Bernadine Evaristo (2013) Mr Loverman. London, Hamish Hamilton. 978-0-241-14578-4

 

This book is about a loveable rogue, Barrington Walker. One of the Windrush generation having moved to London from Antigua in the 1950’s. The book is about prejudice and the consequences of fear.

[Trigger Warning: Domestic Violence]

[Spoiler alert]

Barrington Walker is in his 70’s and has done well through business, although unwilling to identify quite how well, he supports many of his extended family, both in the UK and back in Antigua. He is married with two daughters but has been in an intimate relationship with his childhood friend, Morris, since they were teenagers.

Most of the book is about his coming out – to family and friends – and the fear and prejudice surrounding it. It does however, talk about domestic abuse in the generation above Barry. His wife’s father was physically abusive to her mother, but her mother was unwilling to leave, feeling it was something she had to “put up with”. His own grandmother was physically abused by her second husband and, again, at the time it was felt that women should accept that was how it was. This reflects Barry’s feelings about hiding his homosexuality, his relationship with Morris and his experiences cruising.

In one scene, Barry’s wife, Carmel, slaps him across the face, and there is a suggestion that this isn’t the first time this has happened. He also seems to accept this as his due.

Elif Shafak (2013) Honour. London, Penguin. 978-0-241-97294-6

This is a story of a Turkish-Kurdish family living in London and how the family’s sense of Honour is held by the “appropriate” behaviour of the women while the men live how they wish with approbation.

[Trigger Warning: Domestic Violence]

[Spoiler alert]

This book is about violence against women and girls in an intimate familial setting in the name of honour. Set in the 1970’s, the main characters are twin girls, born in a village in Kurdistan. From a young age they are subjected to honour abuse as one is kidnapped in retaliation for an issue with the marriage of her older sister and , having been taken by men, is punished herself for then being tainted by any sexual abuse that may have been foisted on her. Her Turkish suitor marries her twin instead and they leave for Istanbul and then on to London.

Here, again, the men are free to have affairs, visit prostitutes, gamble, and the father abandons his wife and by now three children, to live with a lap dancer who he pursues to the Gulf when she leaves him for a wealthier suitor. But it is when the mother develops a platonic relationship with a kind, older man she meets accidentally, that the family’s honour is brought into question. The eldest son, despite still being at school, is now the head of the family and, ripe for radicalisation, is pressured to take action when the mother’s indiscretion is discovered.  His action has tragic consequences, and he ends up serving a long sentence in prison.

While there is a sense of growing, learning and redemption in the characters at the end, with one twin dying before her time, one twin murdered and the father dying by suicide, it is a tragic story.

 

Hanya Yanagihara (2015) A Little Life. London, Picador. 978-1-5290-6124-6

 

This is an epic, magnificent book focusing on the lives of four male friends who meet when they are in college and continue their friendships through the ups and downs of work, art and the relationships between themselves and people who join and leave their circle. It starts with them in their late teens and continues through to late middle-age.
 
[Trigger Warning: Domestic Violence]
[Spoiler alert]
 
The domestic abuse in this book occupies a relatively small part of what is a huge book, and is somewhat overshadowed by the self-harm and abuse the main character suffers, but it is significant in it’s brevity but intensity.
 
Jude forms his very first consensual relationship with an artist, Caleb. The relationship very soon becomes both physically abusive and mentally abusive as Caleb humiliates Jude at every opportunity. Finally he rapes him and throws him downstairs, leaving him for dead.
 
Despite the abuse being a discrete part of the book, it is difficult to separate from the main story as tolerating the abuse for as long as he does, illustrates how abuse has characterised Jude’s life and how poor his self-esteem, despite his outward and worldly achievements.
 
Awards:
 
·        Shortlisted for the Man Booker Prize 2015
·        Finalist National Book Award for Fiction 2015
·        Winner of Kirkus Prize for Fiction 2015
·        Shortlisted for the Andrew Carnegie Medal for Excellence in Fiction 2016
·        Shortlisted for the Women’s Prize for Fiction 2016
·        Shortlisted for the International Dublin Literary Award 2017

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.

Nancy Werlin (2006) The Rules of Survival. New York, Speak. 978-0-14-241071-4

 

The narrator is the eldest of three children who live with their neglectful and abusive mother. The story follows her increasingly erratic behaviour as she pursues a man who has rejected her until a tragedy occurs.

[Trigger Warning: Domestic Violence]

[Spoiler alert]

This is an interesting book as it is the first one which portrays an abusive female in a heterosexual relationship. It is interesting to see portrayed how a character – the woman in this case – who is less physically strong, uses violence through the manipulation of other people as well as being mentally and emotionally abusive.

The novel is primarily the story of the three children and how they develop techniques to survive their mother’s neglect and abuse. The eldest child, the narrator, involves a man he meets at the counter of a store. He doesn’t realise it at the time but he is connecting with an adult who has survived childhood abuse. Unwittingly he brings the man into their family and into an intimate relationship with the mother. It is when he experiences her manipulation that he ends the relationship, sparking an escalating pattern of violence, usually at the hands of her new lovers, and abuse towards him. It escalates to a tragic conclusion and he is then drawn in to gather together a group of people to support the children.

This is a young adult novel, with the main character, Matthew Walsh, writing a letter to his youngest sibling, Emmy, who would have been too young to remember the details.

 

Awards:

• Finalist National Book Award for Young People’s Literature 2006
• Finalist Los Angeles Times Book Prize 2006
• American Library Association Best Book for Young Adults 2007

 

“Two or three things I know for sure 

and one of them is that 

telling the story all the way through 

is an act of love”

 

Dorothy Allison quoted in Carmen Maria Machado (2020) In the Dream House P251

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