In her mid-twenties Erin McReynolds lost her mother, who was murdered by the man she was living with. Erin wrote about that terrible experience in her first essay for The Sun, “Train Songs” [February 2020]. A freelance writer and editor who has worked for Audible and American Short Fiction, she has just finished a memoir called The Belongings and is beginning work on a collection of essays called Ornery, about her experiences with the justice system as the family member of a murder victim. Erin’s essay in this month’s issue, “And These Too Are Defensive Wounds,” will be a part of the collection. She is also reviving her blog “Trauma for Dummies” on Substack—because, she says, “I need a place to put all the things I am experiencing as I research and write this next book. Also there are cartoons.”
The Sun often tries to remind us that incarcerated people are human beings who can be worthy of forgiveness and sympathy. But there are also innocent folks who have been hurt badly by someone who is currently in prison, and they shouldn’t be ignored. In her essay “And These Too Are Defensive Wounds” Erin struggles with her feelings toward the man who is currently serving a prison sentence for killing her mother, and who is now up for parole. Her initial impulse is not to perpetuate the suffering caused by the murder, but would supporting his bid for freedom really be the right thing to do?
Andrew Snee: Your essay this month examines how we subtly blame women for their own abuse.
Erin McReynolds: I see this essay as having two threads: that one, and my struggle as a traumatized person to sit with the memories and feelings I’d been keeping at bay. I recently completed a memoir about my mother and her murder and how I coped with it and my attempts, around the age of thirty, to figure out: Where do I go from here? What kind of woman do I want to be, in the absence of a role model? But I purposefully didn’t write in the memoir about the justice system and the trial, because I knew it was going to require its own book, with its own questions and journey.
It really did feel like my mom was the one on trial. The witnesses for the defense talked about her behavior, even her appearance, depicting her as a difficult and messy woman. I was the first witness called by the prosecution, and when the defense attorney cross-examined me, he asked me to describe how my mother could be when she was drinking. I said, “Well, I guess she could be kind of ornery.” I don’t know why I made her sound like Yosemite Sam. But the defense kept bringing up that word, ornery, throughout the trial. They used my own hasty, strange word to suggest that she’d kind of had it coming.
Andrew: It’s sort of an old-fashioned word. It harkens back to the Old West, when someone might shoot another person over a disagreement and walk away.
Erin: Right? It was a weird word, but I was on the spot and scared to death to be there, reliving this nightmare in front of everyone, including Maynard, the man who killed my mother. I found myself in a sort of fawning trauma response—of course, I didn’t know that’s what it was at the time—where instead of feeling anger or sorrow for what he’d done to my mother, I was feeling sympathy for him and his family, even his defense attorney. In fact, when Maynard was first arrested, I’d conflated how I felt with what I imagined he must have been feeling. I’d thought, How awful for him. It would absolutely kill me if I had to go to prison and live with this for the rest of my life.
That’s something that I’ve been working through in the years since. I was in my late twenties then, and I’m about to turn forty-eight, so I’ve had a lot of time to examine why I did that. I think I felt like my own anger was a threat to me: If I get as angry as my mother, will somebody kill me?
It was fifteen years later, when Maynard applied for parole for the second time, that I was ready to deal with my true feelings. And that’s because the deputy district attorney who was trying to keep him in prison reminded me how, in Maynard’s psychiatric evaluation for parole, he was telling the story of the murder in the passive voice. Like, Oh, this thing happened. He was excusing himself. And I remembered that he had done that during the trial too. He was not feeling the incredible remorse, the self-torture that I’d imagined.
Andrew: You give the deputy DA a great pseudonym: Velvet Hammer. It sums up what was necessary to convince you, which was sort of a soft force, but with some weight behind it.
Erin: I really appreciated his technique. He simply reached out to ask me why I’d written a letter that didn’t strongly advise against Maynard’s parole. I had written something like, “If you can guarantee he won’t hurt one more woman and her family, then go ahead and let him feel the surf on his ankles and the sun on his face.” The deputy DA said, “Are you happy with this? Is this what you meant to say?” It reminded me of what a good editor does: they make you go someplace you’ve been resisting.
And so I began to tread into this territory I’d been avoiding for a long time, which was looking at the trial transcripts. I wanted to remember what the prosecutor said in her closing argument, something to contradict the ambivalence I was feeling about his parole. A lot of that ambivalence had to do with my feelings about incarceration. Even before the murder, I would have nightmares about being in prison. It was the worst thing I could imagine, just a horrifying thought. Couple that with what I know of the justice system in America—or, rather, the prison system, which is different from the justice system. I hate our current prison system. I want the whole thing overhauled and I donate monthly to the Innocence Project [a nonprofit legal organization that works to overturn wrongful convictions—Ed.]. But, writing this essay, I had to ask myself: In Erin’s ideal society, in which most prisons have been demolished, who should be incarcerated? And I realized, yes, Maynard is somebody who needs to be kept out of society.
Everyone deserves a second chance. Everyone. But he hasn’t made an effort. No one in my family has ever received a letter of apology from him. His story hasn’t changed. He refuses responsibility. My understanding is that he hasn’t even completed the required domestic violence training for parole. Realizing all this made it easier for me to give up trying to be understanding toward this guy who had not only killed my mother but had abused and threatened other women before her. It probably seems like this should have been a very easy shift for me to make, but it still required a lot of thought and work. That’s what an essay is for, right? It’s from the French essai—to try, to attempt. Whenever I don’t understand my behavior or my thought process, I start an essay.
Andrew: It’s interesting that you compared the deputy DA to an editor. You’ve obviously worked with editors, and you were an editor yourself at American Short Fiction.
Erin: I was the editor for their online fiction for a few years, but it was such an incredible amount of work on top of my full-time job, and also trying to write a book. The submissions kept piling up. I couldn’t stay on top of it. I don’t know if you’ve ever felt that way.
Andrew: No, no, no. Never. [Laughs.]
Erin: I felt so bad, and I was tired of feeling bad all the time. So I stepped back and became one of the manuscript readers.
Andrew: I imagine it’s hard to earn your living through words while also doing your own writing.
Erin: Yes. While I was getting my MFA, I was always waiting tables, and that was conducive to storytelling, because I would meet new people every night. But I was chasing the prestige of a job that involved writing. That felt like the ultimate validation, you know? And I worked for a few tech companies, writing marketing copy. I actually ended up moving to New York and working at Audible, which was great because I got to look at and think about published authors and their books all day. And yet it was also really dispiriting, because there I was imagining my wildly creative life while having to sit through rounds of corporate feedback on a line of copy. It was impossible to then go home and work on my memoir. I’ve heard a lot of writers say, Oh, you just get up an hour early and work on your novel, and then you go to work all day, but when you’re having to dig into traumatic experiences, it’s different. You can’t switch back and forth so easily. You come home at the end of the day, and all you want to do is put your feet up, grab a glass of wine, and zone out.
So I didn’t write for a good four years, and it just drove me crazy. I ended up quitting my New York job and moving to the California desert. I cashed out my meager retirement fund and used it to support myself for the next year and a half. It wasn’t the wisest thing to do when you’re forty, but I had to bet on myself. I told myself I could scrape together enough to live, but what I wouldn’t be able to do is live without writing this book. It was a demon that was going to come out of me, like in The Exorcist.
Andrew: And now you’ve finished it?
Erin: Yes, it’s called The Belongings. I’m currently sending it around to agents.
In the meantime I’ve decided that freelancing is the best way to go, because I can control my hours and my environment. I can go outside and lie in the hammock if I need to decompress. It works OK, but there are times when I wish my full-time job could be something with my hands. Honestly, my dream job would be if somebody let me build things with clay. Is potter a full-time job?
Andrew: It is for somebody, right?
Erin: For a long time I thought I should work with trauma survivors or in a domestic-violence shelter, given what I’d been through, but I just couldn’t bring myself to do it. I figured there must be something wrong with me. Finally I realized that it’s just not something everyone can do. It may not be helpful to survivors for me to come in there with all of my trauma. But I still think a time might come when I’ve told all the stories that I want to tell, I’ve worked on the thing that was killing me, and I just want to help other people tell their stories, including survivors of trauma.
We need to hear more stories—more long-form narratives about personal experiences people have had. It helps build compassion.
Andrew: We’re definitely betting on people wanting those long-form, personal stories at The Sun.
Erin: I’m grateful for it. You know, the first essay I ever read that made me weep was in The Sun. It was called “Cherish This Ecstasy” [David James Duncan, July 2008], and it’s about a guy going through a divorce, but it’s told through the lens of his concern for birds. It begins with a funny story about an ornithologist wearing a fake peregrine falcon on his head to try to get male falcons to mate with it, and by the end the author is trying to save this injured loon in the middle of a highway. And you know he’s gone on this journey, which is really about heartbreak. I reread that essay every year, and it still makes me cry my face off. It continues to inspire my own work.
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