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Madwoman by Chelsea Bieker

Contemporary fiction

Madwoman

by Chelsea Bieker

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Quick take

A prison letter sets in motion the slow unraveling of a woman haunted by her past in this twist-filled domestic drama.

Good to know

  • Illustrated icon, Family_Drama

    Family drama

  • Illustrated icon, Unreliable_Narrator

    Unreliable narrator

  • Illustrated icon, Drugs_and_Alcohol

    Drug & alcohol use

  • Illustrated icon, Serious

    Serious

Synopsis

The world is not made for mothers.

Yet mothers made the world…

Clove has gone to extremes to keep her past a secret. Thanks to her lies, she’s landed the life of her dreams, complete with a safe husband and two adoring children who will never know the terror that was routine in her own childhood. If her buried anxiety threatens to breach the surface, Clove (if that is really her name) focuses on finding the right supplement, the right gratitude meditation.

But when she receives a letter from a women’s prison in California, her past comes screeching into the present, entangling her in a dangerous game with memory and the people she thought she had outrun. As we race between her precarious present-day life in Portland, Oregon and her childhood in a Waikiki high-rise with her mother and father, Clove is forced to finally unravel the defining day of her life. How did she survive that day, and what will it take to end the cycle of violence? Will the truth undo her, or could it ultimately save her?

Content warning

This book contains scenes that depict domestic abuse and child abuse and mentions of infertility.

Free sample

Get an early look from the first pages of Madwoman.

Madwoman

CHAPTER 1

The world is not made for mothers. Yet mothers made the world. The world is not made for children. Yet children are the future. Or so I’ve seen on posters at pediatric offices. Pro-life campaigns. PBS maybe. When I was in school, we spent our lunch hour foreheads pressed to the table while a small twitchy principal bellowed into a megaphone for silence. This was before the internet and secret viral videos and conscious parenting. He and the lunch ladies swatted at us but never hit. I don’t remember telling you about it. I’m sure it seemed irrelevant to me at that time in my life, meaning my entire childhood, when all we cared about was surviving my father. My head on the cool table, solemnly eating Tater Tots, probably seemed like heaven.

Do you get Tater Tots where you are?

Now I’m the mother of Nova and Lark, seven-year-old girl, three-year-old boy, and I sense I’m coming to something important. Or rather, something important is coming to me. It will serve us both to bear witness. The world is not made for us—certainly it’s not; just try to afford preschool—but this thing I’m starting to understand, transforming from felt to known, it’s about the energy of violence. 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.

For many years, despite all I’d seen and all I’d survived, I thought I had evaded those long fingers. That life was about wise choices. For instance, if I did motherhood differently than you, if I ensured a peaceful family life, then I could leave the past behind. No. Not just behind. I could annihilate it.

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Why I love it

First, an apology: To the woman whose grocery cart I accidentally rammed into with mine, I’m sorry. But really, it’s not my fault. I was too busy reading Chelsea Bieker’s Madwoman, a novel so visceral, so harrowing and propulsive, that I couldn’t possibly put it down long enough to buy my groceries.

This story begins with a mother who is trying not to come undone. Clove has worked hard to build a perfect life for herself. She has a kind and loving husband, two children, and a stable roof over her head. But when she receives a letter from her imprisoned mother from whom she thought she’d never hear again, the devastating childhood memories she thought she’d long buried force themselves back to the surface. Clove is not who she says she is, and what unfolds is a deeply harrowing story of a woman haunted by the violent past she fought tooth and nail to escape.

This is one of the most skillfully drawn portraits of the fallout from long-buried traumas, of cycles of abuse, and of mothers and daughters that I have read in a while. With the pacing and propulsion of a thriller and the humanity of an insightfully drawn character study, Madwoman had me with my heart in my throat. I won’t spoil it, but suffice it to say you won’t end this story the same as when you began. This is a special book, and I hope it resonates with you as deeply as it did me.

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