Madwoman

“The way violence shrinks women, makes us feel lucky for things that aren’t lucky. Even when we think we’ve outrun it, look back—see its long reaching fingers touching every choice we’ve made.”

In this passage, Bieker personifies violence as a grasping hand, touching every aspect of survivors’ lives. The verb “shrinks” emphasizes the way that violence can diminish women’s sense of self and agency.

“Now I know it was easier to fixate on small externals than address the fact that we did not know if we would live to see the next day.”

The verbal irony here highlights how trauma survivors focus on manageable details rather than imminent threats: whether they will “live to see the next day.” The phrase “now I know” signals Clove’s retrospective understanding of this, demonstrating how trauma requires time to be processed and understood.

“We put diseased animals out of their misery, we don’t want them to suffer, to infect the rest of the lot. We let men live.”

The author employs a parallel structure in this passage to contrast society’s treatment of animals with its treatment of men, highlighting systemic societal failures in addressing male violence. Clove compares her father to a “diseased” animal who “infected” his family members due to his abuse. The short, declarative final sentence showcases Clove’s understanding of gender-based double standards.

“Siblings are lifelong companions, my husband said often, as if reciting a line from some handbook only he had access to, and I sucked it all down, not knowing any better, not having anything to compare it to, overlooking the fact that he rarely spoke to his siblings, that his brother had recently posted a photo of his toddler son holding a rifle at a gun show and we had deemed them unsafe to visit.”

This passage uses irony to contrast an idealized notion of siblinghood with the reality of Clove’s husband’s actual relationships with his family, which are strained. While her husband says, “Siblings are lifelong companions,” Clove notes the rehearsed nature of his statement as if he is repeating it from a “handbook.” This shows the unspoken rules that he feels he must follow—something Clove doesn’t have access to, given her abusive childhood. The final detail about the brother’s toddler holding a rifle speaks to Clove’s extreme focus on her children’s safety, deeming this family “unsafe.”

“I was pretty enough to convince a man to fall in love, but I knew once he found out about my past, it would be ruined. The first man I fell in love with at seventeen proved this to be correct. With time, he could no longer look at me without seeing it: my story. To him I would always be the girl whose mother had murdered her father.”

In this quote, Clove collapses the distinction between her identity and her trauma, underscoring The Struggle for Personal Identity Amid Trauma. She believes that her romantic relationships will be “ruined” once partners learn about her traumatic past. Clove collapses herself with “her story,” which illustrates how she believes her traumatic upbringing defines her identity—permanently affecting how others perceive her.

“Of course, there was no telling my husband I’d received a letter from a women’s prison and my un-dead mother had written it. But where was aloneness in our house? My children occupied every corner and filled every silence. The thing about motherhood was that everything was happening all the time.”

Bieker contrasts the need for solitude and the overwhelming presence of motherhood through spatial imagery of corners and silences. The text juxtaposes the narrator’s secret about her mother with her motherhood, highlighting how trauma patterns repeat across generations and supporting Intergenerational Patterns of Female Survival.

“The letter ended with a simple xo, Mom, and I realized I had never received a letter from you, had no idea what your favored sign-off was. Xo. You liked to say my father could do anything to you, bruise you, break you, but how much could he really take away? It was all surface damage, you said, and none of it could change the fact that you were my mother, and I was your daughter. But my father’s violence stood between you and everything. Most often, it stood between you and me.”

In this passage, the reality and inevitability of violence interrupt the assumed connection between mother and daughter. Clove’s mother’s statement about “surface damage” is deeply ironic. It contains an understatement of the gap between Clove’s mother’s perceptions and the reality of her situation. Further, the imagery of Clove’s father’s violence standing “between [Clove’s mother] and [Clove]” highlights how it permanently strained the mother-daughter relationship.

“Wherever I was, I felt alone. I still feel this way now, as if the things I’ve seen have created a barrier between me and the living world, and there is nothing I can ever do, no supplement I can take, no inner-child meditation strong enough, deep enough, to remove it.”

This passage depicts The Commodification of Safety, as Clove acknowledges that there is no “supplement” or “inner-child meditation” strong enough to remove her childhood trauma. The repetition of “enough” emphasizes its futility. Further, Clove uses “barrier” as a metaphor to describe the emotional distance she feels between her and “the living world.” This emphasizes the isolation that she experiences due to trauma, as if she is physically separated from others.

“The key to peace between my father and me was to pretend he was not the source of our pain. I counted myself lucky that he only shoved me if I stood in his way to get to you. I’d play along when he’d call women crazy, as if I was not also a woman.”

In this passage, Clove pretends that her father isn’t “the source of [Clove and her mother’s] pain” as “the key to peace.” Bieker uses irony here to demonstrate how Clove had to be complicit in her father’s misogyny, evidenced by him calling “women crazy.” The phrase “I counted myself lucky” functions ironically to demonstrate how the abuse made Clove feel grateful if the physical violence in this situation was only a shove. This emphasizes the toxic nature of the abuse in her childhood home.

“The man on my other side in a bad suit finished his magazine and then donned a sleep mask. I pretended to be asleep as the sunburned man rested a hand on my knee, lifting it every time the attendant walked by, then resting it again. You weren’t around anymore to excuse the behavior of men, to soften it, talk it away. I knew as I picked up the ballpoint pen from bad suit’s tray and turned to the sunburn, held the pointed end against his neck and whispered, ‘Don’t fuck with me,’ that we were in fact quite different from each other.”

The passage reduces men to their defining features (“bad suit,” “sunburn”). This emphasizes their role as generic threats rather than individuals, just as the lack of naming for male characters in the novel turns them into archetypes. The structure creates dramatic tension through the contrast between passive victimization and sudden violent resistance (picking up the ballpoint pen, holding it against his neck, and saying, “Don’t fuck with me”).

“People, most of the time, will try to meet you halfway if you ask. But you only learn that by asking, and you only ask if you’re desperate.”

The repetition of “only” creates a cause-and-effect relationship between desperation and human connection. The universalized opening about “people” contrasts with the specific conditions that follow, highlighting how trauma survivors’ experiences diverge from standard social expectations.

“The problem I began to identify, though, was that his expression of love was tightly entwined with pity. He felt bad for me. Little orphan he had saved. I had pitied you my whole life, so I knew how it worked. There was no power in pity. Here I had thought he was able to see me clearly, to love me in my entirety, but it wasn’t quite that. He looked at me and saw my past. Saw you and my father.”

Though Clove decided to put her trust in the butcher, she never fully accepted that he loved her unconditionally. Instead, Clove had been in survival mode for so long that her default approach to the world was suspicion. This caused her to realize what she thought was love was actually pity, which she associates with weakness—emphasized by phrases like “no power in pity.”

“I wasn’t talking about money, though that mattered too. I was talking about the wealth of familial love. The leg up of a trauma-free or low-trauma childhood. The students around me had parents who called every other day, who beckoned them home for the holidays, where their childhood bedrooms were still intact, like shrines. They had not had to bloody their hands to get a seat at the table.”

The passage extends its metaphor to challenge traditional notions of wealth, moving from literal money to “familial love” and “trauma-free childhood” as forms of privilege. The metaphor of bloodied hands draws on sacrifice imagery to contrast the violence of Clove’s upbringing with the effortless belonging of her peers. Clove further uses details like children’s parents calling regularly, “beckoning” them to visit on holidays, and bedrooms “intact, like shrines” to contrast their loving childhoods with her abusive one.

“I’d cried, tried to make him take it back. Tried to convince him how different I was. But it was too late. He’d glimpsed it. My sexuality, my form taking shape into another crazy woman. I worried my womanhood would make him focus on me during beatings. On the one hand I thought it would be good to give you a break. On the other, I was terrified. But more and more I saw the fear went two ways: when he looked at me, he looked into his own eyes.”

This passage connects female maturation with inherited trauma, showing an inevitable progression toward being labeled “another crazy woman” by misogynistic men. In doing so, the paragraph uses parallel construction to explore the paradoxical nature of abuse dynamics.

“I almost settled into this idea. I imagined us all leaping off the lanai, holding hands in the sky. But in life I do think we’re offered a few moments that stun us into something new. And there, standing in our hallway, my finger tracing an old rust-colored stain, I thought, I’m done living in a place with my mother’s blood on the walls.”

In this passage, the phrase “stun us into something new” functions as both a metaphor and a literal description of transformative moments. The final sentence employs first-person declaration to mark the shift from passive acceptance to active resistance. It uses the concrete image of blood on walls to represent the decision to reject normalized violence, as represented by Clove’s father.

“I hadn’t wanted the Butcher’s or anyone else’s pity, but I was starting to think recognition could be separate from pity. That in recognition there could be a healing, perhaps, but I was not able to be recognized, and because my husband didn’t beat me, and in his coolness my body was still safe, I let it lie.”

This passage creates a distinction between pity and recognition through parallel structure, exploring trauma’s impact on understanding. The final phrase “I let it lie” depicts both acceptance of the situation and continuation of deception, supporting the novel’s exploration of the motif of lying.

“And I could not control you either, Mother. I could not make you see, and it was infuriating, devastating, demoralizing. Celine said all you wanted was to be loved, but I loved you. I saw you and I spoke the truth. You didn’t want to be loved. You wanted his love. You wanted him to love you so much he wouldn’t hurt you. If you could change him, you’d win the game. My love was never enough because my love was never in question.”

Paradoxically, the open and sincere love that Clove offered her mother was less accepted than the conditional, violent “love” of Clove’s father. Clove’s mother had internalized the emotional abuse of her husband. From this passage, it’s clear that somewhere in her mind, she associated rejection and violence with love. Since Clove did not offer either of those things to her, Clove’s mother did not focus on their relationship.

“But we had apartments with broken doors, holes in walls, work boots lining the hallways. Shotguns in closets, mismatched plates and plastic forks, smeared windows lined with remnants of duct tape after Hurricane Iniki. Musty old carpets and scratchy furniture. Eau de cigarette. A smoke childhood. Fear in the air, in our lungs, in our blood.

I don’t tell you this to shame you, Mother. I tell you this to let you know that now as a mother myself, I finally understand the magnitude of what my father took from you.

We did have, we did have, for the worst years of it, the ocean.”

This quote uses vivid imagery to depict a sensory experience of Clove’s childhood environment, emphasizing the decay, neglect, and brokenness that characterized her upbringing. The phrase “Fear in the air, in our lungs, in our blood” underscores the all-consuming nature of her father’s inflicted violence—where fear permeated their entire bodies. The final line about the ocean serves as a volta, employing repetition to transform a list of deprivations into an acknowledgment of the one constant presence in their lives, connecting to the novel’s water motif.

“I collapsed on the dry sand gasping for air, coughing up water. I couldn’t see either of you in any direction. I lay there and people walked around me as if I were a beach chair. No one noticed me. Even now, no matter where I am, I look for the woman abused. There is usually one. No one sees her, but I do.”

The simile comparing the narrator to a beach chair creates an ironic contrast between leisure and trauma while emphasizing Clove’s social invisibility. The final two sentences establish a pattern of seeing and invisibility that positions her as both survivor and witness. This highlights how trauma survivors develop a heightened awareness of others’ suffering.

“The dark traveler greeted me as I stepped into the living room. I’d never felt I had any choices, but there was one to make now. My father pulled you up and over the ledge of the lanai as you kicked and fought. So high up. I looked at the front door. Now, I thought. Now. Now. Someone come in and save us, now. He leaned you farther and you screamed in a way I’d never heard before. Now.

But no one was coming to save us. My mother. My mother. I thought, That’s my mother.”

Clove frequently employs the phrase “dark traveler” as a metaphor for the parts of herself she feels are violent and vindictive, which she suspects she learned from her father. The structure moves from observation to action through increasingly shorter sentences, culminating in the italicized recognition—a repetition that marks the transformation from passive witness to active participant.

“Mother, you sat in prison all these years, remembering. All these years, protecting me. You had been serving the sentence of motherhood all this time, not wanting me to live with this truth. I’m sorry about your dead mother. I think if she had not died when you were young, you would be a different sort of person.”

Here, the author depicts a chain of intergenerational trauma through its connection of Clove’s mother’s behavior to her maternal loss. The final two sentences employ a cause-and-effect structure to demonstrate how early trauma shapes later protective instincts, connecting to the novel’s themes about intergenerational patterns of female survival.

“I heard you that night with my mother. I heard your voice when you came in. The sound of it. I knew you’d done something. It was enough to realize what happened. All this time, I’ve wondered, does my old friend really not remember that part? Is she really going to let her own mother, sweet Alma, rot in there? I used to be weak, but I’m not weak anymore. It’s time for things to be properly sorted, Clove.”

The structure of this passage moves from concrete sensory memory to accusation through short, staccato sentences that build tension. The final line’s use of passive voice in “properly sorted” creates ominous undertones while employing understatement through its bureaucratic phrasing.

“Christina and her principles. Her hatred of bad men. Her encouraging me to leave, to make change for myself. All the while she wanted to trap Celine with her forever. She was so terrified of her daughter out in the world. Of those bad men finding her. Why had we never thought it was strange, Mother? Because everything in our life was wrong?”

This passage’s movement from third person to first-person plural to the intimate address of “Mother” draws connections between different forms of abuse and power. This shifting perspective supports the novel’s exploration of how survivors must reexamine and recontextualize past events to achieve understanding and healing.