Spin Cycle
In 1969, as the summer of love spiraled into the screaming peak of hurricane season, a Cat 5 called Camille detonated the Gulf Coast, made a biblical mess of the country, and definitively shattered whatever sense of social order and narrative stability still lingered at the last gasp of the psychedelic shitstorm that was the 1960s.
On the evening of August 17th, having tumbled over 33 miles of levees and scattered nearly 100 ships across the Gulf, Camille barrelled into the gulf town of Pass Christian and swallowed the whole of Mississippi before tearing through Tennessee, cloudbursting over Virginia, and drowning hundreds of unsuspecting Appalachian mountain communities. Camille killed at least 351 people, caused over $1.42 billion in damages, and remains the second most intense storm to ever strike the continental United States, clocking in at an atmospheric pressure of 900 mb and a landfall intensity of 150 knots.
“She wiped out virtually every trace of civilization from Port Sulphur to Pilot Town,” writes historian Charles Sullivan. “At Buras, formerly a town of 6,000, only six structures remained.”
That’s how, in the high tide of ‘69, not two weeks from the murders at Cielo Drive, which, according to Joan Didion, not only ended the 1960s, but also marked the moment a nation lost the plot entirely, “the very scaffolding of 20th-century civilization fell away,” sparking demand for a new national narrative: new stories to tell ourselves in order to live.
Cue Walter Cronkite: the beloved broadcaster, trusted biographer of a narratively challenged nation. In the days after Camille, Cronkite’s coverage of the storm, delivered with his characteristic blend of journalistic integrity and emotional candor, flashed across every American TV screen, humanizing—even personalizing—a national tragedy. Over a montage of disaster zones and still lives of suffering rotating like the panels of a magic lantern, Cronkite’s soothing voice was a welcome therapeutic: stitching a narrative line across the fucked-up phantasmagoria that is our actual experience.
The camera panned over the salt-stripped wasteland of Pass Christian, Mississippi, lingering on an open wound of asphalt and debris. Cronkite’s voice cracked as he spoke the fateful words that brought to the nation the absurd, apocryphal story of the South’s most infamous hurricane party.
“This is the site of the Richelieu Apartments. This is the place where 23 people laughed in the face of death. And where 23 people died.”
The sensational narrative blazed through the airwaves and remains, to this day, stubbornly sealed into the public imagination. But Cronkite didn’t start the fire. He just picked up the story, which, from the very beginning, was of questionable integrity. Starting with the fact that, of those 23 who’d ostensibly perished at the party, one had, in fact, lived to tell the tale.
The camera lands, the blame falls, on self-declared sole survivor Mary Ann Gerlach. She’s sugar-blonde, salmon-suited, steeped in cigarette smoke, scream-queen chic, and clearly a few knots past tipsy. Some kind of beautiful—like a car fire or a beat-up Barbie. She stands before the wreckage at Richelieu, popping her gum, twirling her hair, and declares: “Me? The first thing that popped into my mind was: party time!”
—
I must have rewound the footage a thousand times, watching her seashell-pink smile twist up and down in a perfect performance of ethical ambiguity. The documentary was called “Camille Was No Lady.” Obviously, neither was Mary Ann, who, having claimed responsibility for throwing the rager that killed 23 people, cashed in on Camille and sold her soul for the story. Our Lady of Reality.
And when it came to the Mary Ann Show, I was hooked from the very first season. I scavenged for more of her the way I’d once collected Real World VHS tapes. And for much the same reason, actually. Her bullshit was a welcome respite from my own. A hot mess to distract me from my writing in 2024, at the mid-September strike of hurricane season, as a Cat 4 called Helene tumbled toward the Forgotten Coast, driving me from Florida into the desolate deadlands of Northern Alabama, where my fellow evacuees had decided, incidentally, to throw a hurricane party. Correction: they were drinking, and I was writing. A book, as it were, about all the ways alcohol had failed me. The pages smacked of self-pity and reeked of solipsism; I was boo-hooing to an audience of one. Worse, there wasn’t much of a story. Just a storm system of suffering with no subject at its center. Once, I’d believed the best books were written in blood. Now, I was drowning in it. Had I been so out of touch as to believe that spatter could ever spell a story worth sharing?
—
The danger of the trauma narrative, writes Leslie Jamison in her reflections on female pain, “is that the self will be subsumed by [suffering] or unable to see outside its gravity. The wound can sculpt selfhood in a way that limits identity rather than expanding it.” I’d squeezed myself into the recognizable shape of a wounded woman, typecasting myself into a single story about pain, flattening myself into a cliché.
This, I blamed on the genre’s apparently irreconcilable demands. Namely: its insistence that a singular subject could streamline the traumatic memory—necessarily fragmented, often fabricated—into a linear, truthful statement about itself. Trauma, by its very definition, is a rupture. Pain blurs the lines between memory and invention, truth and the story we tell about it.
What I wanted, really, was to write through my suffering—beyond it. But I kept getting swept up in my pain. So, absent other options, I tried to circumvent the whole thing entirely and write about another Camille instead—the hurricane that bears my name.
In pursuit of that story, I got swept up in Mary Ann’s shitstorm, and in a circuitous way, I learned to weather my own. But that wouldn’t come until later, which is why I spent the better part of a year patching together, from sound bites and still shots, disparate interviews and trial transcripts, the utterly insane, totally absurd, post-modern epic of Mary Ann Gerlach. It begins with a hurricane, ends with a homicide, and spins cycles around the impenetrable core of self-representation. I pursued the truth to its very limits, which is also, incidentally, how I came up against the limitations of truth. I seem to remember a time when people said that reality was stranger than fiction. But that, I think, was when we could still differentiate between the two.
—
In the summer of 1969, Mary Ann Gerlach was busy squeezing her big dreams of stardom onto the Deep South’s flickering, fluorescent, roadside marquees. Once, so her friends tell me, she’d been a high-class call girl. By then, she’d settled for cocktail waitressing in the beachside billion-dollar playground that was Pass Christian, Mississippi.
By 1969, Mary Ann was several lives deep. Born in 1937 and wed at 15, she hopscotched across six marriages and multiple careers before landing a charmed life on the sugar-white beaches off of Highway 90, where she reigned over the Richelieu Apartments with her sixth husband, Fritz. She was something of a small-town celebrity—known to all her neighbors, many of whom remember her fondly. “We celebrated our birthdays together,” Dale Summers of Gulfport wrote me.“She treated me with respect. She was complex with streetwise instincts. But they hadn’t hardened her compassionate and kind nature.” Indeed, Mary Ann had been through a lot, though it would take the prospect of prison and perjury to get her, only many years later, to admit it. Mary Ann was the quintessential manic pixie American Dreamgirl. Sure, she was damaged. But she was also tough. She was sexy. And above all, she was free. A down-bad Dixie fantasy proving that in Nixon’s America, you could be whatever you wanted to be.
Much like Mary Ann, Camille was a paragon of self-reinvention: a mercurial mess with a wildly erratic trajectory. The trouble began on August 5th, with a tropical wave that swept through the waters off Senegal, concentrating into a circular area of convection over the Lesser Antilles. The system travelled over island chains, burst into the Caribbean Sea, and somewhere between Jamaica and the Cayman Islands, “it” became a “she.” This was ten years before the National Organization for Women pointed out the problematic implications of naming storms exclusively after women. Supposedly, “Carol” was next on deck, but the last one had so misbehaved that she warranted scrapping the name entirely, so famed meteorologist John Hope suggested they call her Camille after his young daughter. This, one supposes, was to be some kind of honor. Though I can attest that sharing a name with a storm that traumatized an entire generation isn’t all it’s cracked up to be.
On August 15th, 1969, Camille reached hurricane status before roaring ashore in Guane as a Cat 2, then weakening considerably over Cuba before making her way to Mississippi. Come evening, forecasters predicted that she would turn northeastward toward the Florida panhandle. “But like any lady,” quips Glenn Ford in the aforementioned 1978 documentary, “she was perfectly capable of changing her mind.”
And like Mary Ann, Camille was a trickster and a tease. Her narrow eye, contracted core, and impenetrable rainbands precluded any possibility of drawing, from her compact body, an accurate meteorological reading. “The first information [anyone] had on Camille was of a 15-foot tide and 150-mph wind, comparable to the 1947 storm. Just a little more severe than Betsy,” recounts former Harrison County Civil Defense Director Wade Guice in an interview for the Mississippi Department of Archives and History. By the time an Air Force plane finally punctured Camille’s knotted coils, reporting a barometric pressure of 26.61 inHg—the lowest ever recorded by any aircraft in the Western Hemisphere—Mississippi’s low-lying bridges had flooded entirely, and it was, for over 100,000 people in her direct path, too late to leave. By mid-afternoon on August 17th, Camille had reached 200-mph wind velocity and a record-breaking 25-foot tide rise with an added 10-foot floodwater line, far outpacing her predecessor, which, for many, was simply impossible to imagine. “I felt about the forecast as the farmer did when he saw the first elephant,” resident Olin Clark reported to Mississippi archivist Charlotte Capers, “there ain’t no such animal. And there ain’t no such hurricane.”
For Guice, Camille’s high body count has much to do with this endemic attitude of disbelief, which he attributes, at least in part, to the Civil Defense’s incapacity to translate the data into a persuasive enough cautionary tale. As luck (or misfortune) would have it, the party at Richelieu would henceforth serve that very purpose.
The Richelieu Apartments were the shining star in a constellation of condos built along the coast in the post-war scramble for leisure-oriented real estate. In 1951, 26 miles of sand were dumped along the slapdash sea wall, which itself had been built in the early 1920s, all of it an architectural illusion obscuring the truth: that Pass Christian was little more than a slip-and-slide into the sea, rebuilt after Camille only to be wrecked again by Katrina in the 21st century. The layout of the Richelieu, with its three-story buildings arranged in a U-shaped formation, arms outstretched to embrace the Gulf, was, in some sense, intended to both soften and preserve that sense of oceanic intimacy. And as with many other newly constructed condos, the buildings were relatively cheap. “They appeared to be made of solid brick,” former resident Pat Shields told me over the phone. “But it was actually just brick veneer.” In other words, the Richelieu residents were the victims of an architectural fiction. In an interview with historian Charles Sullivan, Mary Ann recalls that “the manager and his wife told [residents] it was the safest place to be.” What else to do, then, but hunker down and make the best of it?
It was Camille, more than any other storm before her, who brought the million-dollar question to the fore of public scrutiny: why, given the advent of modern meteorological infrastructure and sophisticated communication technology, do so many, faced with certain danger, still choose to stay in place? But the question itself, I think, betrays a hidden motive: the (very American) impulse to pass a verdict. Are those who stay victims? Or are they, in Cronkite’s words, “sightseers, thrillseekers, stubborn unbelievers?” Are they innocent or are they guilty?
Maybe that’s why Mary Ann’s story so struck a nerve; it turned on the collective obsession with sorting trauma survivors into discernible moral categories. And when it came to Gerlach, the verdict was clear. When asked the million-dollar question, she flashed her million-dollar smile.“We thought it would be great fun,” she conceded.
And so, having persuaded her neighbors to join the party, Mary Ann “went out and got all kinds of stuff to fix, you know, sandwiches and hors d’oeuvres and a bunch of stuff to drink.” By then, authorities were scrambling door-to-door in a last-ditch effort to issue mandatory evacuation orders. In an oral history compiled by Tuskegee University, Mary Ann recounts, with characteristic irreverence, a cinematic standoff at the 11th hour between Richelieu residents and the “Civil Defense people” who were clear on one point: their chances of survival were slim. Her apartment manager argued. The defense workers pleaded. Mary Ann, for her part, offered to make drinks. When a third-floor resident, stone-drunk and proportionally reckless, threw a bottle from his balcony and proclaimed, “damnit, you’ll have to arrest me,” the Civil Defense settled for recording residents’ next-of-kin.
With the party prepped and nothing to do but wait, Gerlach, who’d worked a night shift, settled in for a nap, intending to join her neighbors who had already gathered upstairs to drink. She slept, or perchance she dreamt, the fantastic details that follow, tipping the story into the territory of magical realism. The unearthly sounds of bumping and banging that woke her from sleep. The water, murky and green, pressed up, “aquarium-like,” against the windows. For a moment, all was silent, the world momentarily suspended in pressurized peace. Until the glass burst and the tidal wave came, cracking the walls in half and “floating [her] bed halfway up to the ceiling.”
Her husband, Fritz, was slow to wake and couldn’t swim. So she had, she insists, “no choice” but to leave him with a pool raft and parting words: “I know we’re going to die,” she told him, “but I’m not going to die in here.” Despite his desperate pleas, she took their only flashlight, left him to drown in the darkness, and floated from a third-story window.
It’s a compelling image—and the set-up for a climax that never comes, an ending that resolves nothing. The story comes to a close in box 3, folder 11 of the University of Southern Mississippi’s “Hurricanes of the Mississippi Gulf Coast Research Collection.”
“So I swam on out, and I got tied up in the telephone wires and the light wires outside [...] And as the waves were pushing me, it was also pushing that top floor, and they were having the hurricane party up at the girl’s apartment, I saw the lanterns and all up there. [...] You couldn’t distinguish the people in there, but you could see the lights, and as it was washing me away, it was washing those. It went slowly down, and you could see the apartment, and you could see the lights, and everything just go underwater.”
It’s the best part of the story—or it was to me at least—because it testifies to Mary Ann’s narrative dexterity; it’s cinematic, compelling, and yet somehow, totally ruthless and entirely devoid of sentimentality. It’s a tale of mythic proportions, and yet this is no hero’s journey. The star saves no one, learns nothing, does not return home transformed. There seems, to her story, no sense than that of dreamwork. No pretension to redemption. No maudlin morals to be drawn. In the age of absurdity, maybe ambivalence is the only appropriate disaster response. In a strange way, it seemed to me Mary Ann had salvaged the element of surprise so often lost to trauma narratives.
And just when I thought I had her figured out, she spun a 180. When asked by an inquiring journalist why she’d taken the flashlight from Fritz, Mary Ann replied: “You know, I’m real scared of the dark.”
Pause. Rewind. Why did this detail stick with me?
Maybe because it was the first time she displayed anything like emotional vulnerability. And that confessional interlude cast the general dispassion and distance of her narrative persona into sharp relief. Never once did Mary Ann express a fear of dying or regret at having left her husband to suffer the fate she’d so narrowly escaped. She’d assumed what Jamison calls “a post-wounded posture: full of jadedness, aching gone implicit, sarcasm quick-on-the-heels of anything that might look like self-pity.” And because I read that as narrative ingenuity rather than emotional dishonesty, I kind of admired her for it.
I’m real scared of the dark.
Here, one imagines her smirking. Or is it just me? I loved her insolence, the complete illogic of such a statement, the patent absurdity of fearing a fiction over reality when her reality was outright apocalyptic. Partly because it seemed a more faithful testament to the traumatic experience, which rarely adheres to the grammar of logic and rationality.
I understood, then, why Mary Ann had so appealed to me. I was sure she’d tapped into a new genre: a trauma narrative centered around something other than suffering. A way of writing the wound without performing the pain of bleeding. It didn’t occur to me until later: that a girl who cries pain is no more performative than a girl who pretends it isn’t there to begin with.
—
From the very beginning, there were gaps in Mary Ann’s story.
Take, for instance, the matter of the victims’ bodies, of which only eight (or maybe nine?) were recovered from the wreckage at Richelieu. The official record is admittedly inconsistent, probably because it isn’t half as sexy as Mary Ann’s version. But then discrepancies cropped up between retellings, and surprise survivors of the supposed massacre emerged from the ether, proffering their own versions of the story. Characters shifted positions, the narrator shifted perspectives. She’d been on the balcony when the water rose—no, by the door. The party was an all-out bacchanal. Actually, it was a somber gathering—a last resort. Or maybe it didn’t happen at all.
No one insisted more on this point than Ben Duckworth, Mary Ann’s neighbor at the Richelieu. In the dark days after landfall, Duckworth’s mother, Angela, kept her TV tuned to Cronkite’s coverage of Camille, hoping to catch news of her missing son. Why shouldn’t she believe the most trusted man in America when he reported that no one at the Richelieu had survived the storm? Imagine her surprise when, having sent her husband down to retrieve their son’s body, they found him not only resurrected but enraged. The whole thing, he insisted, was a gratuitous fiction. There had been no party. “I can’t tell you why that story persists, or why people didn’t put two and two together,” he told author Dan Ellis. “I guess the hurricane party makes for a better story.”
Which, of course, it does. Which is maybe why, among all the Pass Christian residents I interviewed, most still believe Mary Ann’s version.
“I distinctly remember the hurricane party,” Sherry Glazier wrote me, “They mocked everyone who tried to get them to leave.”
Pat Shields lost two family members, Jack and Zo, at the Richelieu: “It absolutely happened,” she said. “And they never found their bodies.”
“Folks from the Richelieu Apartments [were] on the CB Radio talking about their hurricane party,” remembers Valerie Ladner. “So no, it’s not a myth.”
At this point, the question of truth began to feel not only irrelevant but also, somehow, juridically motivated. Party or no party—what’s the difference, really? Is this really a matter of setting the record straight or of sorting survivors into discernible moral categories? Is this a truth commission or a trial? And anyway, if you were trapped in a shitstorm, wouldn’t you drink too? I know I would. I know I did.
Brett Shields, a local marina captain, summed it up best: “Who cares whether or not it happened. We all believed it—now it’s just part of Gulf Coast mythology.”
That word “mythology” came up again and again in the writing of this story, and it’s worth, I think, taking a moment to consider what, in this context, it might mean. The Romanian historian Mircea Eliade once described the genre as a “means of making peace with the trauma of history.” In other words, myth functions much like a trauma narrative, albeit a collective one. We tell ourselves stories, after all, in order to live. Which is to say that the point, really, isn’t about remaining faithful to reality so much as making peace with it. Myths don’t pretend to truth so much as they do shape it.
So maybe Mary Ann was something of a mythologist for the modern age. Remember: 1969 was, for more than just Joan Didion, a mile-marker in the steady decline of American—if not global—culture. By the time Camille crushed Pass Christian, the vibes were rather more electrical than ethical. Philosophers spoke of post-structuralism, critics of post-modernism, sociologists of post-history. God had died with Nietzsche, humanism with the Holocaust, and TV, proclaimed the new media theorists, intended to kill more than just the radio star. It aimed to shatter all our shared truths, to disrupt the distinction between fact and fiction, to tear irreparably through the very fabric of reality. And that was just in 1969. Back when the seams first split, few predicted how rapidly the whole of reality would unravel into the unfathomable depths of virtuality. We didn’t yet suspect what we would soon come to see: that it’s just stories all the way down.
So it’s true: Mary Ann had her wickedly manicured pointer on the pulse of the times. After all, the Cuban Missile Crisis had shrouded the world in a stubborn and seemingly ineradicable cloud-cover of existential anxiety, and when the sky goes black and the grid goes dark, what else is there to do but paint the town red?
Maybe that’s why people bought into her story—because it spoke to something truer than truth ever could. And isn’t that why trauma narratives so often skirt veracity? Creative Non-Fiction. The idea is that, in the gaps between facts, something more authentic emerges, something more faithful to the human experience of hurt.
That, or maybe Ben was just boring. Though Duckworth tried three times to “set the record straight,” no one really paid much attention to him. Admittedly, the facts never quite size up to the sensational, particularly when they’re coming from a plump, affable, middle-aged commercial real estate developer. Mary-Ann, for her part, was easy-baked for prime-time television, the high priestess of pulp fiction long before the Jersey Shore was on MTV. And like the eternally recurring reels of her bare-assed, bleach-blonde, tequila-guzzling contemporaries, the Mary Ann show just keeps churning out ever more outlandish seasons.
Remember Fritz? Yeah, neither did anyone else—not until Mary Ann was convicted, thirteen years later, of killing her 11th husband, and someone raised the pertinent question as to what, exactly, had happened to the first ten.
On the evening of January 7, 1981, Gerlach, who was then 44 years old, shot and killed Lawrence Kietzer, on whom she had just taken out a sizable life insurance policy. Four witnesses describe Gerlach’s immaculate lucidity in the days leading up to the shooting, but when police arrived, she appeared credibly crazy and was escorted, instead, to a psychiatric facility. On March 16th, 1981, Gerlach was formally charged with Keitzer’s murder. She entered a plea of not guilty by reason of insanity.
Her court transcripts read like the acid-trip crime confessional you’d imagine Hunter S. Thompson ghost-writing for Britney Spears. There’s something kind of funny about the honorable Justice Robertson listing off the impressive cocktail of exotic and obscure drugs that ostensibly scrambled Gerlach’s brain, launching into unusually detailed descriptions of her many hallucinations and fantasies (including, but not limited to, “spiders on the wall, monkeys on the ceiling,” and ghosts administering talk therapy), concluding with the outlandish claim that “the remainder of the iceberg of Gerlach’s psyche includes the fact that she is a ‘hooker’ who owns 14 to 15 wigs, apparently [...] symptomatic of distinct personalities.” Nearly one for every husband, I might add, given that she married two more guys in jail.
Kind of funny, maybe, but also kind of sad. Because here is unveiled, in full, the psychic vulnerability that Mary Ann worked so hard to conceal behind the scrim of sensationalism. And yet, to quote Cronkite, that’s just the way it is in show business, isn’t it? Behind the scenes of every reality TV series, there’s almost always some perfectly banal, pitifully ordinary tragedy.
I’m not saying she didn’t have it coming. She didn’t even bother to perform plausible deniability. What I am saying is that Mary Ann’s case presents something of a moral quandary: namely, what sorts of responsibilities—to truth, to authenticity—do we demand of traumatized women when they’re called to the stand, called to the page, summoned into the spotlight for fifteen minutes of fame and compelled to trauma-dump right there in front of an audience, a jury, a committee of critics?
That ethical dilemma gets distilled most succinctly—and brutally—into a terse hypothetical, proposed by Mississippi’s erstwhile district attorney:
“Doctor, if you have a forty-four year old white female, who has a history of some 13 marriages, the first one taking place at approximately 15 years of age, having had three children, excuse me, four children, four live births, at least one abortion, who has had numerous hospitalizations in Kesler Air Force Base, Gulf Coast Community Hospital, Gulfport Memorial Hospital, Howard Memorial Hospital, who has had episodes of hysteria, suicidal tendencies, and admitted abuser of drugs and alcohol, who on January 7, 1981, shot and killed, as she fired five shots into her husband's body, excuse me, into the body of a man she was living with, having previously divorced this man, some eight weeks prior, with that hypothetical, do you have an opinion as to the sanity or insanity of that person on that date?”’
The whole of the trial turns on that hypothetical—it comes up, again and again, across appeal after appeal until Mary Ann’s abrupt release. And it’s interesting: because what’s at stake here isn’t so much a murder (that our suspect so very obviously committed) but the matter of Mary Ann’s authorial unreliability—and whether she ought to be held accountable for it. Which is maybe why the transcripts read less like a criminal trial and more like a truth commission—or an inquisition, even. Along with murder, Mary Ann is guilty of narrative heresy—of defecting from the doctrine of self-representation.
Read: of breaking with the conventions of memoir, which, much like juridical norms, function to produce coherent, readable, adjudicable subjects. There’s an argument to be made—and critic Leigh Gilmore’s is pretty convincing—that memoir itself is inherently legalistic, that its demand for a “single, summary, subjective statement” about suffering, one that is not only verifiable but also authentic, ultimately functions in service of passing a verdict. “Self-representation,” she writes, “exists within a juridical frame through the mechanisms of judging and assessment which inform its production of knowledge.” In other words, the parameters of personal narrative aren’t neutral containers as they are ideological apparatuses. Like myths, they don’t so much represent subjects as they do produce the subjects they claim to represent. What is demanded—not only by the courts, but also by the critics—is a “rational and representative ‘I’” at the center of a storm of suffering. Even when that ‘I’ can never be more than a narrative convention, an abstraction. A performance. A myth.
On January 28, 1982, Mary Ann was found guilty (of murder, of lying, of being just another ordinary, wounded woman. How lame. How pathetic. How totally cliché.) For her crimes, she was sentenced to life in prison.
Then, in 1985, the defense appealed her conviction on the grounds that the prosecution’s hypothetical had been incomplete. Which again invites the question: is this a murder trial or a squabble over authorial agency? Mary Ann maintained that the DA had deliberately withheld certain details that would support her insanity plea. (Which details, by the way, were never released, but trust that they remain a matter of obsessive speculation, for this author at least.) Ultimately, Judge Robertson upheld his decision, maintaining that while “Gerlach’s life had been essentially an odyssey of catastrophe and perversion [...] just because you are crazy does not mean you are legally insane.” It’s an interesting choice of words, not only because it speaks to Gilmore’s point (the story you tell about your trauma doesn’t count unless it’s court-approved and critically-sanctioned) but also because it’s unusually mean.
Not to say she doesn’t deserve it, but there’s something disquieting about the good magistrate’s glee in disclosing her dysfunction, something unsettling about the pleasure he derives from stripping her of the stories she’s told herself in order to live. Maybe it’s the fact that he’s a man, and she’s a woman, and it’s sort of hard to deny the implicit misogyny that hums beneath our collective contempt for trauma narratives. Or maybe it’s because I’ve come to recognize that, in insisting on my own post-woundedness, I’ve been complicit in that same reductive critique.
I don’t feel sorry for Mary Ann so much as I do for my own dismissal of female pain. Maybe it’s just me. Or maybe it’s misogyny. But either way, for a long time, I was disillusioned—disgusted, even—with women writing trauma narratives. If only because I didn’t yet have the words to write my own. Or rather, because I didn’t want to write in the common language. I didn’t want to be a cliché. Words belong to everyone. But, as it turns out, so does pain.
Wounds, writes Jamison, “ suggest that the skin has been opened—that privacy has been violated.” The wound makes pain public, not only because everyone wants to know the story behind a scar, but because everyone else has them too. And the wound is an aperture, not only into the self but out of it. It’s through stories about suffering that we read one another, that we come to recognize, in loved ones as in strangers, in heroes as in villains, that which makes us human.
Because I know my pain, I see yours. Even if you’re a murderer, a liar, an attention whore. Even if you’re Mary Ann.
And yet, I can recognize, even empathize with, Mary Ann’s pain without putting stock in her performance of it. If, notes Gilmore, the trauma narrative marks precisely the space where “the private [...] is transformed into political discourse,” then writing it comes with certain responsibilities, not only to ourselves but also to the polis. Two rules to write by: 1. Don’t drown in bathos and blood. 2. Don’t drown everyone else out either. And that, as far as I’m concerned, is the problem with Mary Ann’s narrative.
What I’d first pegged for genre mischief and later identified as performative inauthenticity was actually something more like civic betrayal: a breach of survivor solidarity. It wasn’t just that Mary Ann had performed away her pain, but that, on some level, she’d performed away everyone else’s. That she’d stolen the spotlight from other survivors and sold hers as the single story.
After the trial, Duckworth delivered a statement in which he expressed his desire to avoid a “he-said, she-said debate.” Maybe, he conceded, Mary Ann’s story was true in a way—in the way that trauma narratives can sometimes be objectively false but subjectively authentic. But it didn’t speak to his experience, and really, what Duckworth wanted wasn’t so much to silence her as to be heard. “I lost everything but my life that day,” he told one reporter. It’s a great sentence and a powerful sentiment. Not because it’s all that original, but because it speaks to something I know, and in that way, it feels honest.
In 1992, Mary Ann came up for parole and was abruptly released. A pyrrhic victory for Mary Ann, who earns the dubious luxury of her freedom at the cost of her credibility. After that, she all but disappears. No records. No social media presence. And as of this writing, no obituaries.
Eventually, I stopped searching for her. Partly because the truth had ceased to matter and was, anyway, impossible to confirm. Partly because I no longer wanted her redeemed. But mostly because, if I’m honest, this was never about her to begin with.
—
It was 2025, at the last gasp of hurricane season, but for the first time in recent memory, there had been no major storms that year. Some said it was because things had been so bad on land: floods, wildfires, a botulism outbreak, rampant environmental deregulation. But my thesis professor joked that it was an opportunity to harness all that creative energy. And that was the version I chose to believe.
There’s always an encore to the apocalypse. The end of the world is an eternal return. Someone once said that a writer’s research is finished when she meets herself coming the other way, and that, I guess, is how I washed up again at page one, spun through that cycle the whole way back to the story I’d so circuitously avoided. Back to the sore spot: the origin point of my pain.
There’s a kind of poetry to the whole thing, even if I’m loath to admit it. What is addiction if not a cyclical, repetitive effort to avoid that which, in time, invariably demands to be reckoned with? A reckoning, then. Here’s the short version of the story, should you care to hear it:
Once upon a time, shit hit the fan, and the first thought that popped into my head was: party time. What had promised to be a party turned out to be a tragedy. And that’s it: the end.
There’s a reason I so long avoided writing it: it’s boring. But not because of the story itself. Suffering isn’t reducible to summary, and wounds always bleed beyond the conventional bounds of personal narrative. Essentially, I’d mistaken a problem of form for a problem of content. I didn’t need to dismiss the story altogether. And, judging by my circular peregrinations, there seemed no way around it. I just needed a better way to write into its center.
There’s truth to Gilmore’s claim: that the conventions of memoir “constrain self-representation through its almost legalistic definition of truth-telling, its anxiety about invention, and its preference for the literal and verifiable, even in the presence of some ambivalence about those criteria.” And that, for this reason, memoir can make the very authenticity on which it insists all but impossible to achieve. Still, there’s something to be said for genre conventions, which, like their juridical counterparts, make possible the construction of universally intelligible narratives. They testify to the intractable fact that writing is always a communicative act, that our responsibilities in sharing our stories are not necessarily to truth nor to convention, but to ourselves—and to each other.
Maybe pain is always a performance; we cry out, after all, in order to be heard. And performances don’t necessarily have to be true—but they’re better when they’re authentic.
It’s hard to reach a decisive verdict on what “authenticity” means or what it looks like, partly because authenticity isn’t really judged but felt. Critics define it as “internal resonance.” In music, it refers to the relationship of each note to the next. And in existentialist philosophy, it's defined as “emotional appropriate, purposive, and responsible mode of human life.” Myth, by Eliade’s definition, is authentic. So is a cry of pain. What authenticity will look like in my own work, however, well, I’m still trying to feel that one out. Whatever it might mean in practice, I think it has less to do with aligning with the facts than with writing from where I stand.
A story, like a storm, isn’t an entity—it’s a system, a tangle of wind and rain, of tears and blood. There are a thousand ways to write it, but if you try to find a center, you’ll learn that it cannot hold. To get a comprehensive meteorological reading, to give pain a proper name, we have to look at the system from a thousand different directions. To write from the wound you know, and then beyond it, to that place where the currents of pain tangle with a thousand others. That’s what it takes, I think, to write a story that approximates truth. Even if it can’t. Even if no story ever really can. Which is, in fact, precisely why we need them all.
Camille Louise Goering is a multi-genre writer and journalist currently completing a post-graduate degree at Florida State University. You can find more of her work at the Florida Trident, Munster Lit, the Blue Mesa Review, the New Limestone Review, the Tallahassee Democrat, and camilouise.com.