THE ANSWER IS IN THE WOUND

A memoir through essays by a woman changed, redefined, and reoriented by her experience of domestic violence.

Seven years after her courageous debut (Goodbye, Sweet Girl, 2018), Sundberg makes clear that leaving an abusive partner is only a piece of the story of recovering from that abuse. Her new collection of essays forgoes a linear tale of triumphant escape in favor of poignant reflections on specific episodes not only from within her abusive marriage, but also in her further past, in the years since her divorce, and in the social fabric holding us all. This combination allows her to explore themes of patriarchy and power, spirituality and magical thinking, and motherhood—single motherhood especially—as they press up against her personal love, loss, pain, and healing. Despite raising her son to the threshold of adulthood, building a successful writing career, and finding new love and intimacy, Sundberg knows that her newfound strength, trust of self, and defiant reclamation of her story is forged, at least in part, by desperation. It is the product of quiet, persistent struggle, clashing needs for both solitude and community, and a careening fall through numerous false bottoms of healing. So much of the author's experience resists tidy explanations and clean-cut healing—“I cannot unravel what happened to me. I cannot make it make sense,” she writes. With her signature openness, Sundberg leans into the complexity and opacity of her trauma, swirling the anomalous concoction of love for (and by) an abuser and squeezing the strangeness of heartbreak after abuse. Along her erratic continuum of recovery, Sundberg’s investigation of and compassion for the identity-changing nature of her trauma grants the reader a powerful narrative that is raw, authentic, and full of fragile hope.

Excruciatingly, ragingly tender, written with reverence for the complexity of love, womanhood, and language itself.