“Guilt is a ghost,” Myriam Gurba reflects, more than once, in her memoir, Mean. It’s a refrain, a call to exposure, a statement that works from either side. Mean, after all, is a book of ghosts, including, on some level, Gurba’s own. It is also a book of guilt, of responsibility: a reckoning, or a set of reckonings. What makes this so good? There are many answers, beginning with Gurba’s radical and necessary empathy. She is a survivor of sexual assault, attacked in her hometown of Santa Maria, California, the summer after her freshman year at UC Berkeley. And yet, if this makes Mean a true-crime narrative of sorts, Gurba has deeper concerns. Her focus is less the incident per se and more all the ways it insinuates itself, how…
