I’m updating my website in bits and pieces, and I’m planning on writing a more thoughtful post about turning 40 (my birthday was yesterday) while my book publication is on the horizon.
Unfortunately, I spent my 40th birthday sick with food poisoning, but as a friend pointed out, it can only go up from here, right?
And shortly before my 40th birthday, my book received this review from Roxane Gay. I can’t imagine a better way to turn 40 than with receiving an endorsement like this for a project I’ve thrown my entire being into.
Some other early praise:
“In her stunning memoir, Kelly Sundberg examines the heart-breaking bonds of love, detailing her near decade-long marriage’s slide into horrific abuse. Sundberg shares her own confusions, fears and empathy for her violent husband, even as she comes to realize he will never change. 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
“A fierce, frightening, soulful reckoning—Goodbye, Sweet Girl is an expertly rendered memoir that investigates why we stay in relationships that hurt us, and how we survive when we leave them. Kelly Sundberg is a force. She has written the rare book that has the power to change lives.”—Christa Parravani, author of Her: A Memoir
As a reminder, the book will be released on June 5, 2018, and is available for pre-order here.
Here is my publisher’s book description copy:
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.
And finally, though I didn’t get to spend my birthday drinking cocktails with umbrellas in them, I was able to suck down a Sprite today, and now, I’m feeling mostly recovered.
I think 40 looks pretty good on me.
39 was the year that I hunkered down and really wrote this book; it was a shadow year.
A period of gestation.
I’m ready to bloom now.
Please join me.