Meena Kandasamy (2017) When I Hit You. London, Atlantic Books. 978-1-78649-128-2

 

When I Hit You is set in southern India – between Chennai, Kerala and Mangalore and is a fictionalised account of the brutally abusive four-month marriage the author experienced shortly after leaving college

 
[Trigger Warning: Domestic Violence and Abuse; Rape]
 
[Spoiler alert]
 
The novel travels back and forwards in time to detail the main character’s life as a woman in society where the expectations of her are clearly set out, both by her family and society around her.
 
Having left home to study in neighbouring state, she returns to her family home to nurse a broken heart. Under some pressure to marry, the writer meets and falls in love with a university lecturer who describes a past as a revolutionary communist – and we are never entirely sure if his tales are true or fantasy. He takes up a lectureship in a coastal town where she accompanies him, intending to keep writing.
 
Once isolated geographically from her friends and family, he then isolates her further by taking over her on-line presence, deleting her emails and contacts and limiting her time on the internet. She is ground down physically and emotionally as he gas-lights and manipulates her until the abuse turns more and more violent as he attempts to break her spirit completely.
 
Finally, as the violence escalates, she is able to escape and return to her parents who now use the story of her degradation (she came back with lice in her hair, dirty and unkempt) to justify supporting her against the shame society would choose to identify her.
 
The mental manipulation is really well described and I found myself identifying with the actions in this book, despite the brutality of her experience and the setting in a different cultural milieu.
 
Awards:

• Shortlisted for the Women’s Prize for Fiction 2018

• Shortlisted for the Jhalak Prize 2018

• Longlisted for the Dylan Thomas Prize 2018

• A Guardian Book of the Year

• A Daily Telegraph Book of the Year

• An Observer Book of the Year

• A Financial Times Book of the Year   

Cherie Jones (2021) How the One-Armed Sister Sweeps Her House. London, Tinder Press. 978-1-4722-6877-8

 

Set on the Caribbean island of Barbados, this novel highlights the huge inequalites between the White, foreign, villa-owning rich and the local poor Black and mixed-race population forced to hustle, hawk and sell their bodies to make a living. The stark inequality brings harms to them all.

[Trigger Warning: Domestic Violence and Abuse; Murder, Infanticide; Child Abuse; Elder Abuse; Incest; Rape]

[Spoiler alert]

The novel is not an optimistic one, filled with stories of child abuse, rape, incest, domestic violence and abuse, elder abuse and murder.

It tells the story of Lala, conceived through incest and rape, who marries a man she feels is strong and will enable her to have a happy home life and a family, while her childhood sweetheart is in jail. Adan is violent and abusive, and within an argument, shortly after he has murdered one of the rich men he was trying to rob, their baby is dropped and dies.

The story includes the machinations of the local police officer, angry at having officers brought in from outside handling the murder case. He is not easily fooled by the story of the baby being abducted and found dead on the beach.

The domestic violence and abuse between the two main characters, Adan and Lala includes coercive control, financial abuse - when he steals all the money she has saved and buried- physical violence and rape. Again, we have a perpetrator who is portrayed as consistently a low-life villain and a victim-survivor left with few options in life having come from an abusive childhood with her father and grandfather being one and the same.

Cherie Jones has said in several interviews* that she has experienced domestic abuse herself, not only personally as the victim-survivor, but also amongst her extended family. She has also said that the story of Lala is not her own story.

*https://www.essence.com/entertainment/cherie-jones-explores-race-class-and-domestic-violence-in-the-caribbean-in-her-debut-novel/

Awards:

·        Shortlisted for the Women’s Prize for Fiction (2021)

Stacey Jameson (2019) Why Don’t You Just Leave Him? A True Story of Domestic Violence Self Published 978-1-7945-3217-5

 

This is a self-published book by the survivor of an extremely violent abusive marriage. She writes honestly about her account of how she became compliant and accepting as a result of her mother’s abuse of her as a child and how this fed in to her acceptance of a violent relationship and, despite getting up the courage to leave, returns on a number of occasions.

[Trigger Warning: Domestic Violence]

[Spoiler alert]

The story is told by Stacey who details the development of herself as a child emotionally abused by her mother and how this prepared her for accepting a partner and then husband who was abusive.

Stacey meets her future husband as a teenager and goes on to live with him, have a child with him, marry him and have a further child while experiencing a very physically violent and controlling relationship. She is subjected to financial, sexual, physical, emotional and mental abuse. Finally for the sake of her children she leaves and goes to a refuge. Like many survivors she returns to her husband a number of times before she finally finds the strength to leave for good.

The book is an honest and raw account by a very courageous woman.

Rachel Cusk (2012) Aftermath: On Marriage and Separation. London, Faber & Faber. 978-0-571-35164-0

 

Aftermath is the story of exactly that – the aftermath of Rachel Cusk’s separation from her husband and the setting up of a new home for herself and her daughters and a new life for herself, despite the trauma.

When Rachel Cusk published the novel, it provoked a huge backlash over the honesty of her description of the emotions that accompanied the breakdown of the marriage and her feelings about her daughters.

For me, it provided interesting parallels and contrasts with the trauma experienced by women leaving marriages and relationships due to domestic abuse. Neither is pleasant or easy and the escape from an abusive marriage still contains all this trauma alongside the issues around domestic abuse.

Randy Susan Meyers (2014) Accidents of Marriage. London, Simon & Schuster. 978-1-4711-4044-0

 

This is a book about a family - the mother a well-respected social worker who is passionate about her work and the father a successful, leading public defender. The mother works with families where domestic abuse occurs and begins to look at her outwardly perfect marriage and question what she is prepared to tolerate.
 
[Trigger Warning: Domestic Violence]
[Spoiler alert]
 
The story follows the family as they navigate the complications of two working parents and three children. The mother, Maddy, works with women in abusive relationships, supporting them when they leave their relationships – and then goes home to her husband whose moods swing from the loving to the angry at a moment’s notice.
 
Ben considers his work to have primacy and claims less responsibility for the household and their children’s needs. This comes to a head when Maddy leaves for work early leaving him to drop them at camp and then rescue her when her car breaks down. In his anger he engages in a road rage incident which cumulates in a horrific crash where Maddy is thrown from the vehicle and ends up with horrific head injuries, leaving her in a coma and with long-term physical and mental disabilities.
 
Ben, who has also been having an affair with a trainee at his firm, avoids telling Maddy the details of the cause of the accident and revels in her neediness and devotion to him. His emotional abusive behaviour is directed towards their eldest daughter who finally cracks and tells her mother the truth about the accident.
 
Maddy begins to recover memories around his anger and abuse and cannot forgive him for reducing her life to how it is now – and for his deceit. She decides she can no longer live with him, but as he pleads that he can change, she is unable to close the door on their relationship entirely.
 
I really appreciated this book as it did, for once, focus on some of the more subtle forms of domestic abuse and less on the direct physical harm and abuse. It also resonated in that the protagonist didn’t recognise that what she was experiencing was domestic abuse, despite supporting other women in abusive relationships as they attempted to leave.
 
Although the centre of the book is about Maddy’s accident and recovery, the emotional and mental abuse is detailed in the early chapters and again towards the end. It also recognises the difficulties of leaving a marriage where you have invested so much.

The author is writing from her experience of working with women experiencing domestic abuse.

Carmen Maria Machado (2020) In The Dream House. London, Serpent’s Tail. 978-1-7881-6224-1

 

This book is a personal memoir, reflecting on an abusive lesbian relationship framed in different narrative lenses. The relationship is detailed from the first meeting, through the abuse and after the writer had left.

[Trigger Warning: Domestic Violence]

The story is told partly in the second person and partly in first person. It provides a really intimate portrait of the abuse told through many different narratives – some less than a page long – but each developing the story. It details coercive control in its clearest form – gaslighting, anger at saying or doing the wrong thing, being with the wrong people, it being the wrong time.

This is the first book I’ve read where the experience of the writer resonates with my own experience of an abusive relationship, despite my relationship being a heterosexual marriage and this being a lesbian relationship. All the other books have also been heterosexual relationships but nothing else has come close to my own experience.

Awards:

• Winner of the Lambda Literary Award in LGBTQ Nonfiction
• Winner of the Judy Grahn Award for Lesbian Nonfiction
• Finalist for the Stonewall Book Israel Fishman Non-Fiction Award
• Finalist for the William Saroyan International Prize for Writing
• Longlisted for the Andrew Carnegie Medal for Excellence in Nonfiction

Best Book of the Year

• The New Yorker
• TIME Magazine
• Vogue
• Entertainment Weekly
• Harper’s Bazaar
• Paris Review

Best Memoir of the Decade

• LitHub
• Paste
• Autostraddle

Coleen Hoover (2016) It Ends With Us. London, Simon and Schuster. 978-1-4711-5626-7

 

Colleen Hoover’s book tells the story of a young woman concerned she may be repeating the cycle of being abused from one generation to her own.
 
[Trigger Warning: Domestic Violence]
[Spoiler alert].
 
Lily was brought up with an outwardly successful father who controlled and physically abused her mother. While Lily is at home she secretly befriends and supports a boy, Atlas, who is squatting in an abandoned house and as he discovers what is happening in her home, he supports her and a relationship develops.
 
Eventually Lily moves away for college and stays in Boston, working successfully in marketing. Her father has recently died of cancer and her mother moves to be closer to her. She decides to use the freedom provided by her father’s death to leave her marketing role and fulfil a Long-held ambition to open her own floristry business.
 
Around the same time she meets the wealthy neurosurgeon brother of her old flatmate and the attraction between them is instant. They are a good match and friends and family are pleased. Until Ryle hits her. The relationship goes through the typical abusive cycles of violence, regret and apologies on Ryle’s part.  Lily loves Ryle but knows that apologies and regret will not be enough to stop the relationship remaining abusive, and to stop the cycle of domestic abuse she painfully calls an end to it. Having met up with an older Atlas, who she is able to trust, he helps her move on.
 
This was a hard read for me as my daughter bought me the book, having read it herself. Also being the daughter of a controlling and abusive (although thankfully not physically violent) father, she found the book particularly moving and rang me to thank me for leaving when we did.

It has been suggested that the story is drawn from the author’s own experiences.

Awards:

Goodreads Choice, Best Romance Novel 2016
The Rights to the film have been optioned by Wayfarer Entertainment (2019)