In Marcia Trahan's memoir, she looks at both the health scares and subsequent surgeries that defined her adult life, and her childhood as a shy, uncertain adolescent being raised in an insecure household, and how both those elements factored into her own growing fascination with true crime shows.

This memoir was what I had thought Alice Bolin's Dead Girls: Essays on Surviving an American Obsession would be - an attempt to examine why women are so drawn to stories of the violent deaths of other women. Trahan keeps the lens focused tightly on herself and it's in her willingness to look honestly at herself, she answers broader questions, or at least gets closer to an answer.

Trahan is a very different person than I am, although we share that same weird fascination for crime, and I was at first annoyed by what I saw as a needless paranoia on her part, but this changed into an appreciation that she would so honestly share the reasons behind her cautiousness. There's a lot packed into this slim memoir. It's published by a very small press, Barrelhouse Books, and I'm glad small presses exist to give us unusual and off-beat stories that might not be published by the big guys. ( )