Goodbye, Sweet Girl: a Story of Domestic Violence and Survival A
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Goodbye, Sweet Girl: A Story of Domestic Violence and Survival A dissertation presented to the faculty of the College of Arts and Sciences of Ohio University In partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree Doctor of Philosophy Kelly O. Sundberg May 2018 © 2018 Kelly O. Sundberg. All Rights Reserved. 2 This dissertation titled Goodbye, Sweet Girl: A Story of Domestic Violence and Survival by KELLY O. SUNDBERG has been approved for the Department of English and the College of Arts and Sciences by Dinty W. Moore Professor of English Robert Frank Dean, College of Arts and Sciences 3 ABSTRACT SUNDBERG, KELLY O., Ph.D., May 2018, English Goodbye, Sweet Girl: A Story of Domestic Violence and Survival Director of Dissertation: Dinty W. Moore The dissertation is comprised of two sections—a critical essay titled “Wounds and Wilderness: Women Writing Trauma and Environment” and a memoir titled Goodbye, Sweet Girl: A Story of Domestic Violence and Survival. The critical essay examines the ways in which twenty-first century feminist nonfiction texts, such as Cheryl Strayed’s Wild and Roxane Gay’s Hunger push against traditional environmental narratives that are posited as transcendental or redemptive. The essay analyzes contemporary notions of woundedness, women’s anger as resistance, and the ways in which feminist writing must engage with the uneasy relationship between people and place, along with the ways in which people and place can affect and, subsequently, reflect each other. Goodbye, Sweet Girl: A Story of Domestic Violence and Survival chronicles my upbringing in the rural cattle country of Idaho, and how that environment, along with the gender roles in which I was raised, later helped shape my decision to stay in an abusive marriage. In this memoir, I seek to challenge traditional notions of victimhood, women, violence, and nature. 4 DEDICATION For Kelly, Megan, and Rebecca: The Women Who Opened the Window 5 ACKNOWLEDGMENTS Grateful acknowledgments to my dissertation committee: Dinty W. Moore, Eric LeMay, Ghirmai Negash, and Edna Wangui. Thank you to the Ohio University English Department for summer travel scholarships, which helped to fund my research for this manuscript. Thank you to the people and places that gave me the time and space to write this dissertation, including Dickinson House, Vermont Studio Center, Mineral School, Karen and Dough Sholes, and Rebecca Solnit. Thank you to the National Endowment for the Arts for awarding me their fellowship to a parenting writer. Finally, thank you to all of the faculty at Ohio University and West Virginia University who helped me throughout my graduate course work. 6 TABLE OF CONTENTS Page Abstract ........................................................................................................................... 3 Dedication ....................................................................................................................... 4 Acknowledgments ........................................................................................................... 5 Wounds and Wilderness: Women Writing Trauma and Environment............................... 7 Works Cited .................................................................................................................. 22 PROLOGUE ................................................................................................................. 25 Chapter 1: It Will Look Like a Sunset............................................................................ 31 Chapter 2: The Perfect Family ....................................................................................... 41 Chapter 3: The Sharp Point in the Middle ...................................................................... 50 Chapter 4: The Babysitter .............................................................................................. 59 Chapter 5: Playlist For a Broken Heart .......................................................................... 74 Chapter 6: His Ghost in Her Bones ................................................................................ 81 Chapter 7: Indian Creek Solitaire .................................................................................... 87 Chapter 8: A Valentine’s Love Letter Written to Myself While the Pizza is in the Oven .................................................................................................................................... 102 Chapter 9: On Parenting, Poverty, and Violence .......................................................... 105 Chapter 10: On Affirmation ......................................................................................... 110 Chapter 11: On Social Media, Activism, and Trauma .................................................. 114 Chapter 12: On Writing and Recovery ......................................................................... 120 Chapter 13: If I Could Just Make It Stop ...................................................................... 125 Chapter 14: On Being A Seed ...................................................................................... 128 7 WOUNDS AND WILDERNESS: WOMEN WRITING TRAUMA AND ENVIRONMENT “I don’t want to diminish the gravity of what happened. I don’t want to pretend I’m on some triumphant, uplifting journey. I don’t want to pretend that everything is okay. I’m living with what happened, moving forward without pretending I am unscarred.” -Roxane Gay, Hunger: A Memoir of (My) Body Introduction: Rebecca Solnit’s book The Faraway Nearby begins with a chapter titled “Apricots.” In this chapter, Solnit describes a mountain of apricots that she has inherited from her aging mother’s home. Solnit spreads the apricots on to a sheet on her bedroom floor, and there she can observe that they are “pale orange with blushes of rose and yellow-gold zones, upholstered in a fine velvet, not as fuzzy as peaches, not as smooth as plums” (Solnit 5). Still, every time that Solnit passes the pile of apricots, she finds two or three rotten ones to cull. The reader grows to realize that the apricots represent the decline of Solnit’s mother’s mental health, as the mother succumbs to Alzheimer’s Disease. When I was a teenager, a friend of mine once confided in me about his mother’s cancer. He teared up as he described her chemotherapy. He said that his mother had told him that, during radiation, she pictured herself as a tree with strong roots. In her vision, the radiation was merely plucking apples off of her branches. In my own imagination, I saw those apples glowing as they were gathered by an invisible hand, and I have never forgotten the image of my friend’s mother as a tree that was harvested rather than destroyed. Later, in my own life, I created similar metaphors to carry me through dark passages. I often wonder where this impulse comes from? Why so many of us feel compelled to recast our suffering as organic matter—as a mountain of apricots, a tree with strong roots, or in my own case—a sunset. A little over five years ago, I drove home from a doctor’s office while the phrase “It will look like a sunset” played in my head like an incantation. Those were the words 8 the doctor had said to me as she had held my bruised and broken foot, a foot that had been broken by the man I loved. The doctor was speaking literally (about the colors), but the writer in me only heard the metaphor contained in those words. Even as I cried in the car on the way home, I knew that there was power in that metaphor. Months later, I wrote the essay “It Will Look Like a Sunset” about why I stayed for too long in my abusive marriage, and that essay is what became this dissertation, my memoir Goodbye, Sweet Girl: A Story of Domestic Violence and Survival. In addition to exploring my marriage, Goodbye, Sweet Girl chronicles my upbringing in the rural cattle country of Idaho, and how that environment, along with the gender roles in which I was raised, later helped shape my decision to stay in an abusive situation. As a former wilderness ranger, I have long been interested in environmental writing and, while composing, I sought to write a memoir that was not only about my interior life, but also about the world around me. There is a tradition of environmental writing being positioned as transcendental or redemptive, but I wanted my book to push back against that tradition. Though there may be redemption contained within elements of my story, women writers have long been limited by the expectation that our stories should be phoenix stories wherein we are transformed, or somehow made more whole, by the traumas that happen to us. The truth is messier than that, of course, and the environment in a nonfiction text should, like all other aspects of that text, seek to reflect the writer’s truth. As I attempt to convey the truth of my experience, my memoir seeks to challenge traditional notions of victimhood, women, violence, and nature. Writing from the Wound: In behavioral therapy, “trauma narratives” are considered a source of therapy for Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder. Trauma narratives are a way of helping the trauma sufferer make sense of the abuses that have happened to them and make the abusive situation more manageable and understandable. Behavioral health professionals believe that telling a traumatic story is a significant step in healing from that trauma, and that over time, “Every stage of telling the story will increase a sense of control over 9 overwhelmingly out of control events. Expressive experiences also