If you’re not a name, who are you?
In Karen Palmer’s searingly honest, yet deftly tender, memoir She’s Under Here, she recounts how she fled California in order to become a new person—not metaphorically speaking. Her ex-husband’s threats had reached dangerous new heights and, out of options, she and her family sped to Colorado, assumed new identities, and lived that way for years. Even though this is a book about disappearing, it’s not a book that hides Palmer’s ambivalence about her situation, which propels the narrative forward like a high-powered engine. Through vignettes which depict scenes from her entire life—teenage pregnancy, young marriage, her mother’s death—Palmer interrogates the moments that led her into, and out of, an abusive marriage, ultimately circling the question: How does a person know who they are? When they cannot be known by a name, their family, or even a place?
In our current time, we are pushed to cleanly define who we are. Name. Hair color. Place of residence. Job title. But, as Palmer knows, these markers are imperfect. A person is a collection of their experiences and how they choose to react. She’s Under Here may be a deeply personal, and painful, history, but within it contains a universal truth: the way we live our lives tells the real story of who we are.
I spoke with Palmer over the phone and email in the months leading up to the publication of her book. This interview was edited for length and clarity.
Jacqui Devaney
Your memoir She’s Under Here is about disappearing and your journey to disappearing. Yet the feeling I got while I was reading was that you were resurfacing. Was that how it felt to write the book? How did disappearing and resurfacing intersect as you wrote?
Karen Palmer
I think that’s a very good description of what writing it was like. I knew I had a story, that there was something real there, but I had to work through what happened to me in order to resurface so I could write it. It was this complicated thing of disappearing and then coming up from the depths, poking your head out, and taking some air before sinking back down. I spent so many years writing this book. Eventually, I was able to cope with what happened, and that allowed me to get it down in a way that made sense, but initially it felt terrible.
Jacqui Devaney
Before this, you wrote two novels. How did you decide to write this as memoir? How did you know that it was time to write this story as yourself instead of a fictional person?
Karen Palmer
I tried a couple of times to write this story as a novel, but that was when I was still afraid my ex-husband would find me. I disguised so much stuff while also thinking that I was completely visible despite all the disguising. It felt constrained and I could never get it to work. I wasn’t able to think about it as a true story until I felt safe. Then it was like—okay, whatever else happens, he can’t hurt me. I can tell the story straight.
Jacqui Devaney
The book begins and ends in LA. Did you think about this story as a story about place? Or roots? Or how these things could be taken for granted? Is that something that we maybe don’t notice until we can no longer kind of exist within it freely?
Karen Palmer
You get very used to thinking of your hometown, “This is where I grew up. This is where I had my children. This is where my family lived.” It all feels so ordinary. But once you’ve cut ties with a place, and especially if circumstances force you away, that ordinariness takes on an almost mythological cast. Everything you used to barely notice acquires meaning. In Colorado, I often dreamed about my parents’ house in Silver Lake, or City Hall, where my father worked, or my all-girls Catholic high school in East Hollywood. I’d wake up filled with longing.
As a teenager, I couldn’t wait to get away from LA. I had a difficult childhood and was looking for a fresh start. I was supposed to go back East for college but then at the last minute I didn’t, because I met my future husband and fell in love. He owned a business and had children from a previous marriage, and he wasn’t going anywhere. So I stayed.
When we ran, my second husband and I chose Boulder, Colorado, more or less on a whim. It was a good place to escape to, a safe place, and our family made many friends there, but it never entirely felt like home.
Jacqui Devaney
You decided, eventually, that LA was the place that you needed to be. Why do you think those feelings flipped after all that time away?
Karen Palmer
When we returned to Los Angeles in 2005, my ex was still floating around out there. He’d been in prison for a while and then released, and for a long time I believed he was in New York. It turned out he was only 150 miles away. Proximity felt dangerous, but by that time several years had passed and LA was in every way again my home. I’d needed to return, to face unresolved feelings about my parents, and the things that happened to me here. Being back, under such different circumstances, helped me to see events more honestly.
Jacqui Devaney
I’m curious too about the title She’s Under Here and the story behind it. It was something that you were allegedly shouting in your sleep the first night you spent with your ex-husband Gil. He woke you up and he told you you had been repeating, “she’s under here, she’s under here.” What struck me about the title was that it was something that he had said that you had said, but not something that you actually heard yourself say. Those layers of remove, trust, and power capture the core feelings of the book.
Karen Palmer
I had a couple of other titles while I was writing, but they just didn’t work. One day I was doing that thing writers do where you flip through the manuscript and look for words that might hold a key to what happens in the book. When I came across that dream passage, it jumped out. I thought, this book is about hiding and excavating, everything seen through a lens of having disappeared. So, She’s Under Here felt like a good title. Possibly, it helped the book sell. That’s one of those things that happens in publishing.
The other way the title relates to what’s going on in the book is that, from the beginning, I felt there were three ways of looking at identity in this story. How do you know who you are? One answer is something my ex-husband used to tell me. “You are who you say you are.” He meant that how you present yourself, your confidence in who you think you are, and what you tell people about who you are—that becomes who you are. Ironically, his words helped me in terms of constructing an alternate identity.
The second way of thinking about identity was “You are who I say you are.” That was my life first with my parents and then with my ex-husband. I came to rely almost entirely—not entirely because I did get away—but almost entirely on his version of who I was. The third definition of identity, which is what I believe to this day, is: “You are what you do and what you fail to do, who you love and how you show it.”
Jacqui Devaney
And that’s what’s under “here.”
Karen Palmer
Right.
Jacqui Devaney
And, now, I’m thinking about another way it works, especially for a memoir, because a person picks up this book and it’s titled She’s Under Here. And the “here” is the cover of the book. And when they open it, everything you’re trying to say is beneath the cover.
Karen Palmer
Right. And Algonquin did such a great job with the cover. If you look closely, the designer put a sliver of my face at the left edge of collaged items pulled directly from the story: a Polaroid, a torn love letter, part of a birth certificate, a few lines of piano music, everything held in place by white masking tape, in the way that graphic artists—which I once was—used to mock up potential designs. That slivered face is literally “under here.”
Jacqui Devaney
So much of this book is about the way the desire to create art persists despite the difficulty of the situation. I was struck by the fact that, as you say in the memoir, you began writing novels during this period of intense estrangement from the life you had known before. There’s so much about your desire to write and to create, even though you were afraid and in hiding. How did you find the strength through all of this to continue to pursue art?
Karen Palmer
I don’t think it was strength so much as survival. Writing those two novels was a necessary escape. Both are in third person, and they’re about as far from my own experience as they could possibly be. I didn’t want to write about myself. But of course I am in those books. Both are at heart about identity, about who a person is, what makes you good, and what might save you from being bad.
Jacqui Devaney
There are a few sections where you draw comparisons between yourself and some complicated figures, like Charles Manson, and Terry Barton, the seasonal fire service employee who started, maybe purposely, a massive wildfire in Colorado. And then Stephen H. Fagan, who took his two daughters on vacation and then disappeared for 20 years. Of Manson, you wrote that he was a man who could turn others’ alienation to his own purposes, which I feel could be easily paralleled to the writing of this book. Can you talk a little more about how you approach the untangling of this kind of complication of your situation?
Karen Palmer
I just want to clarify something. The comparison to Manson was meant more to be for Gil. I thought of myself during that first marriage as a follower, his follower, so he was the one that turned my teenage alienation to his purposes. But thinking about it now, I see the nuance in your question, because, yes, I have by writing this story used alienation for my own purposes.
The outside stories brought into the memoir are murky and full of cross-currents. Terry Barton’s situation was just awful. The Hayman Fire was hugely destructive, and even though she admitted to having set it, it’s never been clear what really happened, and it probably never will be. It reminded me that sometimes even the person telling the story doesn’t know the whole truth. I felt a connection to her. Like me, she had two daughters and was going through a hard divorce. I also related to speculation that she might have set the fire on purpose so she could be the one to put it out. I can’t imagine she intended to cause a massively destructive blaze, but maybe she thought she could be a hero. She might have seen it as a way of advancing in the work she did for the Forest Service, maybe even securing her dream of becoming a fire investigator. I sympathized, because I’ve often wondered: Am I a hero, because I saved my family, or am I a villain who deprived a man of his children?
That’s where Stephen H. Fagan comes in. When I ran across his story, I was gobsmacked by the similarities between what he did and what I did, although, from the available evidence, he likely kidnapped his daughters for different reasons. I doubt he did it because he felt he was in physical danger from his ex-wife. Testimony taken both during his divorce and ahead of the kidnapping trial, which at the eleventh hour was plea-bargained down to a lesser charge, makes it unlikely that those children were in life-threatening danger from their mother. But who knows?
Again, there were all these crosscurrents. Who’s the hero? Who’s the monster? There’s a chart toward the end of the book that compares my actions to Fagan’s. Even now, it’s devastating to see it all laid out like that. Writing the memoir was my way of trying to untangle the mess, but with stories like these, maybe with any story, no judgement is definitive, and nothing is set in stone, not even at the end.
I started exploring outside stories because the me, me, me-ness of memoir was hard to live in. And I wanted to give the reader a break. And then it turned out that the stories were entirely relevant.
Jacqui Devaney
Having those stories within your memoir did so much to complicate the emotions and the feelings.
Karen Palmer
I think they do work that way, but they didn’t for a long time. While writing, I would ride these long narrative waves and then crash on the rocks of structure. I was determined not to tell the story linearly but I couldn’t figure out how to order events. At some point I realized that the reason I couldn’t get it to work was because some things that happened down the line timewise I’d placed near the book’s beginning, and so they didn’t feel earned. Same with the outside stories. They lacked context.
There’s this one scene where I’m sitting at a drafting table in our house in Boulder, pasting up a brochure, when there’s a knock at the door. Initially, this was part of an early chapter, but without knowing what led up to that moment, the scene fell flat. The explanation was unwieldy and emotionally unsatisfying. But as I gradually reordered the book to be more chronological—and here I credit my editor, Kathy Pories, with gently pushing me further in that direction—the structure felt increasingly sound.
Jacqui Devaney
It adds so much of the weight to that scene, what’s unsaid.
Karen Palmer
Well, faulty structure is often the reason a story fails. Structure bedeviled me all through the writing. One problem I solved quite late was how to handle the 14 years I spent with my first husband. There were during those years long stretches where not much happened. It was just ordinary life. I thought maybe I could skip it, but that left a hole in the narrative. I needed to show how the relationship changed over time but couldn’t take five chapters to do that because there was so much more I needed to get to. I tried writing out a few incidents, hoping they might stand in for the rest, but that didn’t work either. It only made the holes more obvious.
By happenstance, I was teaching Maggie Nelson’s Bluets, and I was so taken with her vignettes, the beauty she made by condensing things down to a single image, or conveying an intense emotion in only a paragraph, that I thought, what if I write about the 14 years à la Maggie Nelson? A series of snapshots that would feed off each other and move the reader forward. I wanted small authorial asides, too, and the freedom to examine a single word like “mithridatism,” which is when you protect yourself against poison by poisoning yourself a little at a time, so that a regular dose won’t be lethal. I used that word to show how as the years passed I accepted things that should have been enormous red flags. Yes, we have stolen equipment in our house, and yes, you know, he drinks too much, and he doesn’t come home, and yes, he has a drug problem, and yes, he’s controlling. I accepted all this because I’d gradually exposed myself to darkness.
The completed chapter was of course nothing like Bluets—how could it be?—but once it was written, the rest of the book felt, finally, doable.
Jacqui Devaney
Can you talk about the experience of having this story in your voice out in the world?
Karen Palmer
My first taste was when Allison Wright pulled an essay of mine out of the slush at Virginia Quarterly Review. I’d sent it in over Submittable, as one does, and wasn’t expecting it to go anywhere. But she bought it and published it, and then it got picked up for Best American Essays. I still didn’t expect anyone to pay much attention. I knew it was a good essay, but I was just happy that writing it had showed me another way into the book, which I’d given up on.
I did a few readings, and someone would always come up afterward to say, Let me tell you what happened to me. Once, at a residency, a young woman said, I was your daughter in that story, my father kidnapped me. We ended up sitting in a corner and having a long conversation. So the response was unexpected and in some ways overwhelming, but also gratifying.
Jacqui Devaney
The story has taken on a life of its own. Now, it exists for other people in the way that they need it to.
Karen Palmer
It’s amazing to me that it’s going to be out in the world. I hope the story finds its readers. I hope it resonates. There are hard things in the book, but also love and hope. The hard things have become less frightening to me with distance, almost as if they happened to somebody else. It’s still personal and it’s still me, but it was an awfully long time ago.
Jacqui Devaney
So much of this book is about the breakdown of a family, but it’s also about the formation and resilience of another family. How did you approach the writing of this with your family? Did anything about that process surprise you?
Karen Palmer
I was surprised by how supportive my husband and daughters have been. My husband said, you need to write it, do whatever you have to do. Our younger daughter, her attitude was, go for it, Mom. Our older daughter is a fairly public person in Washington, DC. In 2022 she ran for city council chairperson—she didn’t win, but she gave the incumbent a real race—and she never said, Don’t do this, it might cause me problems. She embraced the idea that it was a story worth telling. My family is proud of me for telling it.
As I say in the book’s acknowledgements, I have been lucky in love.
MEMOIR
She’s Under Here
By Karen Palmer
Algonquin Books
Published September 16, 2025
