“Madwoman” is the Essential Novel About the Cycle of Domestic Abuse

Chelsea Bieker’s new novel Madwoman opens with a two-sentence mic drop: “The world is not made for mothers. Yet mothers made the world.” What follows is the story of Clove, a young mother in the Pacific Northwest fervently attempting to outrun her violent childhood by creating a perfect family of her own. But as her past pushes ever closer, Clove begins to understand that she will never be free of her secrets until she stares right at them.

Bieker’s first two books—the novel Godshot and the story collection Heartbroke—announced her not only as a stunningly talented storyteller but also as an author with unique insight into motherhood and motherloss. In Madwoman, she homes in on how trauma ripples through a family, across generations and oceans. She considers carefully what is required to break the cycle of domestic violence once it’s been set in motion.

I sat down with Bieker on Zoom in early summer to discuss how she crafted a thrilling literary page-turner that also moves forward a critically necessary conversation. We spoke about the inherent murkiness of memory, the claustrophobic isolation of new motherhood, how violence is too often carried forward not by its perpetrators but by its most innocent victims, and more.

Marisa Siegel: When did you start writing Madwoman, and what did the journey toward the completed novel look like?

Chelsea Bieker: The first inkling I had of the book was when I’d gone out for the first time since becoming a mom. I had so much undiagnosed postpartum anxiety after having my daughter in 2014; it was very hard for me to leave her. When she was around two, I remember going out to a reading one night, and afterward everyone went to a bar. There was a younger, seemingly childless woman there and I was kind of observing her, and was really taken by her—it was like seeing a reflection of a past self. It was a tiny moment, a little seed, but it was the beginning of wanting to write about how motherhood had changed me.

I went home and wrote a short story titled “Madwoman.” There was something reckless I was feeling about motherhood and it felt urgent to me. I sent the story to my agent, and as soon as I did, I realized that I had a lot more to say here. I knew this wasn’t a short story. And then the COVID lockdown happened: I couldn’t go on my book tour for Godshot, and I needed something to focus on, so I did one of Jami Attenberg’s 1000 Words of Summer prompts. It was just what I needed, and I was filtering everything I was feeling into my writing. 

I came out of that period with a draft of the novel. It was quite unlike the novel that exists now, but that was the start. It wasn’t until I got a lot deeper into the writing of it that I understood the domestic violence thread. At first, I was interrogating the daily grind of motherhood and the ways it had become so hard to inhabit certain spaces as a mother. I was tracking the ways pediatricians and teachers and people out in the world began to call me “mom” instead of using my name. My identity had been changed in this obvious and strange way. 

MS: So did the thread about all the products marketed to new moms, and ways new moms are inundated with and might become obsessed with such products and messaging for control and self-soothing, come in much earlier than the theme of domestic violence?

CB: They came hand-in-hand. I remember so vividly this moment where I was on the phone with my own mom, who has since passed away, and she was telling me about a very stressful situation she was navigating. I found myself frantically searching through my refrigerator during the call for this bottle of green juice, because I was sure that if I could just find this juice, it would keep me safe. In the book, Clove says something like, “Grocery is the opposite of violence.” That phone call with my mother was a light-bulb moment: these products promising wellness or goodness or cleanliness, these tactile things that Clove clings to in the book, allow us to separate from the more devastating and violent realities we might be experiencing. Of course it’s a surface Band-Aid, though there is an element to it that feels like an affirmation of one’s own worth. There was so much that Clove and her mother were not allowed, and so Clove as the adult, wants to offer herself these nice things as a counter to that. 

MS: Talk to me about Clove’s Instagram addiction, and her growing presence on the platform as an influencer.

CB: The book is a direct address to her mother. I think there is part of me that always felt I’d never be known by my mother because of our circumstances. Crossing the valley to have her know me in a day-to-day way felt impossible, but through writing, I could perhaps try and talk to her about my life, about the ways I was showing up in the world each day. 

I think social media, for Clove, is another way to feel connected in her desired identity while not having to contend with the rest of her life. It’s another way for her to construct—or re-construct—a world that is safe.

MS: I was just about to ask whether the epistolary structure had been in place at the start of your writing!

CB: I remember feeling like I had to write it that way. I remember thinking, Oh, maybe someone will make me change this or maybe this doesn’t work, but then no one ever said anything about it. I thought, great, I got away with it! I love a direct address. I love that urgency. I think it added something to Clove’s voice, and to the way the novel unfolds.

MS: Any favorite books that also do this, or works you were thinking of and looking toward while writing Madwoman?

CB: Both The Push by Ashley Audrain and Animal by Lisa Taddeo are fascinating first-person novels that use direct address to astonishing effect. Both were very inspirational to me. I love the intimacy and immediacy created by this mode. 

I’ve also been writing this way for years! I realized this when I came upon some old blog posts I wrote when I was twenty-two that were all a direct address—“Dear M” and “Love C”. I think it reflects a desire to be seen by the person you are addressing in a way that’s not possible in real life. But in fiction, you can sort of command that attention.

MS: Do you think of Clove as an unreliable narrator?

CB: Yes and no—I think for the first time in her adult life, she’s needing to be honest. The shit is hitting the fan and she has to look at things clearly for the first time. But she’s also grappling with a hormonal imbalance from weaning and a haziness has taken hold, so she’s a little knocked off her game. She’s at this desperate moment. 

I like that it’s unclear how reliable Clove is, because memory is being interrogated in this book. Memory is inherently unclear at times. 

MS: I was compelled by the relationships between women throughout the novel. How were you thinking about motherhood and community?

CB: Clove has a persistent yearning for connection. She is at a moment where she’s realizing that shrouding herself in secrecy has backfired because she can’t achieve genuine closeness with anyone. She is not known by anyone, and she’s realizing how painful that is. I wanted her to be yearning for connection so that she would befriend a stranger (who literally crashes into her) in such an immediate way; Clove knows she doesn’t want superficial relationships anymore, and subconsciously, she wants someone to start pressing at certain issues she’s kept to herself. Jane does that.

I wanted to show, for all the women in the book, how they are connected in so many different ways, but ultimately, they go to bat for each other and also betray each other.  Domestic violence at the center of it all. The crux of their connection is this domestic violence. They’re all steeped in patriarchy. I wanted to examine how women maintain friendships and connection while contending with survival on a daily basis. I wanted to show in action how we isolate women, especially mothers, and show the ways the violence blinds these women to seemingly obvious truths about each other. I aimed to display the strain and the closeness this creates between women. I drew from what I’ve observed in my mother’s female friendships, and also the tremor of fear that ran through every day of my childhood—fear running through a day at the beach, fear running through her meeting up with a friend, these really innocent things were always so fraught because of male violence. I wanted to capture that on the page.

MS: How did domestic violence become one of the hearts of the novel?

CB: As I was interrogating motherhood, I started to understand that I couldn’t look at it comprehensively until I’d looked at it through the lens of domestic violence. Because of my mother: For so long, we all bought into a narrative about her that was focused on her addiction but left out that she was being brutalized on a daily basis by men. And I as a child was like, yup, addiction. That’s the problem. But as an adult, and especially after her death when I was reading her journals, I came to understand the vast bind of her oppression. I thought, Wow. Motherhood is hard enough in the best of circumstances. To realize that she mothered me, or tried to, in absolute hell was a light-bulb moment for me. It was like, Oh, you did not die of alcoholism. You died of domestic violence. 

Every bit of my mother’s life was affected by the trauma and the PTSD and the cycle of violence she found herself caught in. I wanted to tell a story that included that.

MS: Each of your books thinks carefully about generational trauma, and Madwoman is no exception. Clove actively attempts to break the cycle but finds that’s not nearly as easy as she’d thought. As a woman who was raised steeped in trauma, I know well that C-PTSD adds a whole other wrinkle to motherhood.

CB: Yes! I think that when I became a mother, I very much had the notion that having a family of my own would be what undid my trauma and fix the past. But what I found was that in the hormonal upheaval of pregnancy and new motherhood, I was dealing with intrusive thoughts, with memories that seemed to emerge out of nowhere. I felt almost psychically attacked by the past. I don’t know if you’ve read the essay “Ghosts in the Nursery,” but that idea of trauma creeping in in the wake of new motherhood, of trauma as a looming presence in the nursery—everything is meant to be wonderful and serene, but actually we are instead asked to contend with our past. For me, motherhood stirred up trauma. I realized, Okay, if I’m going to do this, I’m going to have to look at the past in a very direct way so I can be making decisions from a really grounded place versus a place of trauma response. 

MS: It’s a moment that forces you to reckon with what it means to be a mother, and then to reconsider the choices our own mothers made. Can you say more about how motherhood made you reconsider memory?

CB: As a new mother, so much of memory felt scary for me. It felt terrifying even though I knew I was safe in my own adult home. My body and nervous system couldn’t understand that safety. Memory is a real bitch. It’s alive in a way that feels dangerous. Madwoman is my attempt to nail that down—the slipperiness and urgency of memory.

MS: How did you so successfully resist the tropes that often emerge when writing a “thriller” about domestic violence?

CB: My goal throughout was to add complexity. I think a lot of the genre tropes occur when the story becomes too simplified, when the violence is stripped of its nuance. I wanted to challenge readers’ expectations. And I was really after getting at the generational aspect of domestic violence you mentioned—the violent relationship belonged to Clove’s parents, but the book is about what Clove carries forward through her life, what that looks like long-term. I was interested in writing from the perspective of a child who has lived through violence and realizes that the violence doesn’t just end, someone has to carry it. I remember early on in the writing of the book, a question came to me: Where does the energy of violence go? It seemed like I’d somehow become the carrier of the memory of that violence. 

MS: Even when we are doing all we can to end the cycle, it continues forward. As you said earlier, it’s still in the room, sitting with us.

CB: And the people who enacted the violence are often no longer carrying it in this way! I sat with the weight of it—it’s a huge weight to carry that violence. Carrying it while caretaking and mothering is… a real mindfuck. 

MS: For me, watching my son grow has offered me new insight into what it meant to grow up in a violent home—motherhood has made processing my own trauma a necessity. But it’s also an opportunity, because you can fathom the child that you once were in a way that wasn’t possible before. Reading this book, it felt like, Finally, someone has written about the very specific strangeness of having been an abused child and then raising a child of one’s own. Thank you for putting it down on the page. 

CB: I’ve had that exact experience. And I don’t think there is enough writing about it. For me, watching my kids age is a renegotiation of everything. Every time I think I’ve made sense of my memories, my children hit new milestones and I realize I haven’t pinned it all down so neatly. For me, motherhood awoke a lot of rage. I realized, wow, things back then were actually worse than I’d thought. It opens up a new layer of absolute anger. I’ve had to do a lot of processing of the anger that’s come up in my body. What do you do when there is no one from the past to hold accountable? It’s work you have to do for yourself. It’s a gift to yourself to do that work, but it’s not easy stuff. 

MS: Let’s bring it back around to the book—Clove is trying to outrun her trauma but eventually she comes up against the fact that it’s still there in the room with her. I’m curious whether for you, Madwoman tells a hopeful story about trauma and motherhood?

CB: I do think Clove comes to the understanding that she cannot bypass her trauma. She realizes it’s not serving her or her children or her relationships to hide from the truth of her past; it’s actually this massive bypass. At the start of the book she mentions that she’s done so many different healing modalities—but she has never tried just looking at the truth of her life directly. I think the novel ends with a door opening for Clove, rather than closing.

MS: Are you feeling ready to put such a personal novel out into the world, and for the heavy emotional responses you’re likely to receive from your readership? Is it different from the first two books?

CB: This is such a different feeling. I’ve been really emotional lately, and I think it’s because I’m anticipating what it’ll feel like to have the book out in the world. I do feel that, as you’ve said, women might read this and it’ll spark conversation or deepen their understanding of something—that is the utmost goal, the most amazing outcome I could imagine for Madwoman: for women to understand the effects of domestic violence in a way that fosters connection rather than division. I look forward to that piece of it, I really do. Beyond my urge to write, to make art, I do have a sense that this book needed to exist, to be in the world. The suffering my mother endured, that I endured, I like the idea that it might have a meaning beyond just suffering. That is what art does. This is the power of story.

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