RABBIT HEART

The story of the author confronting the lifelong impact of her mother’s murder.

When Ervin was 8 and her brother, Rolland, was 13, her mother left to return a dress to a mall in Oklahoma City and never returned. Soon, the family learned that their mother, Kathy Sue Engle, had been kidnapped, raped, and murdered, and her body was found in an oil field in the neighboring town of Sayre. In the years that followed, Ervin watched as police falsely accused two men of the murder, only to revisit the case decades later when DNA matched that of a man serving a prison sentence for assaulting another Oklahoma woman. “It’s too beautiful—the fingerprints with the alphabet in their cores, text and body and text, Rolland fighting through the law, me fighting through my words, my mother’s killer found through the power of language and grief,” writes the author, whose work as a teacher of creative writing shines through on every page. While the last third of the book follows the ensuing trial, much of the narrative involves Ervin’s psychological and emotional reactions and broader explorations of physical, sexual, and emotional violence, especially “how we shift blame to women for the violence against their own bodies.” Throughout, the author’s investigations of the concept of victimhood are insightful and urgent, and she demonstrates how “so many victims are silenced and excluded from the process” of punishing the perpetrators. Ervin laces the poetic text with unforgettable moments of startling, shattering honesty, many of which feel impossible to witness. This is the genius of the author’s prose and what makes this book remarkable: Ervin’s unflinchingly brutal gaze, combined with her insistence on facing the worst parts of her past, make it equally impossible for us to look away.

A devastating memoir about living with—and dying from—gender-based violence.