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Catherine Hollis

NonfictionMemoir

An all-too-common nightmare

Review by Catherine Hollis

Kelly Sundberg’s memoir of domestic violence brilliantly records the shock, physical and emotional pain and, perhaps most poignantly, the confusion of abuse. The same man who could proclaim his love for Sundberg and their young child was also capable of verbally and physically assaulting her.

As a young woman, Sundberg longed for safety, and she found it with her warm, funny husband, Caleb. But eventually, he became the man most likely to kill her as cycles of abuse, regret and reconciliation became shorter and more intense. This confusing experience (sometimes called “gaslighting”) is one reason why women stay with their abusers, especially if they have become isolated from friends and family.

Because of its subject matter, Goodbye, Sweet Girl: A Story of Domestic Violence and Survival might seem difficult to read, but Sundberg’s crystalline prose and insightful narration lighten the reading experience. Sundberg captures the slow, terrifying evolution of her relationship: how a few red flags and a frightening episode of rage snowballed into brutal physical violence. She is careful (maybe too careful?) to balance her portrait of Caleb’s abuse with his good qualities, and she does not engage in self-pity. She provides an important record of how anyone could find themselves in an abusive relationship and lends understanding to the reasons they stay—and how and why she eventually left.

Sundberg’s story is haunting, propulsive and, perhaps for some readers, familiar. Her wrenching memoir deserves to be read by a wide audience so that we can all learn to recognize the signs of domestic abuse.

But Sundberg is also a talented writer with many more stories to tell: about her childhood in Salmon, Idaho, her experiences as a forest ranger and her difficult relationship with her mother. These narratives, hinted at throughout Goodbye, Sweet Girl, suggest a rich terrain of material for Sundberg to mine in future stories. I, for one, look forward to hearing more from her.

 

This article was originally published in the June 2018 issue of BookPage. Download the entire issue for the Kindle or Nook.

Kelly Sundberg’s memoir of domestic violence brilliantly records the shock, physical and emotional pain and, perhaps most poignantly, the confusion of abuse. The same man who could proclaim his love for Sundberg and their young child was also capable of verbally and physically assaulting her.

NonfictionTrue Crime

The corruption of Lake County

Review by Catherine Hollis

Pulitzer Prize-winning author Gilbert King returns to Lake County, Florida, in Beneath a Ruthless Sun, a tense and stunning true-crime read. As in Devil in the Grove, his previous exposé of the corruption and racial injustice carried out by the Lake County Sheriff’s Department, King’s exhaustive reporting details the frightening chokehold white supremacists had over a Florida agricultural town in the very recent past.

In Devil in the Grove, King detailed the perversion of justice in the case of four young black men falsely accused of raping a white woman in 1949. The “devil” in that book was Sheriff Willis McCall, who used violence, intimidation, false evidence and murder to frame the so-called “Groveland Four.” King’s painstaking research into that case opened his eyes to a different case in 1957, when a white woman stated that she was raped by a black man. This prompted more brutal racial profiling by McCall’s office. However, the rape was ultimately pinned on Jesse Daniels, a white, mentally disabled 19-year-old. Daniels, known as “the boy on the bike,” was taken from his mother’s house and sent to the state’s notorious mental institution for 14 long years while his case was appealed. Crusading journalist Mabel Norris Reese emerges as one of the heroes of this story, a woman who braved violent intimidation from Sheriff McCall and his cohort to report on the story.

In Beneath a Ruthless Sun, King picks up where Reese left off, brilliantly investigating the deep-seated corruption in Lake County. His book’s taut focus on a single case also shines a light onto larger issues of racial profiling, police corruption and the condition of Florida’s mental institutions.

 

This article was originally published in the May 2018 issue of BookPage. Download the entire issue for the Kindle or Nook.

Pulitzer Prize-winning author Gilbert King returns to Lake County, Florida, in Beneath a Ruthless Sun, a tense and stunning true-crime read. As in Devil in the Grove, his previous exposé of the corruption and racial injustice carried out by the Lake County Sheriff’s Department, King’s exhaustive reporting details the frightening chokehold white supremacists had over a Florida agricultural town in the very recent past.

NonfictionMemoir

Reflecting on a haunted past

Review by Catherine Hollis

BookPage Top Pick in Nonfiction, February 2018

This stunning, poetic memoir from Terese Marie Mailhot burns like hot coal. I read it in a single feverish session, completely absorbed and transported by Mailhot’s powerful and original voice. Mailhot’s story—which extends from an impoverished childhood on the Seabird Island Indian Reservation in British Columbia through foster care, teenage motherhood and mental illness—could seem a painful litany of misfortune were it not for the transformative alchemy of her art.

Sherman Alexie, in his introduction to this memoir, calls Heart Berries “an Iliad for the indigenous,” and recognizes Mailhot as a striking new voice in First Nation writing. The strength of her writing comes from Mailhot’s fearless embrace of emotional darkness and in her depiction of the psychic cost of living in a white man’s world. For example, after Mailhot’s mother has an intense epistolary love affair with convicted murderer Salvador Agron, her words and memories are used by the musician Paul Simon for his musical The Capeman, in which her character is reduced to an “Indian hippie chick.” Mailhot herself falls in precipitous love with her writing teacher, a passion that initially lands her in a mental ward.

Although diagnosed with bipolar II, post-traumatic stress disorder and an eating disorder, Mailhot links her illness to something she calls “Indian sick,” which is as historical as it is individual. There is “something feminine and ancestral” in her illness, which requires an acknowledgment of the generational trauma of First Nation people. Storytelling, Mailhot feels, is a first step toward healing both the individual and her people.

Situating her physical and psychic pain in context with a multigenerational focus, Mailhot crafts an intensely moving story about mothers and what they pass down to their children.

 

This article was originally published in the February 2018 issue of BookPage. Download the entire issue for the Kindle or Nook.

This stunning, poetic memoir from Terese Marie Mailhot burns like hot coal. I read it in a single feverish session, completely absorbed and transported by Mailhot’s powerful and original voice. Mailhot’s story—which extends from an impoverished childhood on the Seabird Island Indian Reservation in British Columbia through foster care, teenage motherhood and mental illness—could seem a painful litany of misfortune were it not for the transformative alchemy of her art.

NonfictionBiography

An incredible story of survival

Review by Catherine Hollis

As a connoisseur of memoir, I thought I had read it all: stunningly dysfunctional families, toxic relationships, addictions. But I have never read a memoir as terrifying as Maude Julien’s The Only Girl in the World. Newly translated into English, this is the must-read memoir of the season for those who, like me, have read them all.

Today Julien is a French psychotherapist specializing in patients who are recovering from extreme psychological and behavioral control, such as cult victims. Julien had the misfortune of being born to a completely unhinged father who was able to disguise his insanity from the outside world. A high-ranking Freemason, he believed that his daughter would become a “supreme being” as long as she was raised under his control in complete isolation.

Julien’s father had previously adopted, raised and “trained” her mother, and he turned their remote château in the French countryside into a chamber of horrors. As a child, Julien was introduced to unthinkable trials designed to toughen her up: meditations on death in a rat-infested cellar, being forced to hold onto an electric fence. Written in a childlike first-person voice, this memoir brings to life Julien’s horrifying experiences and her subtle rebellions against her parents as she refuses to be broken. The reader, too, is trapped and riveted by her story. An epilogue, written from her adult perspective, explains Julien’s theory of the cultlike psychological and behavioral control she was subjected to, and how it continues to shape her dreams and fears. This is a truly fascinating and intense read, and highly recommended.

 

This article was originally published in the December 2017 issue of BookPage. Download the entire issue for the Kindle or Nook.

As a connoisseur of memoir, I thought I had read it all: stunningly dysfunctional families, toxic relationships, addictions. But I have never read a memoir as terrifying as Maude Julien’s The Only Girl in the World. Newly translated into English, this is the must-read memoir of the season for those who, like me, have read them all.

NonfictionHistory

Marriage most royal

Review by Catherine Hollis

In her latest book, celebrated writer and BBC producer Deborah Cadbury (of the chocolate family) turns her attention to the final years of the Victorian era. Although Queen Victoria remained in mourning for her beloved husband, Prince Albert, from his untimely death in 1861 until her own death in 1901, her 42 grandchildren kept her extremely busy in the last few decades of her long reign. Finding appropriate spouses for them all was more than a mere family matter: The fate of European stability hung in the balance.

The plan, inspired by Prince Albert, was to export Britain’s constitutional monarchy throughout Europe by marrying British royalty into the various royal lines of Europe: Denmark, Prussia and Russia. If only the royals were so obedient! While some of Queen Victoria’s children and grandchildren were pliable (especially Vicky, her oldest daughter), others (like naughty Bertie and his children) were less so. Readers will need a scorecard to keep up with them all, but rest assured, there will be mistresses, euphemisms for sexually transmitted infections (poor Eddie’s “gout”) and general disobedience.

Queen Victoria’s Matchmaking is targeted at royal-watchers and viewers of BBC’s great biopic television series “Victoria.” It may also interest readers of the “what-if” school of history. What if Princess Vicky’s husband, Frederick, had lived to become the Emperor of Prussia? Would his liberal values have united Britain and Germany and forestalled the wars of the 20th century?

Ultimately, however, this is a rich history of Queen Victoria’s canny use of political power. ­“Grandmama’s” interest in the marriages of her children and grandchildren goes far beyond a doting mother’s dedication to her family: Matchmaking had the power to make and break empires—if only those being matched would do as they were told.

 

This article was originally published in the November 2017 issue of BookPage. Download the entire issue for the Kindle or Nook.

In her latest book, celebrated writer and BBC producer Deborah Cadbury (of the chocolate family) turns her attention to the final years of the Victorian era. Queen Victoria's 42 grandchildren kept her extremely busy in the last few decades of her long reign. Finding appropriate spouses for them all was more than a mere family matter: The fate of European stability hung in the balance.

History

The Templars

Review by Catherine Hollis

The mythical Knights Templar pervade popular culture: from the video game Assassin’s Creed to The Da Vinci Code and Game of Thrones. Warriors who lived like monks, the Templars have been inspiring legends from the time of their founding in the 11th century. In his new book, bestselling author Dan Jones aims to unpack the myths to get at the history of the Knights Templar.

The Templars were an order of Christian soldiers founded in 1119 to support the Crusades in the Middle East. Then, as now, the city of Jerusalem was both a site for religious pilgrimage and violent political dispute. Sponsored by the Catholic Church, the Crusades were in essence religious wars between Christian and Muslim armies for control of the Holy Land. Despite their vows of poverty and chastity, the Templars soon amassed great wealth, and during the two centuries of their greatest influence controlled much of the economic infrastructure of Europe. Their spectacular rise and fall as soldiers and bankers is the focus of Dan Jones’ carefully written and researched book.

The Templars exemplified the idea of militant Christianity, of the sword rather than the word. Dan Jones makes this the starting point of his narrative, emphasizing the Church-sanctioned violence of the era. This makes for sometimes-uncomfortable reading. It’s fun to read rollicking fiction about the Templars as defenders of the Holy Grail, but it’s sobering to read history about Christians killing in the name of God. Indeed, the Norwegian fascist Anders Breivik—who killed 77 people in an act of domestic terrorism in 2011— claimed to be part of a contemporary order of the Knights Templar.

The violent fanaticism lurking behind the image of the Knights Templar is an important reason for getting their story as historically accurate as possible. Dan Jones accomplishes this goal and more with The Templars.

In his new book, bestselling author Dan Jones aims to unpack the myths to get at the history of the Knights Templar.
NonfictionMemoir

True confessions

Review by Catherine Hollis

The work Cree LeFavour has done—in therapy and in this stunning new memoir—rebuilds a damaged and fragmented self. But for most of Lights On, Rats Out, the reader races forward, worried that LeFavour and her therapist, called Dr. Kohl here, won’t be able to stop her self-destruction. Her chosen weapon is cigarettes, using them to inflict third-degree burns on her own body.

After a childhood in the hippie bohemia of Woody Park, Colorado, a post-college LeFavour pretends she’s just fine, despite the fact that her father abandoned the family to open a fabulous Napa Valley restaurant, leaving LeFavour and her sister in the alcoholic neglect of their mother. Living alone by age 13, she’s exposed to the over-sexualized 1970s without parental guidance. In her early 20s, LeFavour’s careful facade begins to crack: Isolation, binge eating and long hours of reading no longer keep her safe from her psychological demons.

Entering therapy with Dr. Kohl, LeFavour initially spirals into the compulsive rituals of self-harm. An institutionalization—vividly portrayed here—doesn’t appear to help. What does help, however, are the careful boundaries Dr. Kohl helps LeFavour gradually draw around herself. LeFavour’s portrayal of the dramatic exchanges between herself and Dr. Kohl is the best literary depiction of psychological transference I have ever read, including Freud’s Dora.

If all this sounds dramatic and intense, it is—and perhaps this memoir, with literary antecedents in Henry James and Sylvia Plath, isn’t for everyone. But LeFavour’s wry humor and whip-smart, bookish references create a brilliant portrait of a certain kind of young American: intelligent, sensitive and wounded.

 

This article was originally published in the August 2017 issue of BookPage. Download the entire issue for the Kindle or Nook.

The work Cree LeFavour has done—in therapy and in this stunning new memoir—rebuilds a damaged and fragmented self.

NonfictionMemoir

Recovery after a devastating betrayal

Review by Catherine Hollis

Jen Waite’s memoir of betrayal and infidelity has hit a cultural nerve. Offering up every woman’s nightmare, A Beautiful, Terrible Thing expands on the story Waite originally offered in viral blog posts: While she was in labor with her daughter, her husband was on the phone with his girlfriend. When she fled to her parents’ house in Maine to recover from the birth, her husband checked out new apartments with the woman Waite calls “Croella.” When she confronted her husband, he denied it all. And then, as Waite obsessively checked her husband’s email, phone records and social media, she discovered that he’d been a womanizing, pathological liar all along.

Waite’s full-length memoir is like a car crash the reader can’t look away from. Yes, the husband is on the psychopathic spectrum; yes, he is incapable of empathy; and yes, he is a “bad man.” But this reader, at least, longed for a little more self-reflection on the part of the narrator. Her obsessive rifling through her husband’s email and phone records, Uber receipts and Netflix movies, is unhealthy and compulsive at the very least.

Waite’s marriage only occurred in 2014, so this is still fresh material. One wonders how she will continue to process this frightening story in the fullness of time. The resolution here indicates that Waite is now in training to become a therapist specializing in recovery from abusive relationships. Suspenseful and gripping, A Beautiful, Terrible Thing documents the dynamics of an abusive marriage and is sure to spark important conversations.

Jen Waite’s memoir of betrayal and infidelity has hit a cultural nerve. Offering up every woman’s nightmare, A Beautiful, Terrible Thing expands on the story Waite originally offered in viral blog posts: While she was in labor with her daughter, her husband was on the phone with his girlfriend. When she fled to her parents’ house in Maine to recover from the birth, her husband checked out new apartments with the woman Waite calls “Croella.” When she confronted her husband, he denied it all.

NonfictionMedicineHistory

Darkness in light

Review by Catherine Hollis

Written with the taut pacing of a novel, Kate Moore’s The Radium Girls tells the horrifying true story of the young women who worked in radium dial factories in the 1920s and ’30s. Using radium dusted paint to create glow-in-the-dark numbers on watch faces, the “shining girls” became luminous themselves, their clothing and hair dusted with a deadly mist of the toxic poison. Discovered in 1898 by the Curies, radium was seen in the early decades of the 20th century as a wonderful discovery. Radium was used to treat cancerous tumors, and people ingested radium pills for good health.

Hundreds of young women in New Jersey and Illinois found employment as watch dial painters in factories where they used boar bristle brushes, licked to a fine point, to coat the tiny numbers with radium paint: “Lip … Dip … Paint,” in Kate Moore’s haunting refrain. Radium’s half-life of 1600 years and its ability to mimic calcium and target bones meant that it took several years before horrific ailments snuck up on the employees. Many young women lost teeth, parts of their jawbones and their lives before anyone began to connect their illnesses with their employment.

Moore’s extensive research into the individual life stories of these doomed women brings their struggle to achieve justice heartbreakingly to life. Despite clear evidence that radium was the cause of their deaths, the corporations buried evidence and refused to pay compensation to their grieving families. It took 15 years, and the dramatic bedside testimony of a dying woman, for the “Society of the Living Dead” to win their court case and institute federal regulations for the safe handling of radium. Their incredible story, beautifully told by Kate Moore, is sure to incite equal parts compassion and horror in the reader.

Written with the taut pacing of a novel, Kate Moore’s The Radium Girls tells the horrifying true story of the young women who worked in radium dial factories in the 1920s and ’30s. Using radium dusted paint to create glow-in-the-dark numbers on watch faces, the “shining girls” became luminous themselves, their clothing and hair dusted with a deadly mist of the toxic poison.
NonfictionMemoir

A revolutionary childhood

Review by Catherine Hollis

BookPage Top Pick in Nonfiction, April 2017

Peter Andreas’ enthralling new memoir describes growing up on the lam with his Marxist revolutionary mother. In a childhood only the American counterculture could create, young Peter and his mother flee the bland suburbs of Kansas for new horizons: a hippie commune in Berkeley, a socialist farm in Allende’s Chile and collective living in Peru. Writing with candor and sincerity, Andreas—now an international studies professor at Brown University—creates an unforgettable portrait of a remarkable woman.

Born into a Mennonite family in central Kansas, Carol Andreas grew up questioning the strictures of her community. On her wedding day at 17, she suddenly balked and told her husband-to-be that she didn’t know if she believed in monogamy. Despite going through with the marriage, Carol’s years as a 1950s housewife quickly came to an end once she began studying for a Ph.D. in sociology and became involved with 1960s political activism. Subject to the increasingly repressive countermoves of her husband, Carol kidnapped Peter from school in 1969, taking off with him and his two older brothers for Berkeley and freedom. For the next decade, Peter and Carol would travel throughout Latin America, while Carol wrote books about their experiences.

Peter’s father never gave up trying to regain custody of him, and the emotional heart of this story is the tension between young Peter’s loyalty to his mother and his desire for the domestic stability (cereal and Saturday morning cartoons) of his father. The great achievement of Rebel Mother: My Childhood Chasing the Revolution emerges from the balance and respect with which adult Peter portrays the conflict between his parents. Written with the aid of Carol’s extensive diaries (found after her death), Rebel Mother offers a sympathetic and fascinating glimpse into the life of a radical woman, a tumultuous era and a sensitive young man’s coming of age.

This article was originally published in the April 2017 issue of BookPage. Download the entire issue for the Kindle or Nook.

Peter Andreas’ enthralling new memoir describes growing up on the lam with his Marxist revolutionary mother. In a childhood only the American counterculture could create, young Peter and his mother flee the bland suburbs of Kansas for new horizons: a hippie commune in Berkeley, a socialist farm in Allende’s Chile and collective living in Peru. Writing with candor and sincerity, Andreas—now an international studies professor at Brown University—creates an unforgettable portrait of a remarkable woman.

NonfictionBiography

Poetic highs and lows

Review by Catherine Hollis

Robert Lowell’s poetic imagination emerged from the extremes of New England’s weather, its frozen winters and fiery summers. Similarly, his temperament reflected the seasonal extremes of “passivity and wildness” in the depression and mania that afflicted him throughout his life. Scion of an old New England family with a history of mental illness, Lowell was able to transform his illness into art, becoming one of the 20th century’s most significant American poets. In her new book, Kay Redfield Jamison, author of An Unquiet Mind, brings her medical and personal experience of bipolar disorder to bear on the entwining of Lowell’s poetry and psychology. 

Robert Lowell, Setting the River on Fire: A Study of Genius, Mania, and Character is a compelling and intuitive account of his life and poetry against the backdrop of repeated hospitalizations for mania. Much of Lowell’s -poetry—including important poems like “For the Union Dead” and the collection Life Studies—emerged from a fertile “hypomanic” state, when an elevated mood and quickened mind helped the poems spill out onto the page. As Jamison discusses, many other artists have shared this combination of genius, creativity and illness. But Jamison, who received unprecedented access to Lowell’s medical records, doesn’t glamorize or trivialize the experience of mania or the havoc it caused Lowell’s family and friends.

The poet’s nearly annual hospitalizations were finally slowed late in the 1960s, after lithium was introduced as a treatment for bipolar disorder. The medication gave him a stability he’d never experienced before. But would the same medication have altered his poetry had it been available sooner?

Jamison has been studying the complex relationship between brain chemistry and creativity throughout her career; in Lowell, she has found her ideal subject.

This article was originally published in the March 2017 issue of BookPage. Download the entire issue for the Kindle or Nook.

Robert Lowell’s poetic imagination emerged from the extremes of New England’s weather, its frozen winters and fiery summers. Similarly, his temperament reflected the seasonal extremes of “passivity and wildness” in the depression and mania that afflicted him throughout his life. Scion of an old New England family with a history of mental illness, Lowell was able to transform his illness into art, becoming one of the 20th century’s most significant American poets. In her new book, Kay Redfield Jamison, author of An Unquiet Mind, brings her medical and personal experience of bipolar disorder to bear on the entwining of Lowell’s poetry and psychology. 

NonfictionBiography

The life of Emma Jung

Review by Catherine Hollis

A biography of Emma Jung is by necessity also a biography of her husband, famed psychoanalyst Carl Jung. By placing the focus on Emma, however, Catrine Clay comes up with a fresh and compelling take on the story of Jung’s relationship with Freud and the early days of psychoanalysis.

Wealthy, educated Emma refused Carl when the penniless doctor first proposed, but with her mother’s encouragement, Carl asked and was accepted the second time around. In part, the attraction was intellectual: At the time, an educated woman was more likely to find mental satisfaction in her husband than through her own career. And Carl’s work as a resident doctor at Burghölzli, an asylum treating patients with a range of mental illnesses, was certainly fascinating. While Emma may have hoped to help Carl with his work, pregnancy and domestic cares soon preoccupied her. 

The young couple traveled to Vienna to meet Carl’s hero, the eminent Dr. Sigmund Freud, and the two men developed an intense attachment that was to shape the developing field of psychoanalysis until their infamous split a decade later. Here Emma also discovered Carl’s predisposition to infatuation with smart women. Throughout their marriage, Emma would have to grapple with the numerous frustrated, intelligent women who clustered around her husband, ultimately accepting one of them, Toni Wolff, into the household. 

Labyrinths does a fine job portraying the tightrope Emma walked to manage her husband’s health. Carl was haunted by a “second self,” an emanation from his unconscious that heard voices and saw visions. As much as Emma struggled with her husband’s flirtatiousness, she was also integral to his well-being, and they succeeded in building a long and solid marriage. Perhaps most happily, once her children were grown, Emma was able to write psychological essays, finally stepping into the limelight on her own.

 

This article was originally published in the November 2016 issue of BookPage. Download the entire issue for the Kindle or Nook.

A biography of Emma Jung is by necessity also a biography of her husband, famed psychoanalyst Carl Jung. By placing the focus on Emma, however, Catrine Clay comes up with a fresh and compelling take on the story of Jung’s relationship with Freud and the early days of psychoanalysis.
NonfictionMemoir

A marriage’s dark demise inside a cursed castle

Review by Catherine Hollis

Written with the taut urgency of a thriller, Danielle Trussoni’s memoir of the disintegration of her marriage is flat-out terrifying. Author of the bestselling novels Angelology and Angelopolis, as well as an award-winning memoir about her Vietnam-vet father, Trussoni turns her unique gaze in The Fortress to the dark heart of romance. Only she could write a memoir about a failed marriage that also includes black magic, Communist Bulgaria, the Knights Templar, ghosts and Provence. 

When Trussoni meets Nikolai at the Iowa Writer’s Workshop, the passion is intense, immediate and transformative. Soon the smoldering Bulgarian on a limited student visa is living in her apartment, eating her food and telling her that they have spent lifetimes looking for each other. He must be with her—which is why she ends up moving to Bulgaria with him when his visa expires. That, and the fact that she’s pregnant. Ignoring the persistent red flags in Nikolai’s behavior, she finds herself living in Eastern Europe for two years and giving birth in a stark Communist-era hospital. 

The relationship is good until it isn’t, but a major contributing factor is Nikolai’s volatile mental state. After selling her first novel, Trussoni moves the family to the South of France into a 13th-century fortress used by the Knights Templar. Her depiction of the psychological terrors of Nikolai’s unraveling mind set against the occult history of their remote castle is reminiscent of The Shining, down to the ghostly apparitions and nightmares they each suffer. By the time Trussoni discovers the Tibetan death threats Nikolai has carved into a doorframe, her fear is palpable and the suspense unrelenting. 

While The Fortress reads like a horror novel, its raw power comes from the hard-won emotional clarity Trussoni brings to her own role in the creation and dissolution of this marriage from hell.

 

This article was originally published in the October 2016 issue of BookPage. Download the entire issue for the Kindle or Nook.

Written with the taut urgency of a thriller, Danielle Trussoni’s memoir of the disintegration of her marriage is flat-out terrifying.

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