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2019/54: When I Hit You: Or, a Portrait of the Writer as a Young Wife -- Meena Kandasamy
I doubt I'd have read When I Hit You -- a partially autobiographical tale of a physically, mentally and emotionally abusive marriage, told in the first person by a young female writer -- without the Reading Women Challenge 2019, which gave me impetus to buy and read a novel by a woman from 'South Asia' (that is, the Indian subcontinent). And I'm glad I did read it, despite the grim subject matter. Rather than a dystopian vision of The State vs Women -- a theme all too prevalent in fiction and fact, lately -- this is very much a conflict between two individuals. And this narrator survives, walks free, makes her suffering into art, because she tells her own story.
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And I am thinking of how I am someday going to be writing all this out and I am conscious that I am thinking about this and not about the moment, and I know that I have already escaped the present and that gives me hope, I just have to wait for this to end and I can write again, and I know that because I am going to be writing about this, I know that this is going to end. [loc. 862]
I doubt I'd have read When I Hit You -- a partially autobiographical tale of a physically, mentally and emotionally abusive marriage, told in the first person by a young female writer -- without the Reading Women Challenge 2019, which gave me impetus to buy and read a novel by a woman from 'South Asia' (that is, the Indian subcontinent). And I'm glad I did read it, despite the grim subject matter. Rather than a dystopian vision of The State vs Women -- a theme all too prevalent in fiction and fact, lately -- this is very much a conflict between two individuals. And this narrator survives, walks free, makes her suffering into art, because she tells her own story.
( Read more... )
