Curious, Healing » memoir

“The Armless Maiden” edited by Terri Windling

Sonia Connolly — Fri, 16 Dec 2011 06:23:08 +0000

Subtitle: And Other Tales for Childhood’s Survivors

This is an anthology of fairy tales retold for adults, with the scary bits left in, and also the bits about resilience and survival. Yes, her father cut off her arms, but then the armless maiden rescues herself and her child through quick wits as well as magic.

The stories vary widely from beautifully retold tales, to heart-wrenching realities, to clunky pieces using child abuse for cheap drama. I imagine each reader would put different stories in the three categories.

Some of my favorites are:

“The Session” by Steven Gould, where an adult Sleeping Beauty has a therapy session about who, exactly, gave her that poisoned apple.
“Knives” by Munro Sickafoose, where a girl is isolated in a tower by her beloved father, and has to learn about the outside world after he dies.
Terri Windling’s “The Green Children” about a young girl whose mother killed her abuser, and Terri Windling’s essay about her real mother, who didn’t.
“The Little Dirty Girl” by Joanna Russ rings true about what’s needed for healing.

This is a book to read slowly, with time for emotional processing, and plenty of permission to skip the stories that don’t resonate for you, or that resonate too much.

Available at Powell’s Books.

“The Mother’s Voice” by Kathy Weingarten

Sonia Connolly — Sun, 13 Nov 2011 04:05:51 +0000

Subtitle: Strengthening Intimacy in Families

I read this by coincidence, and it fits perfectly with themes I’ve been thinking about lately. Kathy Weingarten, a family therapist, addresses double binds that society creates for women around acceptable roles and definitions of success. She talks about dominating behaviors in men and how to address them. She weaves her personal story of motherhood, illness, and family together with societal trends. Throughout, she maintains awareness of intersectional issues of race, class, sexual orientation, and gender.

When she was diagnosed with breast cancer, she realized that her need to focus on her health conflicted directly with her need to be a “good mother” by focusing wholly on her pre-adolescent children. This contrast brought to light the invisible constraints society placed on her thoughts about mothering. She includes thoughts about the roles of wives and fathers as well.

At age 7, her son bullied her daughter, then 3 years old. She withdrew from his dominating behavior, and had to consciously reconnect with him. As she connects with him as “like her” rather than disconnecting as “alien, unlike her,” she has leverage to change the roles society prescribes for boys, sons, and men, as well as for mothers.

When she shares her true feelings and thoughts with her children in age-appropriate ways rather than maintaining a perfectly serene front, she builds real connections with them and allows them to see her as a separate person.

I appreciate how much consciousness and intention Weingarten brings to her mothering.

Some passages become repetitive, perhaps in an attempt to convince the reader, but that is a minor flaw. Overall, this is a beautifully written, carefully thought out, intimate gift of a book. Highly recommended.

Available at Guilford Press.

“I Thought We’d Never Speak Again” by Laura Davis

Sonia Connolly — Sat, 05 Nov 2011 00:48:35 +0000

Subtitle: The Road from Estrangement to Reconciliation

Recommended by: Laura Davis’s website

Laura Davis is co-author of the classic book about healing from incest, “The Courage to Heal.”

This book is written with compassionate awareness that not all stories have happy endings and not all estrangements can be reconciled. Nevertheless, I cried while reading it, for all the estrangements I have been unable to reconcile, and for all the reconciliations that turned out to be grave mistakes, and for all the fears that I should have been able to do it all better.

It has concrete suggestions for how to evaluate the possibility of reconciliation and take steps toward it, as well as a variety of gritty, beautiful stories about others’ attempts and successes. Davis’ reconciliation with her mother is woven through the book.

Recommended, if you have the time and energy to work through the feelings it might bring up.

Available at Powell’s Books.

“Street Without a Name” by Kapka Kassabova

Sonia Connolly — Thu, 27 Oct 2011 04:31:15 +0000

Subtitle: Childhood and Other Misadventures in Bulgaria

Recommended by: Ceil Wirth on the EEFC mailing list

Kapka Kassabova’s chilling, yet engaging, personal memoir of growing up in communist Bulgaria, and then returning to visit shortly after Bulgaria joined the European Union. The characters are finely drawn, and each chapter covers a different aspect (home, school, summers) in overlapping chronologies. The childhood section focuses primarily on Sofia, the capital, and the adult section covers all the regions of Bulgaria, shading into travelogue more than memoir. Woven around personal details, she covers history, current events, communism, capitalism, and ever-present tensions and truces between different ethnicities (Bulgarians, Turks, Macedonians, Greeks).

Her family emigrated to New Zealand when Kassabova was 18, and the book was written in English and published in the US, with the occasional New Zealand turn of phrase.

Kassabova is a few years younger than I am. While she was growing up with her sister and parents in a 2-room (not 2 bedrooms, 2 rooms total) apartment, struggling for food and boots and sometimes electricity and water, I was growing up with relative plenty, vaguely aware but mostly oblivious of others’ struggles.

Coincidentally we also visited Bulgaria at around the same time in 2007, although I only went to Sofia and Bansko. We visited many of the same attractions in those places, and I appreciated learning more details about them. For example, I drank from the mineral spring in the center of Sofia, but didn’t know that it flooded the main street when they first accidentally dug into it.

My attention wandered occasionally while reading, but overall I recommend this book highly as a memoir and a source of information about Bulgaria then and now.

Available at Powell’s Books.

“CrowHeart” by Keelin Anderson

Sonia Connolly — Sun, 02 Oct 2011 04:18:52 +0000

CROWHEART: becoming unwounded, a memoir of transformation

Recommended by: Keelin Anderson

To tell her story of healing from incest and emotional abuse, Keelin Anderson weaves together daily narrative, fiction, quotes, tarot readings, and dreams, all in present tense.

As I read, I saw places where our paths have overlapped, and places where they have diverged. We have both struggled with finding respectful healers to help us, and have vowed to be respectful of our own clients and their individual processes.

She consciously decides to invite spirit guides into her process. I did that for a while, but found that not all spirit guides are trustworthy, and I was better off looking within for guidance. I think there are many ways of contacting Spirit and healing.

Available from Lulu.

“Leaving the Saints” by Martha Beck

Sonia Connolly — Sun, 28 Aug 2011 04:40:12 +0000

Subtitle: How I Lost the Mormons and Found My Faith

Recommended by: Reading Martha Beck’s older books

I first read this years ago and loved it. I came back to it while writing a (forthcoming) article about spiritual abuse and faith. Since I last read it, I read her newer book “Steering by Starlight” and saw that her latest book is about weight-loss, so I started re-reading with trepidation. I still like this one, though!

This book is honest about extreme sexual and spiritual abuse and its effects, side by side with humorous details about daily life. She talks about forgiveness without preaching (much). She talks about how crazymaking it is to have someone casually deny reality. She talks about how wrenching it is to lose family connections because she tells the truth.

She also talks about her personal search for faith, first as the seeking camel, then as the discerning lion, then as the innocent, playful child.

In her last act as a practicing Mormon, she spoke to a huge crowd about domestic violence. “If something I said feels right to you, believe it. If it feels wrong, disbelieve it. The choice to believe or disbelieve, that’s what makes you free.”

Available at Powell’s Books.

“Traveling Mercies” by Anne Lamott

Sonia Connolly — Fri, 19 Aug 2011 16:10:47 +0000

Subtitle: Some thoughts on faith

I stumbled across this book while looking for a quote about forgiveness. I usually find Anne Lamott’s books laugh-out-loud funny, reassuringly insightful, or disturbingly insightful. This book, a series of autobiographical essays about faith and religion, left me cold.

Maybe it was the large daily consumption of alcohol and other drugs she reports before she got sober. I can’t tell if she’s exaggerating or not!

Maybe it was the pretend conversion to Judaism in college, where one of the questions was “Do Jews camp?” The response was, “No, we should be at home where it’s comfortable.” She has to memorize a recipe for “Candle Salad” which includes an upright banana with a maraschino cherry on top. The vignette screeches right past funny into ugly stereotypes and cultural appropriation.

Maybe it was the later conversion to Christianity, where she describes Jesus following her everywhere like “a little cat running along at my heels.” I’m glad she found a spiritual home at St. Andrew Presbyterian Church, and at the same time the description sounds a little too much like spiritual stalking to me.

Reading this book felt like having tea with a distraught, judgmental friend who is telling me every little detail of her troubles, including mean physical descriptions of the people involved, without pausing to ask how I’m doing.

Available at Powell’s Books.

“Tiger, Tiger” by Margaux Fragoso

Sonia Connolly — Tue, 14 Jun 2011 20:14:14 +0000

Recommended by: rushthatspeaks

This is Margaux Fragoso’s matter-of-fact memoir of growing up in Union City, New Jersey with an angry father who is a jeweler, a mentally ill mother who is often hospitalized, and a very complicated relationship with a pedophile, Peter.

I skipped whole chapters in the middle of this book, unable to read the detailed, oily dishonesty that twists a child’s desire to be pleasing and pleasant against herself, eventually manipulating her into holding still for rape.

Over the fourteen years that Margaux Fragoso was enmeshed with Peter, she continued to express her spirit and her boundaries as well. The story of her entrapment is also the story of how she survived and eventually flourished.

In the afterword, she notes, “that a sexual predator looks for children from troubled homes like mine, but that he can also trick average families into thinking he’s ordinary of even an upstanding member of the community.” If you have been the victim of such a predator’s deceit, this book is immensely validating.

Highly recommended for detailed, clear depictions of complex relationships, with a huge trigger warning for manipulation and sexual abuse.

Available at Powell’s Books.

“Whipping Girl” by Julia Serano

Sonia Connolly — Fri, 13 May 2011 19:01:07 +0000

Subtitle: A transsexual woman on sexism and the scapegoating of femininity

An illuminating book. Julia Serano describes her own experience as a transsexual woman, including the identities she explored before deciding to transition, and the internal and external changes she noticed during transition. She uses her experiences, carefully supported with research, to call out some of our societal assumptions and prejudices about gender.

She proposes that we all have a subconscious sex from birth. For people in whom it matches the body’s sex, it remains unnoticed, and leads to the assumption that it matches for everyone. For people in whom it does not match, it causes ongoing deep pain and sadness. Changing the body’s sex and gender presentation relieves the pain and leads to a sense of rightness instead.

She argues that rather than being marginal in feminism, the treatment of transsexual women is a central issue. Transsexual women are discriminated against because they have chosen to move from a societally more valued class – men – to a societally less valued class – women. She sees transsexual men receiving much less discrimination because they don’t violate the societal preference for maleness.

She notes in the introduction that her biggest challenge in writing the book is addressing several audiences: transsexual people, non-trans academics in women’s, queer, and gender studies, and those who want to learn more about transsexuality and feminism. I fall in the third camp, and found myself less engaged by detailed discussions of academic framing of transsexuality, or interpersonal politics in LGBT groups.

At the same time, I’m glad the material was there. Now I’m aware that many academics view gender as entirely socially constructed, and that transsexuals tend to be marginalized in LGBT groups because many of them express gender in a more stereotypically masculine or feminine way.

She argues that it is femininity itself which is devalued and under attack, being equated with weakness, passivity, and artifice. I see her point that she became more connected with her emotions when she started taking estrogen, and that emotions are devalued in our culture. I also see that women (and men) can enjoy dressing up to please themselves.

At the same time, I struggled with her assertion that femininity is natural. Many attributes I associate with femininity (rather than femaleness) are artificial and mandated by the patriarchy: dieting, makeup to appear youthful, hair sculpted with toxic chemicals, high heels, uncomfortable movement-impairing clothing, etc.

I agree that we need to accept each person’s gender expression as equally valuable, while also working to remove patriarchal manipulations of the expression of femininity (and masculinity as well).

Highly recommended to anyone interested in better understanding feminism, sexism, and transsexuality.

Available at Powell’s Books.

“The Way to Rainy Mountain” by N. Scott Momaday

Sonia Connolly — Mon, 14 Mar 2011 23:22:31 +0000

Recommended by: veleda_k in 50books_poc

A series of impressions of the legends, history, and personal experiences of the Kiowas, a Native American tribe living in Oklahoma. Scott Momaday’s grandmother Aho attended the last full Sun Dance of the Kiowas as a child, and shared stories and traditions with him as he grew.

Each image is bright, clear, specific to its own time and place.

The aged visitors who came to my grandmother’s house when I was a child were made of lean and leather, and they bore themselves upright. They wore great black hats and bright ample shirts that shook in the wind. They rubbed fat upon their hair and wound their braids with strips of colored cloth.”

Highly recommended both for the beautiful writing, and for the information about the Kiowas in particular, in contrast to the generalized impression of Native Americans that many books contain.

Available at Powell’s Books.