num_pages: 272
description: In this brave and beautiful memoir written with the raw honesty and devastating openness of The Glass Castle and The Liars Club a woman chronicles how her marriage devolved from a love story into a shocking tale of abuseexamining the tenderness and violence entwined in the relationship why she endured years of physical and emotional pain and how she eventually broke free.You made me hit you in the face he said mournfully. Now everyone is going to know. I know I said. Im sorry.Kelly Sundbergs husband Caleb was a funny warm supportive man and a wonderful father to their little boy Reed. He was also vengeful and violent. But Sundberg did not know that when she fell in love and for years told herself he would get better. It took a decade for her to ultimately accept that the partnership she desired could not work with such a broken man. In her remarkable book she offers an intimate record of the joys and terrors that accompanied her long difficult awakening and presents a haunting heartbreaking glimpse into why women remain too long in dangerous relationships.To understand herself and her violent marriage Sundberg looks to her childhood in Salmon a small isolated mountain community known as the most redneck town in Idaho. Like her marriage Salmon is a place of deep contradictions where Mormon ranchers and hippie back-to-landers live side-by-side; a place of magical beauty riven by secret brutality; a place that takes pride in its individualism and rugged self-sufficiency yet is beholden to church and communal standards at all costs.Mesmerizing and poetic Goodbye Sweet Girl is a harrowing cautionary and ultimately redemptive tale that brilliantly illuminates one womans transformation as she gradually rejects the painful reality of her violent life at the hands of the man who is supposed to cherish her begins to accept responsibility for herself and learns to believe that she deserves better.
language: English
title: Goodbye, Sweet Girl: A Story of Domestic Violence and Survival
publisher: Harper