When I Hit You: Or, a Portrait of the Writer as a Young Wife, by Meena Kandasamy.
I loved this book. It’s so delicate in its structure and so honest in its account of male violence, interpersonal violence, and the violence one will apply to themselves as a way to get out of those situations, even if one can only escape in their mind. I loved the fullness of the protagonist before she became a wife. I loved the portrayal of the war happening between her desire and her need to write and the demands of her husband. I loved how she recognized the ways she was decreasing both in her life and in her work as those demands grew, and I loved the way the author wrote all of this down. I loved the undertones of the abuser’s profile, what those undertones implied and communicated, and how the reader can (and should) view all personality veneers through the lens of those undertones outside of the book.
Every day, both in real life and in my library, I am becoming increasingly unconvinced of the inherent goodness of men, and I know this is backwards of me—I know it’s anti-feminist—but if I was ever gonna make a tweet a mantra, it would be the one where the author was like “men should start in jail and prove their way out.”