Flipping the Script on True Crime: The Ms. Q&A With Author Kristine S. Ervin
Kristine S. Ervin was 8 when her mother was abducted from a mall parking lot, murdered and abandoned in an Oklahoma oil field.
In her debut memoir Rabbit Heart, Ervin resists the true crime trope of exploiting and glorifying femicide and instead delves into the emotional toll her mother’s death took on her and her family. In a personal story interwoven with research, Ervin painstakingly works to reconstruct a woman she can never fully grasp from her own memory—instead, she pulls from letters she uncovers, and from the stories of other family members. Her drive to know her mother intensifies over the years winding into her own fraught adolescence. Candid and brave, she reckons with the contradictions of what a woman is allowed to be—a self beyond the roles of wife, mother, daughter, and victim.
It took decades for Ervin’s mother’s case to be resolved, and her murderers brought to justice—and Ervin is upfront about the sorrow this caused. Rabbit Heart sheds light on the ways women confront violence and gender power dynamics in our everyday lives and encourages us to take back our voices by refusing to remain silent.
I met Ervin at a writing workshop while we were both working on memoirs and writing into places that felt terrifying to name and disclose. We sat down recently to talk about her book, growing up motherless, how this informed her life’s gender power dynamics and her evolution from being a feminist-skeptic to writing what is undeniably a deeply feminist memoir.
