Mary Lucia has spent much of her adult life in the public ear.
For 17 years, Minnesotans immediately recognized her voice on 89.3 The Current as a funny, unique person who is passionate about music.
With her new memoir, What Doesn’t Kill Me Makes Me Weirder and Harder to Relate To, Lucia recounts a life shaped by music, radio and family, centered around a three-year, listener-turned-stalker experience. She said those years upended everything she thought she understood about safety, trauma and the systems meant to protect people.
While a little dark, the book’s title is memorable, and Lucia laughed when it was mentioned.
"It really just rolls right off the tongue, doesn’t it?” she said.
That unlikely mix of humor and unease runs throughout the memoir, and was present in our conversation on Headwaters.
The discussion took place during an especially heavy time in Minnesota with thousands of U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement agents in the Twin Cities. Asked how she was holding up, Lucia said she appreciated the question.
“It would be impossible for me to not reveal and show how absolutely unnerved I feel. I don't think we've recovered since 2020 as a city, and we're so vulnerable right now to have had this happen, again, within this proximity of similar neighborhoods. And going to bed at night with the helicopters overhead — it's not cool,” Lucia said.
“You thought maybe that you would have learned something when George Floyd was murdered, that you wouldn't feel as helpless, but you do. You absolutely do.”
Lucia’s path to radio wasn’t straightforward. She was studying acting at New York University in New York City in the early '90s when music began pulling her in another direction. Armed with a fake ID and a desire to see as many shows as possible, she found herself increasingly disconnected from her theater peers.
Then, she heard about a new alternative radio station, launching in Minneapolis, spearheaded by DJ Kevin Cole (now at KEXP). On a leap of faith that still surprises her, Lucia cold-called him.
“I had no experience,” she said. “And he took a chance.
“ ... I think you need to have somebody in your life at least once or twice that has that kind of renegade spirit that goes, 'I realize you have no experience, but based on just talking to you and the things I'm learning about you, I'll give you a chance.'”
That call changed her life. Lucia left New York, moved to Minneapolis in 1994 and started her path of helping define alternative radio in the Twin Cities with Rev 105.
Fixation turned stalking
The core of Lucia’s memoir centers around a three-year period while she was at The Current, when a listener’s fixation escalated into stalking. It began with packages sent to her workplace and evolved into threats and repeated violations of her home and personal safety.
As to why she decided to write the book, Lucia said she searched for books that might help her make sense of what was happening and found very little.
“What was out there was mostly domestic stalking, in which you know the stalker, like a former partner or landlord or something," she said.
"So the circumstances as a person in media ... these parasocial relationships develop. And if you're good at your job, then you're your authentic self on air. So people will feel that they know you. And to a large degree, they do.”
In turn, Lucia found that lack of boundaries can quickly turn dangerous.
Though the stalker was eventually sentenced, Lucia said the trauma never fully disappeared. Even years later, ordinary moments can trigger a visceral response.
She recalled just this summer discovering her backyard gate open after a contractor was on her roof the day before.
“And my reaction was just [to] cry," she said. "And I know that is not a normal reaction to an open gate.”
Throughout the conversation, Lucia is candid about the ways the experience reshaped her: the isolation, the hypervigilance, the sense that nothing worked and no one could help.
“It was nothing I would wish on my worst enemy,” she said.
As a reader, the book gives frustrating insight into Lucia’s experience navigating law enforcement, her family’s response and the workplace. She describes being gaslit, minimized and pressured to return to normal at work, even as she was deeply changed.
“I cut a ton of slack for people's lack of understanding,” Lucia said, “but their lack of interest in knowing what it was doing to me is where things just went off the rails for me.”
Lucia also points to broader failures in how stalking is treated legally, especially when mental illness is involved, even for a felony.
“If there is mental illness involved, which usually I think there is, it's impossible. Courts can't mandate mental health help,” Lucia said. “The most frustrating part is without physical proof of damage — either a gunshot, a stab wound — they don't see the damage. ... I'm grateful there isn't a bullet hole, but it's really messed up.”
Perhaps most disturbing to learn, when her stalker was sentenced, he was released the same day on good behavior.
Now back in radio at the University of Minnesota’s Radio K, Lucia is finding her voice again.
In the book, she jokes that she still “foolishly” believes that music programming can be an art form. At KAXE, we’d argue she’s not foolish at all.
Despite the heaviness of the main subject in the memoir, Lucia’s writing is often funny, sharp, deeply personal and still rock 'n' roll.
What Doesn’t Kill Me Makes Me Weirder and Harder to Relate To is out now through University of Minnesota Press.
