Publications

“Write what disturbs you, what you fear, what you have not been willing to speak about. Be willing to be split open.”

— Natalie Goldberg

Gold and black intricately designed honey bee

The Superior Act of Presenting Your Teeth to Strangers

In this gripping memoir, we walk alongside MD Marcus as she follows orders, stands in line, and bides her time during a couple stints at a mental health facility. In the halls, she witnesses what it is that those who are deemed "crazy" or "unsafe to themselves or others" are subjected to undertake: group therapy, announcing ridiculous delusions-lying to make it seem like they are ready to go home. Unable to get her shoelaces back until she asks, MD Marcus then lets us into her mind's deepest, darkest secrets. A place that may be too real and honest for some readers to stomach, especially when her mental state becomes most challenged by her sister's cancer diagnosis. But in the truth lies healing, and in healing lies a way forward. By the end, we are ready to travel home with her, at long last, and continue forth, anew and enlightened.

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“This memoir is a brilliant balancing act of storytelling. Not only does it balance time, it balances prose and poetics, openness and control, and the reciprocal relationship between writer and reader. The writing moves with an honest intentionality. It is not a giving over of a narrative. It is a welcoming into a space we get to be exposed to but that is still undoubtedly the writer’s. We are grateful for the invitation and thankful for what we gain from the experience. We leave excitedly waiting to be invited back again sometime soon.”
–Dasan Ahanu, author of Freedom Papers, Everything Worth Fighting For: an exploration of being Black in America, and Shackled Freedom

“It takes courage to face our own deepest wounds, to look pain and loss right in the eye and refuse to blink. Perhaps more courage than most of us ever muster. And yet, in her debut book, MD Marcus does exactly this. In what proves to be as much a poignant, poetry-laced memoir as it is a permission slip for the rest of us to disbelieve our worst circumstances are the last word, Marcus is never glossing—and never without hope.”
–Steve Daugherty,

author Experiments in Honesty

“MD Marcus’ unflinching memoir bravely examines the intersection between depression, single parenthood, anxiety and grief, culminating in a beautiful story of loss, and love.”
–Cinthia Ritchie, author of Malnourished: A Memoir of Sisterhood and Hunger and Dolls Behaving Badly