Madwoman

Content Warning: This section of the guide includes discussion of death, child abuse, physical abuse, emotional abuse, suicidal ideation, and mental illness. 

Madwoman begins as a first-person letter, addressed from a daughter to her mother. She tells her mother about her children, seven-year-old Nova and three-year-old Lark, and sorts through her memories of her mother, which include her mother’s obsession with buying plastic bottles of water. The daughter claims to understand this, saying that “it was easier to fixate on small externals than address the fact that [they] did not know if [they] would live to see the next day” (4).

She also considers a memory of her father during a time when he was on pain pills following an injury to his finger. When they brought her father to the store, he intuited her mother’s obsession with bottled water, and the narrator says that her father “was slowed down, but not as much as [her mother had] estimated” because he threw the water out of the cart and snarled abuse at the narrator’s mother (4). The next day, the narrator’s mother discovered a bottle of water by her bedside, which she took as proof that her abusive husband loved her.