Rabbit Heart: A Mother's Murder, a Daughter's Story

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For readers of My Dark Places and I'll Be Gone in the Dark, a beautiful, brutal memoir documenting one woman's search for identity alongside her family's decades-long quest to identify the two men who abducted-and murdered-her mother Kristine S. Ervin was just eight years old when her mother, Kathy Sue Engle, was abducted from an Oklahoma mall parking lot and violently murdered in an oil field. First, there was grief. Then the desire to know- what happened to her, what she felt in her last terrible moments, and all she was before these acts of violence defined her life. In her mother's absence, Ervin tries to reconstruct a woman she can never fully grasp-from her own memory, from letters she uncovers, and the stories of other family members. As more information about her mother's death comes to light, Ervin's drive to know her mother only intensifies, winding its way into her own fraught adolescence. In the process of both, she reckons with contradictions of what a woman is allowed to be-a self beyond the roles of wife, mother, daughter, victim-what a "true" victim is supposed to look like, and, finally, how complicated and elusive justice can be. Told fearlessly and poetically, Rabbit Heart weaves together themes of power, gender, and justice into a manifesto of grief and reclamation- our stories do not need to be simple to be true, and there is power in the telling.

Reviews

"Kristine S. Ervins Rabbit Heart, which I read in a single sitting, is a memoir of incredible power, forged out of equal parts terror and courage and an honesty so deep and profound it took my breath away. To say this book moved me is an understatement. It is a marvelbeautiful, heartbreaking, and so very, very healing." Lacy M. Johnson, PhD, author of The Reckonings: Essays

"If seeing clearly is love, then Rabbit Heart is a love letter. Not only to the vital, irreplaceable force at the center of this book, or to the loved ones upended by her absence, but to all the lost women who have been brutally taken out of their lives. Uncompromising, politically charged, and alert to the shifting fault lines of family, Kristine S. Ervin knows that she cant touch light without writing it all down first, reconstructing a tower with the brightest language in reach." Paul Lisicky, author of Later: My Life at the Edge of the World

The death of a mother has lifelong effects on children, even more so when the loss is sudden and violent. Rabbit Heart depicts the effects of a mothers murder on a young daughters development with searing honesty. By giving us rare access to the emotional, mental, and somatic aftermath of early loss, Kristine Ervins story represents the pain and triumphs of so many voiceless girls and women. This is a bravely honest, painfully beautiful book. Hope Edelman, author of Motherless Daughters and The AfterGrief

Rabbit Heart is an instant classic. Required reading for those who have been impacted by gendered violence, those who love them, and any who seek to interrogate the ways our culture, by design, makes certain bodies more vulnerable. Ervin writes with so much gutting love as to somehow translate the inarticulable into art. Enter preparing to be changed. Gina Frangello, author of Blow Your House Down

"A deeply moving memoir. Throughout each nuanced essay-chapter, we watch our speaker encounter grief, examine grief, and ultimately transform abiding grief into abiding art. Rabbit Heart is an elegy to a lost mother, yes. It is also a profound meditation on patience, on healing, and a bildungsroman that carries us unforgettably into the speaker'sand her familysbittersweet beyond." Julie Marie Wade, author of Just an Ordinary Woman Breathing and Otherwise: Essays

Author Bio

KRISTINE S. ERVIN grew up in a small suburb of Oklahoma City and now teaches creative writing at West Chester University, outside Philadelphia. She holds an MFA in poetry from New York University and a PhD in creative writing and literature, with a focus in nonfiction, from the University of Houston.