For Domestic Violence Awareness Month
For this October, Sylvia's Place has partnered with the Allegan District Library to cultivate a Reading Recommendation list for those interested in hearing stories from survivors, learning how to grow past abuse, and read novels that handle the situation from a survivor's perspective.
Novels that have been marked can be found at the Allegan Library, next to our Clothesline Display! Check them out there first!
In this Article:
Assume Nothing: A Memoir of Intimate Violence
by Tanya Selvaratnam
In Assume Nothing, award-winning filmmaker Tanya Selvaratnam bravely recounts the intimate abuse she suffered while in a relationship with former NY State Attorney General Eric Schneiderman and uses reporting to examine the domestic violence crisis.
Crazy Love
by Leslie Morgan Steiner
This is a memoir of love and violence, two life experiences that should never go together. Crazy Love was first published in 2009 and remains a compelling exploration of what it feels like to fall in love with a deeply troubled, abusive man — and then to leave him. Go deep inside the world of abuse and emerge victorious, wiser, and stronger on the other side.
Escape Points: A Memoir
by Michele Weldon
Deftly lacing heartbreak with humor and insight, Michele Weldon provides a potent antidote to the crazy, harried, single mom stereotype in Escape Points. Untethered from a comfortable, upper-middle-class life with a handsome but abusive attorney husband, Weldon relates the challenges and triumphs of the years that followed as she raised three growing sons alone in the face of cancer, an ambitious career, and the shadow of her ex. As she maneuvers through a complicated life of long daily commutes, radiation treatments, supporting three boys’ all-consuming high school wrestling careers, and trying to mitigate their hurt and resentment at an absent father, Weldon shows that single mothers, and their children, can succeed when others—neighbors, family, teachers, and in this case one incredible wrestling coach—step in to fill the void and the remaining parent stays the course with common sense and dutiful love.
Goodbye, Sweet Girl
by Kelly Sundberg
In this brave and beautiful memoir, written with the raw honesty and devastating openness of The Glass Castle and The Liar’s Club, a woman chronicles how her marriage devolved from a love story into a shocking tale of abuse - examining the tenderness and violence entwined in the relationship, why she endured years of physical and emotional pain, and how she eventually broke free.
Know My Name*
by Chanel Miller
She was known to the world as Emily Doe when she stunned millions with a letter. Brock Turner had been sentenced to just six months in county jail after he was found sexually assaulting her on Stanford's campus. Her victim impact statement was posted on BuzzFeed, where it instantly went viral—viewed by eleven million people within four days, it was translated globally and read on the floor of Congress; it inspired changes in California law and the recall of the judge in the case. Thousands wrote to say that she had given them the courage to share their own experiences of assault for the first time...
Mad Wife: A Memoir
by Kate Hamilton
In this electrifying literary memoir, Kate Hamilton deftly traces her complicated journey from loving wife to gaslit victim to furious feminist with an urgent goal: to expose how women are pressured to uphold the institutions of marriage and family, no matter the cost.
Not Exactly Love: A Memoir
by Betty Hafner
It was 1969, and all the rules were changing, when Betty, a woefully single French teacher on Long Island, met the handsome but edgy new teacher at her school, a hippie just back from Woodstock. His vitality opened up a new world to her--but when they married, his rages turned against her, and often ended with physical violence. Like millions of women who discover they've married an abusive man, Betty was forced to make daily decisions--to suppress her feelings or risk.
Learning to Live Without Violence
by Daniel Sonkin and Michael Durphy
A Handbook for Men. Used by counselors and therapists across the country . . . especially for the court-ordered perpetrator. Starting in the early 1980s, "Learning To Live Without Violence: A Handbook For Men" set the standard for the treatment of batterers. Provides techniques and suggestions to hep men in the continuation of their journey away from violence, fear and anxiety.
No Visible Bruises: What We Don't Know About Domestic Violence Can Kill Us
by Rachel Louise Snyder
We call it domestic violence. We call it private violence. Sometimes we call it intimate terrorism. But whatever we call it, we generally do not believe it has anything to do with us. In America, domestic violence accounts for 15% of all violent crime… we have not taken the true measure of this problem. In No Visible Bruises, Rachel Louise Snyder gives context for what we don’t know we’re seeing. She frames this urgent and immersive account of the scale of domestic violence around key stories that exploded the common myths — that if things were bad enough victims would just leave; that a violent person cannot become nonviolent; that shelter is an adequate response; and more insidiously, that violence inside the home is disconnected from other forms of violence. Through the stories of victims, perpetrators, law enforcement, and reform movements, Snyder explores the real roots of private violence, its far-reaching consequences for society, and what it will take to truly address it.
See What You Made Me Do: Power, Control, and Domestic Abuse
by Jess Hill
Domestic abuse is a national emergency: one in four women has experienced violence from a man she was intimate with.
But too often we ask only one question: why didn’t she leave? We should be asking: why did he do it?
Investigative journalist Jess Hill puts perpetrators - and the systems that enable them - in the spotlight. See What You Made Me Do is a deep dive into the abuse so many women and children experience - abuse that is often reinforced by the justice system they trust to protect them. Critically, it shows that we can drastically reduce the violence - not in generations to come, but today.
Combining forensic research with riveting storytelling, See What You Made Me Do challenges everything you thought you knew about domestic abuse.
The Body Keeps the Score*
by Bessel Von der Kolk
The Body Keeps the Score is the inspiring story of how a group of therapists and scientists— together with their courageous and memorable patients—has struggled to integrate recent advances in brain science, attachment research, and body awareness into treatments that can free trauma survivors from the tyranny of the past. These new paths to recovery activate the brain’s natural neuroplasticity to rewire disturbed functioning and rebuild step by step the ability to “know what you know and feel what you feel.” They also offer experiences that directly counteract the helplessness and invisibility associated with trauma, enabling both adults and children to reclaim ownership of their bodies and their lives.
Big Little Lies*
by Liane Moriarty
Pirriwee Public is a beautiful little beachside primary school where children are taught that ‘sharing is caring.’ So how has the annual School Trivia Night ended in full-blown riot? Sirens are wailing. People are screaming. The principal is mortified.
And one parent is dead.
Was it a murder, a tragic accident or just good parents gone bad? As the parents at Pirriwee Public are about to discover, sometimes it’s the little lies that turn out to be the most lethal…
Big Little Lies is a brilliant take on ex-husbands and second wives, mothers and daughters, school-yard scandal, and the dangerous little lies we tell ourselves just to survive.
Criminal*
by Terra Elan McVoy
Nikki’s life is far from perfect, but at least she has Dee. Her friends tell her that Dee is no good, but Nikki can’t imagine herself without him. He’s hot, he’s dangerous, he has her initials tattooed over his heart, and she loves him more than anything. There’s nothing Nikki wouldn’t do for Dee. Absolutely nothing.
So when Dee pulls Nikki into a crime —a crime that ends in murder— Nikki tells herself that it’s all for true love. Nothing can break them apart. Not the police. Not the arrest that lands Nikki in jail. Not even the investigators who want her to testify against him.
But what if Dee had motives that Nikki knew nothing about? Nikki’s love for Dee is supposed to be unconditional…but even true love has a limit. And Nikki just might have reached hers.
Eleanor Oliphant Is Completely Fine*
by Gail Honeyman
Meet Eleanor Oliphant: She struggles with appropriate social skills and tends to say exactly what she’s thinking. Nothing is missing in her carefully timetabled life of avoiding social interactions, where weekends are punctuated by frozen pizza, vodka, and phone chats with Mummy. But everything changes when Eleanor meets Raymond, the bumbling and deeply unhygienic IT guy from her office. When she and Raymond together save Sammy, an elderly gentleman who has fallen on the sidewalk, the three become the kinds of friends who rescue one another from the lives of isolation they have each been living. And it is Raymond’s big heart that will ultimately help Eleanor find the way to repair her own profoundly damaged one.
Homegoing*
by Yaa Gyasi
Effia and Esi are born into different villages in eighteenth-century Ghana. Effia is married off to an Englishman and lives in comfort in the palatial rooms of Cape Coast Castle. Unbeknownst to Effia, her sister, Esi, is imprisoned beneath her in the castle’s dungeons, sold with thousands of others into the Gold Coast’s booming slave trade, and shipped off to America, where her children and grandchildren will be raised in slavery. One thread of Homegoing follows Effia’s descendants through centuries of warfare in Ghana, as the Fante and Asante nations wrestle with the slave trade and British colonization. The other thread follows Esi and her children into America. From the plantations of the South to the Civil War and the Great Migration, from the coal mines of Pratt City, Alabama, to the jazz clubs and dope houses of twentieth-century Harlem, right up through the present day, Homegoing makes history visceral, and captures, with singular and stunning immediacy, how the memory of captivity came to be inscribed in the soul of a nation.
Normal People*
by Sally Rooney
Connell and Marianne grew up in the same small town, but the similarities end there. At school, Connell is popular and well liked, while Marianne is a loner. But when the two strike up a conversation—awkward but electrifying—something life changing begins.
A year later, they’re both studying at Trinity College in Dublin. Marianne has found her feet in a new social world while Connell hangs at the sidelines, shy and uncertain. Throughout their years at university, Marianne and Connell circle one another, straying toward other people and possibilities but always magnetically, irresistibly drawn back together. And as she veers into self-destruction and he begins to search for meaning elsewhere, each must confront how far they are willing to go to save the other.
Normal People is the story of mutual fascination, friendship, and love. It takes us from that first conversation to the years beyond, in the company of two people who try to stay apart but find that they can’t.
https://www.amazon.com/Normal-People-Novel-Sally-Rooney/dp/1984822179
The Color Purple*
by Alice Walker
A powerful cultural touchstone of modern American literature, The Color Purple depicts the lives of African American women in early twentieth-century rural Georgia. Separated as girls, sisters Celie and Nettie sustain their loyalty to and hope in each other across time, distance and silence. Through a series of letters spanning twenty years, first from Celie to God, then the sisters to each other despite the unknown, the novel draws readers into its rich and memorable portrayals of Celie, Nettie, Shug Avery and Sofia and their experience. The Color Purple broke the silence around domestic and sexual abuse, narrating the lives of women through their pain and struggle, companionship and growth, resilience and bravery. Deeply compassionate and beautifully imagined, Alice Walker's epic carries readers on a spirit-affirming journey towards redemption and love.
https://www.blackgarnetbooks.com/item/rBSsMLeAZlYbBUFEbgIcug
The Great Alone
by Kristin Hannah
Ernt Allbright, a former POW, comes home from the Vietnam war a changed and volatile man. When he loses yet another job, he makes an impulsive decision: he will move his family north, to Alaska, where they will live off the grid in America’s last true frontier.
Thirteen-year-old Leni, a girl coming of age in a tumultuous time, caught in the riptide of her parents’ passionate, stormy relationship, dares to hope that a new land will lead to a better future for her family. She is desperate for a place to belong. Her mother, Cora, will do anything and go anywhere for the man she loves, even if means following him into the unknown.
...In this unforgettable portrait of human frailty and resilience, Kristin Hannah reveals the indomitable character of the modern American pioneer and the spirit of a vanishing Alaska―a place of incomparable beauty and danger. The Great Alone is a daring, beautiful, stay-up-all-night story about love and loss, the fight for survival, and the wildness that lives in both man and nature.
