Reviews with content warning for Domestic abuse - Stay and Fight

Reviews tagging 'Domestic abuse'

Stay and Fight by Madeline ffitch

3 reviews

ktkeps's review against another edition

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challenging emotional medium-paced

Plot- or character-driven? Character
Strong character development? It's complicated
Loveable characters? Yes
Diverse cast of characters? Yes
Flaws of characters a main focus? Yes

4.0

Content Warnings

3mmers's review

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challenging reflective sad slow-paced

Plot- or character-driven? Character
Strong character development? It's complicated
Loveable characters? It's complicated
Diverse cast of characters? Yes
Flaws of characters a main focus? Yes

3.5

In the right literary circles, you often hear about how hard or challenging books are hugely beneficial. Their upsetting content or presentation is used to disarm or to confront the reader with harsh realities or uncompromising characters. Stay and Fight by Madeline ffitch is very firmly this type of book. It was provocative. It was distressing. I’m having trouble expressing in words how viscerally it shook me. It caused me to turtle up reflexively from arguments I ostensibly agreed with, and it has taken me a lot of reflection to see the value in them after all. This is a book about independence, and true independence can be an unsympathetic thing. In Stay and Fight, true independence is about living in your own way even if others disapprove, whether or not those disapprovals are sympathetic. It is about having whatever personality you want, and not being made to change even if it gives others good reasons to dislike you. True independence means sacrificing many of the things others take for granted in order to live in an uncompromised way. It also hit me in a deeply personal place, and even though I’m now able to appreciate the merits of the novel a little more, I still feel deeply ambivalent about it. This review is going to be more of a personal reflection of the themes and messaging of Stay and Fight than of its mechanics.

Disenchanted Seattlite Helen migrates to rural Appalachia with her boyfriend and the romantic notion that they’ll buy land there and live pastorally off the grid. She is quickly disabused of both boyfriend and romantic notion of off-grid life, and turns to survival with the aggressive single-mindedness of a mother grizzly but none of the charm. She’s got the kind of terminal know-it-allness that only pacific north-westeners can develop. She recruits for the mission Karen and Lily, a lesbian couple who won’t be able to stay on their women-only commune after the birth of their son, Perley. Helen demands more than offers that they live with her on her land while raising their son. All three women are united by a non-conformist tendency, but that doesn’t mean they’re a natural team. Helen is aggressive and condescending, insisting on her way of doing things despite demonstrably less competency than the two locals. Karen is domineering and cold but also deeply insecure and passive-agressive. She only feels okay when receiving visibly preferential treatment. Lily is the youngest partner and the most passive. She casts herself as the peace keeper or scapegoat of the group rather than objecting to choices she dislikes. As a unit, they’re immensely dysfunctional, but they manage. They build a cabin and it is draughty and sinking on one side, but a home nonetheless. This far from the rest of the world they’re free to truly survive. Helen and Karen in particular finding fulfilment in the genuine battle for life. They forage, hunt small game, and collect road kill, surviving the winter on stockpiled acorns, sleeping side by side with the ubiquitous black snakes.

Spoiler

All is well until Perley, at age seven, insists on public school and the harsh eye of the wider world is turn on their unconventional lives. The wider world does not approve, not of their living situation, not of their diet, not of their relationships. Perley is removed by CPS and placed in a foster home unless the women can meet a seemingly insurmountable list of conditions. All three of them retreat into their bad habits. For Helen, it’s her stubbornness. Nothing was wrong with the way they were living and it was ridiculous of CPS to suggest otherwise. She wants to keep going on as before, as a show of principle. For Karen, it’s her insecurity. With her relationship to Perley challenged by the state, she withdraws further, leaving for the pipeline construction crews up north in an effort to make the money their little unit needs to get their kid back, not that she’d ever communicate that. For Lily, it’s her passivity. She slips into a depression slumber and emerges willing only to take the most extreme course of action, refusing the most realistic. Scattered to the winds, it is unclear whether this family can pull itself back together.

I’ve painted a pretty unflattering portrait of these characters, and it’s not unwarranted; they’re meant to be tough to be around with unsympathetic personalities. A big part of Stay and Fight’s message is that an unlikable personality doesn’t mean one is unjustified in their cause or their needs. The most discomforting part of these characters is how much I see myself in there. Reading this book was like looking into a mirror of my own most self-destructive tendencies. Like Helen, I know I can be way too stubborn and I have a compulsive need to be in the right. Helen compiles a ‘Best Practises Binder’ to record the most optimal technique for every aspect of off-grid live (how to skin a snake, how to empty a pit toilet) which none of the others consult because they don’t need a guide on the proper method for things they’ve been dong their whole lives. When I was a kid I had a best practises notebook too. Even as an adult is is almost physically painful for me to endure a person using the ‘incorrect’ procedure for something or doing things in a suboptimal way. Seriously, when my co-worker opens all her messages and chooses the easiest to respond to, rather than opening and completing them in order from least to most recent, i.e. the correct way, it drives me fucking insane. Like Karen, I know I can be way too insecure. I’m plagued by the certainty that barely anyone remembers me outside of immediate interactions. I also often misinterpret statements in their worst possible light and it makes me look like an absolute shithead. Rejection sensitivity makes me into my worst self. And these things are painful to read about! I talked about this a bit in my review of Thorn by Insitar Khanani, but while relatability can often make people feel seen or their experiences represented, sometimes it fucking sucks. I don’t like the parts of myself that are like these women. I wish I could get rid of them (I tried, and spent a good amount of money on therapy; it didn’t work that well). It’s uncomfortably and upsetting to sit with the worst parts of yourself and watch them do all the things you hate yourself for doing or are afraid you’ll do. I am once again running out of words to articulate this with.

With the power of distance and reflection I feel like I can now better appreciate why the characters are like this and what their abrasive personalities are meant to contribute.

Spoiler

Helen’s stubbornness is almost compulsive and influenced by a history of boyfriends steam rolling her preferences. It is the reaction to eternally being an odd duck, unable to really relate to any members of her family. It was Helen’s boyfriend’s idea to move to Appalachia at the beginning of the novel, and Helen’s commitment to survivalism after that is an assertion of independence in doing the thing that he told her she couldn’t. Karen is ultra-sensitive to rejection but she has good reason to be. As a butch woman from an undemonstrative family, she has had to be stoic her whole life, and her masculine lack of emotionality is paired with an equally masculine fear of rejection. Her relationship with Perley is seen as non-existent in the eyes of the law; she is an ‘unrelated adult’, not his mother.

Of course, abrasive and dysfunctional people exist everywhere — I’ve just spent the last paragraph talking about how unlikable I find myself to be — and a big part of Stay and Fight is that people don’t need to become perfect and good to deserve independence, freedom, their family.

Spoiler

At the end of the novel, everyone does manage to come home. Lily abandons her fantasies of righteously kidnapping Perley to make up for all the times she could have stood up to Karen and Helen but didn’t, and finds work arounds to really reach him during their visitations. Helen opens herself up to new possibilities and doing things for which she doesn’t know the best procedure. In the final scene, Karen gets the reunion with Perley that she feared letting herself dream of, where the two of them do share a special parental bond that goes beyond DNA.

They’re still deeply frustrating, but this novel is not so much about overcoming character flaws as it is about surviving adverse conditions.

The characters can be genuinely uncomfortable, but I started off with a softball to myself so I could warm up for the tougher topics.

Spoiler

When Perley is taken by the CPS, the state has a couple major reasons for his removal. One, that Perley is surrounded by too many ‘unrelated adults’ (Karen and Helen) and needs a conventional (straight) parental relationship, is easily unsympathetic. But the other, that the conditions he lives in were insufficient, trouble me. Perley is alone and often unsupervised. He is underweight. He interprets his world according to the cultural hierarchy of wolf-riding elves in his favourite fantasy comic series, the only fictional media he has ever encountered, which gives him a deeply twisted way of viewing his world. For example, ‘fun’ and ‘play’ are unimportant, there is only ‘duty’ and ‘preparation’. Love is conveyed through the cold assignment of increasingly daunting challenges, rather than through affection. At least for me, it was a pretty upsetting way for a seven-year-old to think.

One beloved principle of the family’s survivalism is the ‘survival dice’. If they roll snake eyes, a 3% chance, they can supplement their pantry with a trip to the grocery store. Any other roll and they must hunt and forage and deal with the hunger when those ends don’t meet, which they frequently do not. Lily objects to the dice, but rebels only by treating rare grocery outings like a professional prepper. She never pushes back on the idea that voluntarily embracing starvation might be unhealthy for a new mother and a young child. Karen and Helen are excited by the thrill of surviving close to the edge. The book explicitly and often invokes Dignity of Risk, the idea that an autonomous person must be allowed to make decisions that others consider inadvisable, or even dangerous. In order for someone to have free choices, they must be able to make bad ones. The most challenging part of the book is the question of how radically this principle should be held especially when it concerns young children. Helen, Karen, and Lily are free to live however they want, so they have the right to adopt a survivalist lifestyle, even if some might consider it dangerous for Perley. Is it right to raise a child that way? Is it right to put the preferences of parents over the needs to the child? Is this a different kind of wrong from the wrong of Lily’s relationship with Karen? I don’t know. I still have a hard time really thinking about this question because my immediate emotional reaction was that this was a story about two mothers who had failed their child. One cared more about her own lifestyle than about what would be good for her son, and the other was too codependent to advocate for her son when it mattered.

This is going to sound ridiculously out of touch and bougie compared to Stay and Fight’s hardscrabble Appalachian life, but this is where it hit me. A lot of the food and the survival stuff in Stay and Fight was triggering for me. I grew up with a parent whose number on priority was a lifestyle that he enjoyed. I learned pretty early on that objecting to something that he wanted, whether due to preference or due to fear, was unacceptable. My life, when it was amenable to be included in his at all, was about supporting the image of an independent outdoorsy family, not my own comfort. I first went ice climbing when I was eight or nine, not because ice climbing was a particularly good activity for nine-year-olds (it wasn’t; I was too weak and scared of the slippery frozen waterfall to climb more than a couple steps so sat getting wetter and more miserable on a vaguely horizontal chunk of ice), but because ice climbing was something my dad wanted to do. When I was growing up there were a lot of rules about what sorts of foods we were allowed to eat. Lots of foods that were okay for others were not okay for us. When Perley begs to eat mac n cheese for dinner, even though he has never tried it and therefore could not possibly know if he was craving it, that’s my whole childhood right there. I wanted to eat mac n cheese and pop tarts and fruit roll-ups not because I liked the taste (I tried my first pop tart at age 17) and not even because they looked good (they didn’t), but because I wanted to eat like other people ate. I didn’t want to be the only kid in the cafeteria with strange and ugly lunches containing things like aubergine or purled barley. Now, as an adult, intellectually I do understand that all my parents wanted to do was for me to grow up healthy and with minimal cavities. I know that being able to do so many outdoor activities was a privilege that very few kids experience. I get that it is actually kind of hilarious that the nickname my bullies chose was ‘cow cheese’. Is not most cheese a cow derived product? But emotionally it still hurts. Emotionally, I desperately wish I’d been fed mac n cheese and that by the principle of ‘you are what you eat’ I would subsequently become normal. Emotionally, I’m not reading a book about characters doing fictional actions to convey a particular story with its own meanings and messages, I’m watching my own childhood again where I was lonely and strange and unpopular because that’s what my parents wanted to be.

I always have trouble with books narrated by weird little kids. I discovered this first years ago with Room by Emma Donoghue. That might seem like a weird pull, but both Perley and Room’s Jack are deeply strange kids who lack the experience to understand just how unusual their lives are. They move through the world with the naive certainty that if they are different, it is because they are uniquely talented or powerful. The ultimate product of love and isolation, unprepared for how others will encounter them. I see myself a lot in these weird lonely little boys. I didn’t have a lot of close friends growing up on account of multiple regular international moves and a period of homeschooling. I always had difficulty judging how others perceive me; my sensitivity to rejection comes from being a kid who didn’t even understand enough about others to know they were mocking me. I’ve been caught out, blind-sided by unexpected hatred and disgust from people who I thought liked me so many times that that is simply my default now. It is painful to see these characters. On a certain illogical level I hate them. I hate them for being so insulated, so unsavvy, so loved that the confidently put their foot in it over and over again. I don’t have a good relationship with my inter child, that’s the other reason I quit therapy.

Are these kids okay? Are they weird but still healthy? Stay and Fight argues so.

Spoiler

Lily steals Perley’s brain medication hidden in plastic easter eggs and throws it out into the dirt so that he never has to be anything other than the son that she loves.

A consistent motif is flanges in orangutans. Adult males grow flanges, large flaps of skin around the sides and bottom of the face, but some males grow to adulthood without them and are unflanged. There is something different about them, something wrong, that all the other orangutans can see. At the midpoint of the story, Perley realizes that he is flanged (the book inverts the two states) and there’s nothing he can do about it. It is heartbreaking to read. It’s horrible to be a little kid and to understand for the first time that no matter what you do you can never be a kid that others like and you just have to deal with that. The dawning recognition that the best you can expect is to be tolerated. I’m too cynical for the book’s ending:

Spoiler

that all the family is flanged but they love each other.

Even the inversion of the biological reality of flanging — Lily and Karen mistakenly believe that flanging is an indication of an individual’s weakness when really it develops only in large and powerful males who have reached the top of the social heap — strikes me as trite. My family’s flanges only make it harder for us to reach each other. Only it’s worse now because I have both the inability to judge another’s perception of me and the unaccountable disgust at the other’s flangement. In Stay and Fight the characters, cantankerous and unlikable though they might be, are just doing their best to live.

Spoiler

The section about Perley’s removal by CPS and Karen’s discovery of the looming threat of the pipeline indicates a society even harsher than the Appalachian winters, one that punishes non-conformity with the unfeeling coldness of a concrete wall. In such radically independent living, a kid who doesn’t play because he needs to help gather acorns or empty the pit toilet is necessity, not abuse.

His hand-carved child-sized tools are understanding of the importance of duty and preprepared rather than play and fun are symbols of love. Intellectually, I know this, but emotionally I still have trouble reading them that way.

In hindsight, a big part of my animus for this book comes from a poor recommendation. Back when I first started keeping an organized tbr over a year ago, this was one of the first books I added. I don’t even remember why. Some vague recollection of a tumblr post pitching it as a heart-warming cottagecore-esque narrative about Appalachian lesbians and the power of community. Part of the reason I was so shaken by it was I was utterly unprepared going in. I was excited to be getting to a book I’d been wanting to read for a long time. Over the summer I read ‘Indian’ in the Cabinet, the political memoir of Indigenous Canadian politician and former Attorney General Jody Wilson-Raybould. Wilson-Raybould was candid about her disillusionment with the politics of liberal Prime Minister Justin Trudeau, who used their appointment for optics then refused to pursue her priorities (Indigenous reconciliation) and hung her out to dry when she refused to allow transparently illegal liberal party politicking. Nevertheless, Wilson-Raybould remained optimistic for the future of reconciliation on a federal level and the ability of federal politics to clean house enough for a genuinely equal nation to nations acknowledgement to be possible. That’s more along the lines of what I was expecting from Stay and Fight. Perhaps if I’d been better prepared for such an uncompromising, contrarian novel, I’d have had a better time with it and could pitch it to you today as the literary equivalent of eating your spinach.

This novel does have valuable things to say. I’m sure I could pick out some more if I re-read it, but I won’t. The greatest tragedy of this read is that despite my reflection, despite coming around to many of its ideas, I already know I won’t ever be able to really appreciate it. I’ll never be able to see it as a narrative.It will never be successful or unsuccessful for me because I’m not reading about the characters anymore, I’m reading about myself.

Spoiler

When Perley hikes away from his foster placement back to his home and finds Karen, his pack leader, waiting for him just like he knew she would be because he was so isolated his sole interpretive framework was a fantasy comic series and so the only way he knew to expect affection was as stoic silence,

that’s me trying to reach my dad. And I know it won’t work.

Content Warnings

blschuldt's review against another edition

Go to review page

adventurous challenging emotional tense slow-paced

Plot- or character-driven? A mix
Strong character development? Yes
Loveable characters? It's complicated
Diverse cast of characters? No
Flaws of characters a main focus? Yes

4.5

So good. Really stressful at times which I don’t normally seek out on purpose, but full of some of the most incredible characters and so surprising all throughout.

Content Warnings

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