
Review: Goodbye, Sweet Girl by Kelly Sundberg
Reviewed by Joanna R. Demkiewicz
Goodbye, Sweet Girl: A Story of Domestic Violence and Survival
A Memoir by Kelly Sundberg
HarperCollins, June 2018
$12.99, 272 pp.
ISBN-13: 978-0062497673
In 2014, Guernica published an essay by Kelly Sundberg warmly titled, “It Will Look Like A Sunset,” a piece that was then included in Best American Essays 2015, tucked in between luminaries Rebecca Solnit, Zadie Smith, and Meghan Daum. Spare and compact, this story by relative newcomer Sundberg rattled readers in its pointed juxtaposition of pleasure and pain. In an early section, Sundberg calls the cops on her husband Caleb, eight years into their marriage:
“The young policeman told me, ‘It’s alright. My wife and I fight. Things get crazy. Sometimes you just need time apart.’ I nodded my head in agreement, but I wanted to ask, ‘Do you beat your wife, too?’”
I almost wrote that “Sunset” hit readers like a slap in the face, but that instinct made me cringe. Too often in language we rely on gestural violence to express ourselves. For the sake of Sundberg and every woman who has experienced domestic abuse—and for all the hidden violence masked behind smiles and strength—I won’t use any of that language here. There’s already enough of it permeating our lives, bullying us into thinking we can’t live without it.
Sundberg published two other essays on domestic violence in 2014—“The Sharp Point in the Middle,” a prismatic reflection on youth, assertion, and ownership, and “Goodbye, Sweet Girl,” an ode to the women who heal and grieve together. Weaving these themes together and expanding to preface the life she lived before she met the man who abused her, Sundberg’s memoir has a familiar title, Goodbye, Sweet Girl: A Story of Domestic Violence and Survival.
Sundberg is born into a “barely even middle-class” family, in the vast, rugged, and lush world of Idaho, the seventh least densely populated state in the U.S., and home to the second largest Mormon population. Her older brother Glen suffers from night terrors, hypnotic dreams that draw him from his bed and require their mother’s unwavering attention. Sundberg suffers night terrors, too, “but they were silent.” She swallows them up, learning early on that pain she can’t prove is best handled on her own.
An incident with her neighbor Danny is formative, but not as formative as her reflection afterward: one day, Danny chases her with a knife. She runs from him, fearing the cold look behind his eyes, and is finally saved by her brother, who tells Danny to buzz off. But he also calls Sundberg a wimp, guffawing, “He wasn’t going to hurt you.”
Later that winter, Sundberg finds Danny crying, having lost his brother’s dog Mimi. Danny fears his brother’s wrath, and so Sundberg helps him search for Mimi, but they never find her. In the spring, Mimi’s lifeless body turns up and Danny explodes into guilt-ridden tears. Sundberg “felt a softening toward him… He was still the boy with the knife, but he was also the boy who was suffering.” Her instinct is to show him love, empathy.
We think of children as sponges, but that suggests that they lap up observations and lessons in equal measure. Adolescent experiences aren’t catalogued on neatly lined primary-ruled paper, they’re all tangled up in a shoebox, sticky from the heat of growing up. Something that first causes a child pain may give way to love and warmth later on. But what happens to the pain? What happens when someone who hurt you needs your love?
Foundational to Sundberg’s coming-of-age are her impressions of what it means to be godly, and what it means to be a girl. Her radio is tuned to a Mormon deejay, “Leo the Lion,” who feeds her good news—like snow day announcements—and in Sunday school, she’s taught to fear possession, something that happens when you don’t fill your body with God. She recognizes thoughts that she has—jealousy toward her brother, frustration toward her strict parents—as unholy: “My body wasn’t a safe house. I had awful thoughts all the time.” Each night she prays to God to protect her from these thoughts, from her night terrors, “from possession.”
A few years after the Danny incident, Sundberg is riding to service with her parents when Salt-N-Pepa’s “Let’s Talk About Sex” slides out of the radio. Sundberg knows the words and begins to sing along, but her mother shuts her down: “How inappropriate. How sinful.” They never talk about sex, and a wall builds between Sundberg and her mother, fraught with misunderstandings, and kept secrets. Seven years later, a friend claps his hand over Sundberg’s mouth and tries to force his fingers inside of her, but she screams, and he doesn’t get what he wants: to possess her. Sundberg blames herself. She tells no one.
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According to data collected by the National Coalition Against Domestic Violence (NCADV), one in three women experience intimate partner violence in their lifetime. In Idaho, statistics reveal a confusing public message: while an arrest is more likely to occur in a domestic violence situation than in other violent situations, violence against an intimate partner is less likely to be charged in a court than other violent crimes. The message: when a man lays a hand on the woman he claims to love, the law lays a paltry slap to his wrist. This, of course, requires a phone call to the police to occur in the first place.
When Sundberg finally makes that call—almost a decade into her marriage to Caleb—she is living in Morgantown, West Virginia. There are no statistics comparing domestic violence arrests and charges in West Virginia, at least that I could find. When I visited the West Virginia Coalition Against Domestic Violence website, the link for their domestic violence fact sheet was broken.
When Sundberg makes that call and the police arrive, one of them—as we know—suggests that all couples fight. At this point, Caleb has fled. But when the policemen ask to see Sundberg’s license and she can’t walk to retrieve it, her foot bleeding and swollen to “the size of a football,” they recognize battery and ask Sundberg to call Caleb so they can arrest him. As they are handcuffing him, they ask Caleb if Sundberg hit him: “Because we can arrest her, too,” they say. In Caleb’s one redeeming moment in Goodbye, Sweet Girl, he tells the truth. She did not. They sweep him away, and Sundberg is safe, though it doesn’t feel that way to her, for a very long time.
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Recent accusations of sexual assault against gargantuan public, professional men have jostled the needle, but there’s still a lot of work to be done in the court of public opinion when it comes to rape, sexual harassment, and especially domestic violence. There are still people who wonder why she was drinking. Why she wore that dress. Why she got into bed with him in the first place. Why she was nice to him. The victim is blamed, shamed, and then ignored, as if she doesn’t exist.
Imagine then, if you are the victim of intimidation, harassment, manipulation, and assault—and the abuser is someone you love. Someone you married.
Charming and sensitive, Sundberg is intrigued by Caleb when she meets him at twenty-six—this gentle writer who built his own cabin in the woods. They fall in step quickly, and their romance deepens with haste, despite a few weeks when Caleb disappears. Sundberg chalks this up to early relationship jitters—something many of us would presume. He writes her notes: You are the most beautiful woman I know. They both crow over how perfectly their bodies fit together, again and again.
After five months together, Sundberg gets pregnant. She wants an abortion. Caleb does not. “If you have an abortion … We’ll have to break up. I don’t want that to happen, do you?” She doesn’t. They get engaged. They marry.
He is sweet, “nurturing,” during Sundberg’s pregnancy and after the wedding, cooking stews for Sundberg, bringing her surprise treats, massaging her tired feet, rubbing her belly.
But Sundberg is now privy to Caleb’s turns, the way his mood darkens when he is wrong, or embarrassed, or not in control. In an early instance, Caleb takes a dead-end road, and Sundberg fears they are lost. She tells him this, and he slams on the brakes, screaming at her: “Quit telling me what to do!” But she is right, and he turns around. When they meet the paved road again, he pulls over. “I have to shoot my gun,” he tells Sundberg. “It’s loaded.” Then he admits that the gun is jammed. “If anything happens to me, I want you to know that I love you.” When Sundberg hears the crack of the gun, she jumps, but when Caleb returns to the driver’s seat, she nuzzles up to his shoulder, relieved to no longer feel fear. Fear for what exactly—his violent temper, his manipulative love, losing the man she loves, the father of her child—she doesn’t know, not yet.
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Goodbye, Sweet Girl is heartbreaking, breathtaking in its scope, and urgently truthful in its harrowing and tender examination of when empathy fails—and when it wins. Domestic violence does not occur in a vacuum, and Sundberg shows us this with grace and integrity. Far too often throughout the memoir, Sundberg is told to try harder, to work on her marriage, that Caleb’s problems are her problems to solve. In one particularly affecting section, Sundberg offers “An Incomplete List of the Things We Tried,” including individual counseling, couple’s counseling, mindfulness (for her), and medication (for both of them). In her book on mindfulness, she learns about the “pain-body—an autonomous manifestation of our psychic pain—that wants to antagonize other peoples’ pain-bodies.” This buzzword becomes an out for them both—an excuse for Caleb to hit her, an excuse for her to challenge him, which gives Caleb an excuse to hit her.
In this way, domestic violence can be cyclical, a Ferris wheel of control driven by the entrenched gears of hypermasculinity and a culture of blame, with onlookers consistently averting their eyes. Or dismissing the victim. Or suggesting it happens to everyone. Or offering a warning to the abuser, then letting him back inside. We all have to do so much better than this.
After being tangled up in this loop for too long, Sundberg chooses empathy for herself, finds ownership in her body, her writing, her agency. A few very good women in her life offer her support, shelter, room to breathe, to grieve. Her son offers her the lightness of innocence, discovery, of family. In letting go of this part of her life, she reveals the poignancy of contemporary self-actualization, that this experience doesn’t define her, but moreover, it doesn’t shame her. She’s as full as ever. This book is her deliverance.
Joanna R. Demkiewicz is a co-founder of The Riveter, a women’s long-form and lifestyle magazine that ran for five years both online and in print. She works as a book publicist for Milkweed Editions, an independent press based in Minneapolis, as well as a co-editor for The Sager Group’s Women in Journalism anthology series. Her writing can be found in Guernica.
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