Member-only story
This Is How You Break a Woman
Note: This is the essay I carried and revised for seven years. It started as a story about childhood grief — but over time, it became something else. A reckoning. A release. A moment where I stopped writing from the wound and started writing through it.
It’s not clean or redemptive. It doesn’t tie anything up with a bow. But it’s the first piece in my new essay collection that finally feels done.
(TW: animal abuse/cruelty)
My mother hands him a sack with two kittens. Get rid of them, she says to the new man she’s dating. A man whom I’ll come to call my father. But right now, he stands in the kitchen. Quiet. Head bowed. Weak. He smells of hay and musk from the thoroughbred horses he breaks. He loves animals. He loves kittens. But he takes the sack in his hands and looks up at me. I open my mouth, but no sound comes out.
Years later, I’ll shout at him during an argument: you had a choice. His voice will crack when he snaps: It’s your mother. What choice did I have? And we’ll ride to the library, to the gondola in the garden where we’ll sit and eat our French fries because the idea of going home, being with her, in that house, was unimaginable. We would do anything to escape the fans that clipped the air year around. The rotten peach pies and empty beer cans under her bed.
