Mad Wife: A Memoir

Submitting to unwanted sex destroyed Kate’s love for her husband But she considered killing herself before she could imagine leaving In this electrifying literary memoir, Kate Hamilton deftly traces her complicated journey from loving wife to gaslit victim to furious feminist with an urgent goal: to expose how women are pressured to uphold the institutions of marriage and family, no matter the cost. In the tradition of Know My Name and The Argonauts , Hamilton braids her own story with cultural criticism to argue that we must face the misogyny lurking in the shadows of marriage in the 21st century. She examines the beliefs and conditioning that held her in an increasingly destructive marriage and unflinchingly documents what she did to keep her family together—therapy, unwanted sex with her husband, swinging, affairs, an abortion—without always knowing what she freely chose. And she considers the damage that was done, to herself and... Kates husband threatened to kill her, but even that wasnt 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 hasnt been enough discussion about nonconsensual sex in marriageits 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 authors husband threatens to kill her over an affair she is having. Kates 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 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 husbands increasingly violent behavior.