Madwoman

Madwoman (2024) by American author Chelsea Bieker tells the story of Clove, a woman who can no longer keep the demons of her past locked away after she receives a letter from her estranged mother, who has spent decades in prison for killing Clove’s father. It explores themes including Intergenerational Patterns of Female Survival, The Struggle for Personal Identity Amid Trauma, and The Commodification of Safety.

This guide refers to the 2024 Kindle edition.

Content Warning: The source material and guide feature depictions of death, graphic violence, sexual violence and harassment, child abuse, physical abuse, emotional abuse, suicidal ideation, mental illness, addiction, substance use, gender discrimination, sexual content, and cursing.

Language Note: Bieker uses “madwoman” in the novel’s title. This outdated and offensive term historically referred to a woman with a mental illness. Previously, the derogatory term was also used to refer to women deemed “out of control” or who deviated from traditional norms and societal expectations. 

Plot Summary

The novel opens with a first-person letter from a daughter to her imprisoned mother. The narrator, who now goes by the name Clove, lives with her husband and two children, seven-year-old Nova and three-year-old Lark, in an upscale suburb. Her carefully constructed life includes thousands of dollars in credit card debt from compulsive spending on supplements and clothing, which she conceals from her husband through lies and a secret PO box. While retrieving packages from it with her children, she receives an unexpected letter from her mother, who is serving a life sentence for murdering Clove’s father, a fact that Clove hides from her family.

The day that Clove receives the letter coincides with Lark beginning to wean and Nova starting summer vacation, both of which are causing Clove immense stress. The letter reveals that a lawyer has taken her mother’s case and discovered that Clove is still alive. The lawyer requests Clove’s testimony for a clemency hearing, citing her father’s abuse as grounds for her mother’s defense. This unexpected development triggers deep panic in Clove, who begins experiencing insomnia and irrational fears about her children’s safety. This leads her to dispose of potentially dangerous items like medications and batteries from their home.

As the narrative unfolds, Bieker reveals that Clove, originally named Calla, grew up with a violent and abusive father. During her childhood, her father regularly physically assaulted her mother, who developed an obsession with buying bottled water as protective objects. During one incident, when her father was on pain medication for an injured finger, he discovered this obsession and threw the water from their shopping cart. The next day, her mother found a bottle by her bedside, which she interpreted as a sign of love despite the abuse. Over the years, Clove’s father isolated her mother from her career, friends, and family, regularly inflicting physical abuse that left visible bruises, broken bones, and permanent injuries.

When Clove was 10, her father moved the family to a high-rise apartment on the Hawaiian coast. Clove and her mother initially felt hopeful about the move, believing that the change might improve their situation. In Hawaii, Clove’s mother befriended a neighbor named Christina and her immunocompromised daughter, Celine. The two families became close, with Christina often criticizing Clove’s mother for staying with her abusive husband. Christina and Celine became confidants for Clove and her mother, providing them with emotional support and advice about potential escape.

The abuse escalated in Hawaii. Clove’s father inflicted multiple broken bones and a ruptured bowel on her mother. He began threatening to kill the whole family by throwing them from the balcony, along with himself. Before his death, he attended what he thought was an Anger Management meeting but was actually a Battered Men’s group. His lies about Clove’s mother’s treatment of him would later be used against her in court. After a particularly severe incident that left her mother hospitalized, Clove and her mother attempted to escape. A friend helped them reach a safe house on the North Shore, where they spent a week watching movies and preparing for their departure. During this time, Clove’s mother encouraged her to remember her father’s good qualities, though Clove was already working to distance herself from these memories. Eventually, Clove’s father discovered where they were hiding, shot through the glass door with a shotgun, and forced them back home at gunpoint, destroying their plane tickets in the process.

Weeks later, Clove’s father took her swimming far out in the ocean, where he threatened to drown her after discovering her notebook containing escape plans. Following this event, at her mother’s employee barbecue, Clove’s father’s coworker sexually assaulted her in a bathroom stall. She defended herself with a broken bottle, only to discover that her parents had left without her, forcing her to take two buses home alone. That same night, her mother ended up in the hospital after one of her father’s beatings.

On the night of her father’s death, Clove awoke to find her parents arguing on the balcony. Her father was threatening to throw her mother from the ledge and then die by suicide. During the ensuing struggle, Clove attempted to pull her father away from her mother, causing him to fall over the railing to his death. While her mother ran down 33 flights of stairs to her father’s body, Clove fled. With Christina’s help, she obtained a plane ticket to San Francisco. Christina also gave Clove Celine’s identification documents so that Clove could assume Celine’s identity and not be traced. Over the years, Clove repressed the memory of her role in her father’s death, instead internalizing the state’s narrative that her mother had murdered her father.

In San Francisco, Clove found refuge with a woman named Velvet, a specialist in helping girls disappear from abusive situations. She lived at Velvet’s for six months, participating in household chores and learning survival skills like dumpster diving for food. Despite food being available in the house, Clove’s trauma led her to avoid taking it, fearing punishment as her father would have inflicted. During this time, Clove received a letter from Christina informing her of Celine’s death from her immune disorder and Christina’s plan to die by suicide, which Christina then appeared to go through with.

Velvet helped Clove secure a job at a grocery store in the butcher department. At the grocery store, Clove developed a relationship with the butcher, who provided her with housing when she turned 18. They lived together for nearly a year, during which Clove experienced her first healthy romantic relationship. However, she began to resent his pity and developed aspirations for a more upscale life, becoming interested in supplements, clean living, and expensive brands. She secretly obtained her GED and applied to colleges, eventually fleeing without explanation to attend a university in Oregon.

In her new life, Clove married a man she chose for his lack of curiosity about her past. She selected him because of his stable family life and his willingness to abstain from drinking alcohol in her presence. They built a life together and had two children. Clove maintained elaborate systems of lies to protect her secrets, including bribing the mailwoman to intercept any letters from the prison.

In the present timeline, while dealing with the emergence of her past through her mother’s letter, Clove meets a woman named Jane after a minor car accident. They begin working together at a grocery store called Earthside, where Jane reveals her past as an escort. Their friendship deepens when Clove invites Jane to live with her family as a nanny, initially agreeing to serve as a surrogate mother for Jane in exchange. The arrangement creates conflict with Clove’s mother-in-law, Tootsie, who discovers Clove’s letters and threatens to expose her secrets.

The situation grows complex when Jane appears to know more about Clove’s past than she should, culminating in her telling Nova about her imprisoned grandmother. After Clove contacts the butcher, who reveals her drunken confession about doubts regarding her mother’s guilt, another truth emerges: Jane is actually Celine, having undergone plastic surgery and identity changes. Christina had been poisoning Celine to keep her isolated and dependent, leading Celine to poison her mother in retaliation before disappearing.

The revelation leads to Jane taking Clove’s children to visit their grandmother in prison without permission. At Chowchilla, Jane reveals that she has been the “feminist lawyer” mentioned in the original letter and has known Clove’s whereabouts all along. Clove had been using Jane/Celine’s social security number for her new identity. In a hotel room near the prison, Jane convinces Clove to write a story that will help free her mother. Clove, Jane, and Clove’s husband start to work together to free Clove’s mother from prison. They craft a strategic narrative claiming that Christina intervened in the fight between Clove’s parents, leading to her father’s death. This version allows Clove to maintain her current life while helping her mother. They share this story on Instagram; it goes viral. Despite the revelations about his wife’s past, Clove’s husband wants to work through their issues together. Clove promises to reconnect with her mother and see the ocean with her again, suggesting a possibility for reconciliation.