Mean
Author: Myriam Gurba
Publisher: An Emily Books Original/Coffee House Press
Pages: 175
Price: $16.95
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