On Fri, 7 Nov 1997, Lori Schroeter wrote:
> Susan,
>
> What was the plot of your book? I read a feminist ghost story about
> child abuse once and it made quite an impression on me. I wonder if
> they are one and the same? The story I recall was (I believe) about a
> lesbian woman living in a suburban area.
>
> ---Lori
>
Mine's about a straight woman who's married, has a young daughter, and is
remembering how her father molested her when she was twelve; to escape the
abuse, she had out-of-body adventures, during one of which she met the
ghost of her sister, who died before the protagonist was born and who'd
always been held up as the "perfect" child by the rest of the family.
Most of the book is about the developing relationship between the two
sisters.
If you remember the title of the book you're recalling, please let me
know. I'm interested in how "fantastic" elements in abuse/trauma
narratives help communicate the "untellability" of the tale, the
difficulty of narrating it in any way that will make sense in the everyday
world. Someday I want to teach a course on sf/f about historical
trauma (Ryman's "The Unconquered Country," Willis' "Fire Watch," Yolen's
"The Devil's Arithmetic," etc.). The course would address the question,
"Why write fantastical narratives about events of which we have historical
accounts?", and the way in which fantasy and science fiction help
communicate the experience of *strangeness* is, I think, at the heart of
the answer to that question. People living in Auschwitz or in Cambodia
under Pol Pot might just as well have been living on another planet, for
all the good conventional language will do at making us feel what it
meant to be there. So in some ways, fantasy and SF are better at certain
kinds of "realism" than realism itself is.
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