A writer’s brave journey through darkness to find her own light
Tells the tale of Cathy Park Kelly’s abusive relationship with her former partner, Karl. It is a gripping read about what happens to the sense of self when living with violence. By
“Imagine you are minding your own business, lathering soap into your hands in the bathroom. You switch off the taps and towel-dry your hands. The door bursts open and your partner strides in, lips clenched, his eyes dark with rage.
“He grips your shoulders and starts screaming into your face, ‘Stop. Fucking. Engaging. With. Me.’ You try to wriggle out of his grasp. He grabs a fistful of your hair and drags you out of the bathroom.
“He pushes you onto the bedroom floor, sits astride you and with a red marker pen begins to scrawl across your breasts. Hot tears roll down your face.
“With one last stroke, it is over. He gets up, storms outside and is gone. You struggle up and make your way semi-naked to a full-length mirror. The words are etched in red on your body, ‘SLUT. CUNT. WHORE’.”
So begins Cathy Park Kelly’s Boiling a Frog Slowly. The book, part memoir, part inspiration, tells the tale of Park Kelly’s relationship with her former partner, Karl. It is a gripping read about relational trauma, of what happens to the sense of self when living with physical and psychological violence over time.
Rebecca Solnit, who wrote The Faraway Nearby in 2013, argues that sometimes empathy must be learned and then imagined by perceiving the suffering of others and translating it into one’s own experience of suffering.
Empathy makes you imagine the sensation of the torture, of loss. You make that person into yourself, you inscribe their suffering on your own body or heart or mind, and then you respond to their suffering as though it were your own. This is exactly what Boiling a Frog Slowly does, very successfully so.
As with most relationships with abusive men, when Park Kelly initially goes out with Karl, there is no sign of the monster lurking beneath. He is good-looking, relaxed and charming. He works his way into her life and heart. Mostly, he is kind and attentive. Until he is not.
Boiling a Frog Slowly is an exercise in working with memory to relive and process the horrors of what happened to Park Kelly.
“Memory is like a basket filled with beads,” she says. “Each incident in our lives is one of the beads. Some are shiny from being picked up often, rubbed with a thumb and looked at. These become almost calcified, unchanging, fixed in our life story.
“Other memories have fallen to the dusty bottom of the basket. They are there, they happened, but we haven’t picked them out for so long, they’ve faded from our story. But they can be retrieved and held, polished up once more to a glossy shine.”
Park Kelly wrote the book to make sense of what she had been through. “It was almost like detective work, to track back to the start of our relationship and try to find when it had started and who had started it. I began with questions. The purpose was not to
apportion blame, but to sort out my own complicity and victimisation. I needed to find the truth in the mess, to sort through all the words that were doing battle in my head and come to some sort of understanding.”
Park Kelly says as she wrote, “something began to grow in me in my search for the truth. It felt like a flame that burned brighter and brighter. I also wrote it for the reader in my head, to explain how insidiously it had happened, to show how small moments can become big, how it is possible to lose oneself gradually in the name of love.”
The book is exactly that: a beautiful love story that turns ugly. It paints a visceral picture of what happens when someone gradually starts to make you doubt yourself.
For those concerned about experiencing a sense of trauma in reading about violence, the writing technique is ingenious in circumventing this.
Although the reader is pulled into the lair of Karl’s darkness, it is the iridescence of
Park Kelly’s light – her joy in the simple pleasures in life, her views on the world, the essence of who she is – that shines through.
Gaslighting is a pivotal theme in the book. Karl convinces Park Kelly that she invades his “psychic space”. Even when she is doing nothing at all, when she is in the next room minding her own business, he lashes out at her for “pulling” at his mind. Park Kelly has to sleep in her car, so that he can sleep peacefully, evidence of a deeply narcissistic mind.
Park Kelly describes the effects of this gaslighting: “It drove me very close to a kind of madness. I felt like my mind was being torn apart by two realities: his, in which it was all my fault; and my reality, in which I knew it takes ‘two to tango’.
“My natural default is to want to understand and empathise with others, but in acknowledging and affirming his pain, I abandoned myself. This meant accepting his view that I was insane and psychotic. I began to doubt myself deeply, to doubt my other relationships, my interactions with people. It became difficult to make decisions. His reality became my reality, as though he had colonised my head.”
Park Kelly’s turning point was not dramatic or visible. “It’s different for each of us,” she explains. “Unlike in the movies, there isn’t an ‘Aha’ moment when things automatically fit into place.
“The first step in seeing things for what they are, is to look at the facts of your situation and letting go of any romanticisation or hope that somehow, things will change.
“My decision to leave formed and strengthened over many months.”
David Whyte, the author of Consolations, reminds us that to be courageous is not necessarily to go anywhere or to do anything. It is to make conscious the things we already feel deeply and then to live through the unending vulnerabilities of its consequences. To be courageous is to seat our feelings deeply in the body and in the world, to be open to the unknown that begs us on.
Boiling a Frog Slowly is an effervescent narrative of what happens when we dare to open up to the unknown, to move on.
In Park Kelly’s words, “I kept turning to myself. I had reached the end of my tether, and my need to look after myself … was finally stronger than my need to make the relationship work.”
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In 2018, the right-to-die activist’s world was shattered. Arrested for the murder of his quadriplegic friend, Davison found himself locked up.
tracks his journey as he prepares for his gruelling legal challenge. Freed this month, Davison remains unwavering in his belief that we all have the right to die with dignity. His book will change the way you see death. Melinda Ferguson Books (R320).
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Jackman tosses together tales from a rich, nomadic life with masses of meaty recipes (oxtail potjie, beef fillet with French Brie, parsley-crusted rack of lamb); spicy poultry dishes (tamarind duck curry, chicken coconut curry); a handful of signature dishes (spanspek soup, bacon-andbeer braai bread); and the desserts with which Jackman likes to spoil his friends. From the DM
Shop (R340).