls was himself a victim, she discovers, of his baseball coach, an especially prolific local predator. “My catechism teacher, a white nun with sky-blue eyes, taught me that god is omnipresent,” she recalls. “Rape is everywhere too. Rape is in the air. Rape is in the sky. Rape is in the Bible. Rape happens at the neighbor’s.” She can’t resist a grim little joke: “Rape gave birth to Western civilization and maybe your mom.”
The book keeps revolving between these poles of horror and humor, sometimes wobbling on its axis. Gurba is addicted to terrible puns, and they get worse and more numerous as the book goes on. I had to brace myself against their onslaught — embarrassing plays on “Rambo” and “Rimbaud,” “memories” and “mammaries.”
It’s not that the jokes are inappropriate or in bad taste — it would be a form of madness to ask for good taste in a book about rape, and I’m all for Gurba’s more opulently offensive humor, even when it makes me a little queasy. It’s the lack of care that’s so puzzling, especially in a book so attentive to language.
Worse, the compulsive punning and jokiness distract from the book’s more ambitious possibilities — and its most interesting tension. Gurba has said she had no intention of “performing” her victimhood in this book, and indeed she holds some of the details of her attack close; she doesn’t want to offer them up for our consumption or titillation. But she’s oddly cavalier about the suffering of others. “Mean” begins with an imagined look up Torres’ skirt and moves into a grisly moment-by-moment recap of how she was chased and mutilated and murdered. There are instances in the book when Gurba doesn’t even refer to Torres by name — just as a defiled corpse.
It’s not just Torres. There’s some relish in the evocation of the deaths of Virginia Woolf (“I wanted to know how many rocks it had taken to weigh her down”) and artist Ana Mendieta (“The other day, as I was cleaning my bedroom, I decided, for fun, to act out Mendieta’s murder”).
It feels as if Gurba is drawn to these details not from ghoulishness but from a need to make her own suffering and fear feel more real to her. The book’s clear forebear is “The Red Parts,” Maggie Nelson’s book about the murder of her Aunt Jane. I wished Gurba had wrestled with, as Nelson does, what it means to use a dead woman, a stranger, in this way: as a blank slate on which to project her fantasies and fears. There’s an admonishment on the second page of the book, too quickly forgotten: “We may feel that because we are privy to the wreckage she belongs to us too, but she does not.”
‘After a stranger ambushes you and assails your private parts, everything becomes new. Everything is reborn. Everything takes on a new hue, the color of rape. You look at the world through rape-tinted glasses. You understand that you live in a world where getting classically raped is possible and that classical rapists lurk everywhere.’