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An account of surviving assault mixes horror and humour

Book review of 'Mean'

Mean
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Mean

Parul Sehgal | NYT
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

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