Reviews

Clove is a woman undrowned. Honestly, so am I, &, I think, so is Chelsea, which is probably why her work resonates with me so much.

At the start of Madwoman, we meet Clove when she seems to be healed from the chaos of her childhood. Nobody in her life even knows that her childhood was traumatic. Clove has successfully reinvented herself, & she has no plans to go back. However, the world has something else in mind for Clove when she receives a letter from someone in her past that turns her carefully built facade on its head.

Madwoman first & foremost is a novel about mothergrief. Like many of us who carry mothergrief, Clove had to become a parent to herself & her mother, & Chelsea expertly illuminates the harms of that parentification. So much of Madwoman is about the pain of having to see your mother for who she really is & knowing you love her anyway. Much of Madwoman sees Clove attempting to resist this impulse, all while trying to mother herself & her two children. We see Clove attempt to determine what can replace the love she never received from her parents. We see Clove unknowingly repeat her mother's mistakes as she tries to resist them. & ultimately, we see Clove make peace with the nuance of knowing her mother as a whole person - the good & the bad.

Madwoman is also a novel about intergenerational trauma. Clove & her father are both haunted by a dark traveler who instills them with self-destructive impulses. The ways Clove attempts to reckon with the trauma rearing its head in her body is one of the most relatable depictions of Complex PTSD I have ever come across. Clove's struggles evidence how living with trauma becomes instinctual & habitual until it's wired into your nerves. The reckoning Clove faces also wonderfully depicts how trauma lives in your body & will keep happening to you until it is excavated.

& Madwoman is a beautifully pro-survivor story. Any survivor of intimate partner violence will see parts of their experience echoed in Clove. Chelsea intimately depicts the prison that abuse becomes, even after the abuser is out of your life.

Even though Clove has gotten free of her abusers, we see her attempt to control every little thing about her life. We see her struggle to accept care. We see how her world was shrunk by the abuse she suffered, to the point that she’s not even aware of her own agency. So much of Clove’s experience resonates with my own survivor narrative, & I’m so grateful to have been able to accompany her through her journey to freedom.

It’s difficult to capture what Chelsea’s work means to me. I first came to it only a few months into being voluntarily estranged from my mother. In her first book Godshot, Lacey May finds herself abandoned by her mother, but as I devoured Chelsea’s novel, I found that Lacey & I faced much of the same anger & grief about our mothers. By the end of Godshot, in a way, Lacey’s mother returns to save her from her grief. By the end of Madwoman, we see Clove, in a way, return to rescue her mother. I don’t know if I will ever return to mother, but I know I will return to Chelsea’s work over & over again for the rest of my life, any time I need to be reminded that I’m not alone in my mothergrief. Thank you, Clove, thank you, Alma, & most importantly, thank you, Chelsea.

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