Review: Mary Lucia writes about dealing with a stalker in surprising memoir

Mary Lucia’s writing is funnier than Mary Lucia’s talking, and that is saying something.

Those who listened to her on the radio for decades already know about her dynamite combo of warmth and acidic wit, which still can be heard for a couple hours every week on Radio K. Those who have missed her presence on 89.3 the Current since she left in 2022, after years of frightening behavior from a stalker and the maddening official response to that stalker, will find the wit gets amped up in Lucia’s memoir released Tuesday, “What Doesn’t Kill Me Makes Me Weirder and Harder to Relate To.”

Lucia is a bold, loosey-goosey writer whose idiosyncratic prose might make you think of Tom Wolfe in bits like this, from a chapter about inadvisable addictive behavior: “I could take a handful of downers and be able to drive a school bus of kindergartners, no problem. I might be the only person to have assembled an IKEA bookshelf on Dilaudid.”

Lucia, or “Looch” as she sometimes calls herself, recalls teachers telling her she wasn’t a good writer. They were wrong, as she demonstrates repeatedly, with aperçus she slings like a punkish Fran Leibowitz: “I don’t like being told what to do. This does not make me an ideal candidate for holding 99 percent of all jobs with a boss, nor does it increase the likelihood of me joining a cult.”

And she plays around with words as if they’re a Rubik’s cube she might solve but maybe she’d rather just arrange in a pleasing order, as when she describes the chore of playing songs she disliked: “I have done the unthinkable and pulled the fader down midsong on a tune that was doing me great bodily harm. I’m sorry, Joanna Newsom. It was nothing business — it’s strictly personal.“

All of that may be surprising to readers who have heard that Lucia’s book addresses being menaced by a stalker who shifted from ominous notes to break-in attempts, lurid threats and backyard invasions. Her stalker was briefly jailed and, as Lucia writes, was released only to rent an apartment mere blocks from her home.

Lucia’s wicked humor colors all of “Weirder” but, in truth, it has a split personality. About half of it addresses her frustration with those who either couldn’t understand or couldn’t be bothered to understand the crimes being committed against her, including leaders at Minnesota Public Radio, which owns the Current, as well as police officers and even her own mother.

The voice in “Weirder” is one of the strongest this year, and I’ve read memoirs by practitioners such as Susan Orlean and Arundhati Roy. That voice is the key to Lucia’s gifts as a music DJ, not just because it’s authoritative and funny but because it seems to say that we’re all muddling through this together.

Which is why it’s appropriate that “Weirder” closes with Lucia’s final setlist for the Current, 64 songs hand-picked to raise the roof, comfort the soul and kick out the jams.

What Doesn’t Kill Me Makes Me Weirder and Harder to Relate To

By: Mary Lucia.

Publisher: University of Minnesota Press, 179 pages.