Goodbye, Sweet Girl
A Story of Domestic Violence and Survival
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4.3 • 29 Ratings
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- $13.99
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- $13.99
Publisher Description
"Stunning . . . . This is an immensely courageous story that will break your heart, leave you in tears, and, finally, offer hope and redemption. Brava, Kelly Sundberg." —Rene Denfeld, author of The Child Finder
In this brave and beautiful memoir, written with the raw honesty and devastating openness of The Glass Castle and The Liar’s Club, a woman chronicles how her marriage devolved from a love story into a shocking tale of abuse—examining 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. "I’m sorry."
Kelly Sundberg’s 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 woman’s 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.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
In this powerful debut memoir, Sundberg delivers a harrowing account of an abusive marriage and how she left it. Upon getting pregnant at 26, Sundberg married her boyfriend, Caleb, and over the course of eight years, Caleb went from screaming at Sundberg to beating and choking her. In their early years, the couple lived in Idaho, finding joy in their son and sometimes each other, despite Caleb's fiery temper and Sundberg's bouts of depression. Sundberg presents candid portraits of herself and Caleb as complicated people that transcend abuse stereotypes she is ambitious and outgoing, and her husband is sensitive and anxious. As Sundberg found professional success as a writer, Caleb, also a writer, felt threatened and the abuse intensified. Though they attended counseling and Caleb attempted sobriety, things got worse. When Caleb smashed a ceramic bowl into her foot, causing an injury Sundberg wasn't able to hide, she finally left him. After settling her divorce, Sundberg moved to Ohio with her son to begin a PhD program. Throughout the book, Sundberg contemplates a recurring question in the public discourse on domestic violence why women stay with abusive men (for example, that women might overvalue the sacredness of marriage). Sundberg cogently ties together the painful chain of events in her life and the personal growth that resulted from it.
