Chelsea Bieker’s Madwoman grapples with one character’s attempts at escaping her traumatic past through deceptive means. Meet Clove, a young mother, who indulges in expensive herbal supplements and designer clothes to distract from her paranoid thinking. She must remain poised, self-contained, immaculately dressed and wholesomely fed. If not, she worries that her deceased father—whom Bieker comically names Spider Dick, for a tattoo on his nether regions—will show up in his Jimmy and transport her to Hell, which she pictures as “an empty movie theater playing my childhood over and over forever.” These sentiments are not based on thin air: in multiple essays, Bieker has been candid about using her own biography as inspiration for her art. In a 2022 Lit Hub essay, Bieker explores her own magical thinking. She explains that she took responsibility for her father’s alcoholism—subconsciously, she believed that her success as a writer would incite him to stop drinking. But as Bieker ultimately recognizes that there is no magic recipe for her parent’s sobriety, the character of Clove cannot shake the demons of her past. And Clove’s burden is especially heavy.
When Clove was just a teenager, her mother pushed her abusive father over the banister of their Hawaii high-rise apartment in an act of self-defense (or so the story initially reads). When we meet Clove, she is unhappy, married to a bland finance worker. She has two kids in tow, who inhibit rather than enrich her life. One of the initial, evocative scenes of the book involves Clove at a post office, where she receives a letter from her mother, who is locked up in a California prison. Then, things escalate. Clove’s son, Lark, tampers with a Lego display. A cocky young man asks for the pen Clove is using, and Clove responds, “Use a different one, shitbag.” Clove is astute at analyzing her own motives and patterns: she recognizes “I slipped into the place where violence lived. . . . My father’s words in my mouth. Shitbag, haybag, whore.”
Bieker cleverly aligns Clove with Spider Dick in other ways. Describing Clove’s parents’ first meeting, she writes that they “locked eyes, and then he came for you. He was older. . . . A reputation as a lady-killer.” Like her father, Clove lures her husband in an almost predatory fashion, sniffing out his potential for “future stability,” knowing that he would be likely to provide her the white-picket-fence life she craves. She pulls him backstage during theatre class with the promise of a kiss, then when he declines, and instead suggests dinner, she determines him a decent man, one who could provide her with the opportunity of “motherhood, the ultimate healing modality.” Just like her father, who habitually lied to cover his tracks, Clove lies to her husband about her past. As far as he’s concerned, there was no murder. Both parents died in an accident. Her sexual experience? “I’ve been holding out for you,” she says coyly, while informing readers that she had passionate, visceral sex with her butcher boyfriend many times in the meat locker when she was seventeen.
Clove learned deceit from her mother and father, both of whom attribute her father’s violence to something they call his “dark traveler,” a nefarious being that would take over his body and mind, absolving him of any blame. Bieker is highly skilled at describing the prejudices and other biases that prevent television viewers and even the police from accurately identifying her father as the abuser. Clove’s father was attractive, a Kenny Rogers lookalike. In the media coverage of his murder, they use a photo of his smiley-faced image in a work ID, likening him to your average blue collar worker. Beside his smiling visage, they show a picture of Clove’s mother dressed up as the wicked witch, face green, hand conjuring. The mother is the wicked temptress, the femme fatale, while the father’s grinning moment is frozen in time, and, to viewers uneducated about domestic violence, it equals all of him.
In a particularly telling scene, in which Clove and her husband watch the true-crime television series Snapped, Bieker cleverly reveals how even people with good intentions are clueless when it comes to domestic violence. In this scene, a reenactment of Clove’s father’s murder plays on the screen. Her husband, unaware that he is watching Clove’s trauma reenacted before him, says of Clove’s mother, “Why didn’t she just stop drinking? Or ask for help?” and “Seems like a money thing. . . . Like lack of resources breeds desperation breeds violence. I’m sure there are studies that show that correlation.” Clove’s husband is a college-educated man with a full-time job in finance, yet he doesn’t have the insight to recognize that women who, shall we put it, snap, are often victims of domestic violence. Clove’s husband is unable to hurt a bee, intercedes when his children hit each other, yet he blames Clove’s mother for her reaction to her husband’s violence instead of wondering, perhaps more deeply, about what she might be reacting to.
With Madwoman, Bieker asks us to interrogate the grey areas in our legal system. Should police be held accountable on domestic violence calls for choosing not to interrogate the husband, who hides his abusive side underneath a charming veneer? For repeatedly assuming the drunk mother is the problem, without much evidence? And perhaps most crucial—does murder necessarily warrant a life sentence if the woman committing the murder does so to save her child, and to save herself?
FICTION
Madwoman
By Chelsea Bieker
Little Brown and Company
Published September 3, 2024
