Kate's husband threatened to kill her, but even that wasn't enough for her to leave him; why do we stay in loveless, even dangerous, marriages? And what do we need to understand about these relationships to prevent them from happening in the future?
Following the #MeToo movement, Kate Hamilton notes that there still hasn't been enough discussion about nonconsensual sex in marriage, it's still condoned and even encouraged. She writes, "One of the most damaging effects of our cultural sanctification of marriage is how it trumps all other ethical matters."
Her memoir opens with a dramatic stakes-setting scene in which the author's husband threatens to kill her over an affair she is having. Kate's strong narrative instinct guides us from there back into her personal history and deftly traces the complicated journey from unhappy wife to gaslit victim to furious feminist with a whole new goal: to show others how and why this can happen.
Kate is an English professor with a background in feminist scholarship. Nevertheless, her upbringing in a relatively conservative family combined with the social pressure we all feel to make a marriage work regardless of the personal sacrifices caused her to remain trapped in a loveless and increasingly abusive marriage for years. Kate includes transcripts of police visits to their home and court records from their divorce case to demonstrate the way her own story was twisted to better suit patriarchal narratives. Her memoir aims to shed light on the systems and social norms that reinforce her impulse to stay in spite of her husband's increasingly violent behavior.
