Madwoman by Chelsea Bieker: a tumultuous examination of the impact of domestic abuse on motherhood
Clove is a young woman with a seemingly good life. She has an adoring husband, two healthy, happy children and a comfortable home in Portland, a pleasant US city. She is a perfectionist with an obsession with clean eating and super-health who has spent years building such “perfection”.
Unsurprisingly, this Instagram-friendly version of affluent domesticity is a sham used by her to conceal an abusive, violent and traumatic past – from herself as much from others.
Statistics around women and domestic violence make grim reading. In the UK, the National Centre for Domestic Violence reported that in 2023, 2.4 million people experienced domestic abuse – of whom 1.7 million were women. One in four women will suffer domestic abuse in their lifetime.
In the US, the National Domestic Violence hotline has found that on average, every minute 24 people are victims of rape, physical violence or stalking by an intimate partner — more than 12 million women and men each year.
This is the subject that American author Chelsea Bieker explores in her new novel, Madwoman. Clove has runaway from her abusive childhood, leaving it, her mother and even her real name in the past.
In her new life, she passionately loves her feisty three-year-old daughter Nova and adorable toddler Lark, although she’s exhausted by their insatiable demands – not least, Lark’s reluctance to stop breastfeeding and determination to retain access to what he calls her “nonnies”.
Clove’s kind, reliable husband may not set her heart alight, but he has never hit her or threatened her in any way. He is safe, with “undivorced parents who loved him”. He is her passport to a normal world and motherhood that, she desperately believes, will be her reinvention:
I thought having babies, soft mobile extensions of my body tucked sweetly in organic linen swings, would help me escape … That as a mother I would ascend and actualize into who I was meant to be.
However, sustaining the illusion of normality is not easy. Clove’s picture-perfect life is not cheap and she’s racked up significant debt. One day, a letter arrives at the post office box she uses for her out-of-control online shopping that sends her life further into chaos.
It’s from a women’s prison in California and sent by Alma, the mother she has erased from her new life. Alma has been contacted by a feminist lawyer and her case is being re-evaluated. She asks Clove to give an eye-witness account of what happened the night her father died.
But what did happen that night? That question haunts Clove with increasing intensity. The narrative shifts to and fro in time, between Clove in the present and her memories of a fractured, troubled past. At the heart of the story is her relationship with her parents and their addicted, toxic marriage.
Her father is a charismatic, handsome man who manages to charm Clove and her mother between his violent outbursts. Both women are damaged by the dynamic he creates, and become used to living a dysfunctional, make-do existence:
We had apartments with broken doors, holes in walls, work boots lining the hallways. Shotguns in closets, mismatched plates and plastic forks … Fear in the air, in our lungs, in our blood.
We see the trauma of the past reverberate in the future. Neither Clove nor Alma can make accurate judgments about the people they encounter, and their life-choices are unhealthy and skewed.
Clove loves Alma, but rages against the pain and horror of her abusive childhood and the harm her mother exposed her to. The tragic outcome is their separation and estrangement, and Clove’s mistaken belief that the only way to build a viable future is to conceal the past.
Despite all her meticulous world-building, Clove’s mental health takes a turn after Alma’s letter, and the flaws of her fake life are soon exposed. She is forced to come to turns with both her past and present. Her journey is, however, complicated by meeting Jane, a woman whose life is also troubled and with whom Clove feels a strong but enigmatic kinship.
Shock twists and turns
Written in a searing first person, the novel gallops through shock twists and turns. The narrative voice is Clove’s and she directly addresses her mother and her own motherhood:
Without kids it would be me alone all day subsumed by memories, the truth of you and my father ever present and inescapable.
This choice by Bieker draws the reader in. Addressed as “you”, it feels like readers become Alma. Such intimacy in the language makes it easy to get quickly invested in the fast-unravelling drama.
The chance for Clove to confront her mother highlights how this potentially nourishing relationship, mother and daughter, is all too often fractious and unhappy. And there are also acute observations about the joys and pains of bringing up small children, even in seemingly normal circumstances.
While some of the narrative twists are trite and require some suspended belief, there are many important questions raised in the narrative. This novel’s examination of the long-term impact of domestic abuse is insightful, and the depiction of the alliances and connections made by women in extremes is intriguing. The writing at times sets upon some beautiful imagery and finds moments of true emotion.
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Sally O'Reilly does not work for, consult, own shares in or receive funding from any company or organisation that would benefit from this article, and has disclosed no relevant affiliations beyond their academic appointment.