Goodbye, Sweet Girl
(Harper Collins, 2018)
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.
“Goodbye, Sweet Girl is heartbreaking, breathtaking in its scope, and urgently truthful in its harrowing and tender examination of when empathy fails—and when it wins.”
— Los Angeles Review
“Goodbye Sweet Girl is a beautiful, devastating, and nuanced story of domestic abuse and escape that does true justice to the experiences of the victims without judgment or criticism of their choices.”
— Bustle
“Goodbye, Sweet Girl, bursting with such heartfelt, beautifully crafted scenes, is a gift for those who’ve experienced the pain of growing up and out of abusive relationships and a guide for those who seek insight and understanding.”
— New York Journal of Books
“It is a hell of a thing to write about brutality and suffering with strength, grace, generosity and beauty. That’s precisely what Kelly Sundberg has done in her gripping memoir about marriage and domestic violence. Sundberg’s honesty is astonishing, how she laid so much of herself bare, how she did not demonize a man who deserves to be demonized. Instead, she offers a portrait of a broken man and a broken marriage and an abiding love, what it took to set herself free from it all. In shimmering, open hearted prose, she shows that it took everything.”
— Roxane Gay, New York Times bestselling author of Hunger and Bad Feminist
“Goodbye, Sweet Girl is a breathtaking gut-punch of a memoir. Real talk: the story is hard. We spend so much time pretending that domestic violence doesn’t exist. We spend so much time doubting women. Enough. Sundberg gives us the truth in all its complexity; fear and hope and fury in gorgeous, near-cinematic prose that made me weep, and cheer, and understand. Here is how we save ourselves. Here is how we survive.”
—Megan Stielstra, author of The Wrong Way to Save Your Life
“Reading Kelly Sundberg’s writing—fresh, luminous, spirited—is a pleasure second only to witnessing her decision to survive. Goodbye Sweet Girl is a meditation on what it takes to save your own life.”
— Ariel Levy, author of The Rules Do Not Apply
“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 shattering of the silence that enables domestic violence to continue, Goodbye, Sweet Girl shines a fierce light on how complex and sometimes joyous a relationship that’s also an abusive cage can be, why women gradually lose the orientation they need to find the exit, and how they escape when they do, or how this one did. This book is a testament—and a warning to batterers that the silence is broken, and their secrets are leaking out.”
—Rebecca Solnit, author of Call Them by Their True Names: American Crises (and Essays)
"Kelly Sundberg's lyrical, devastating 2014 essay about domestic violence, "It Will Look Like a Sunset," made readers hold their collective breath. It's now expanded into a full-length memoir about Sundberg's husband, a man who was wonderful and violent at turns."
- Elle (The 30 Best Books to Read This Summer)
“Mesmerizing and poetic, Goodbye Sweet Girl is a harrowing, cautionary and ultimately redemptive tale that brilliantly illuminates one woman’s transformation.”
— BookReporter
“[Goodbye, Sweet Girl helps us] to better understand each of our nuances and complexities, how any of us rationalizes our decisions, and how we find the courage to take care of ourselves and to speak our truths…. [Sundberg writes] her truth with a deep sense of compassion.”
— The Millions
“Kelly Sundberg gives one of the most brave and beautifully written accounts of a marriage gone wrong in her memoir, Goodbye, Sweet Girl. Sundberg looks at both the tenderness and the violence of her abusive marriage, while also analyzing why women remain too long in dangerous relationships.”
— Brooklyn Digest
“In this powerful debut memoir, Sundberg delivers a harrowing account of an abusive marriage and how she left it….Sundberg cogently ties together the painful chain of events in her life and the personal growth that resulted from it.”
— Publishers Weekly
..and keep a lookout for:
The Answer is in the Wound
(Roxane Gay Books, 2025)
The trauma of surviving an abusive marriage didn’t make Kelly Sundberg stronger. In fact, it nearly broke her. Instead of following the neat storyline she expected from her life, she became someone she resented. First learning to coexist with her rage and then turn that rage into strength and power, Sundberg’s journey to alchemizing her suffering from post-traumatic stress disorder into post-traumatic stress growth was neither easy nor simple. But far from bleak, her story provides vital insight into the little-known recovery process, and how healing is possible.
A narrative following a process of discovery as Sundberg’s personal story is juxtaposed against established research, THE ANSWER IS IN THE WOUND offers a redemptive arc for trauma survivors, arguing for healing through an acceptance of their new state of being. Sundberg uses metaphors like the act of erasure—shown in erasure poetry created from her abusive ex-husband’s apologetic emails—and includes theories from psychiatrists and researchers like Judith Herman, Bessel van der Kolk, and Peter A. Levine to construct a balanced meditation on trauma and the imprint it leaves.
For readers of In the Dream House by Carmen Maria Machado and The Empathy Exams by Leslie Jamison, THE ANSWER IS IN THE WOUND is a beautiful, devastating, and nuanced examination into embracing a new reality after trauma and finding power and beauty in it.