Right Before My Very Eyes, an Abused Woman
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Hanna Halperin is the author of two novels. Something Wild was published in 2021, and I Could Live Here Forever in 2023. I read I Could Live Here Forever first and found it to be very compelling. It was about a woman in love with a heroin addict. Wanting to read more by the author, I sought out Something Wild. It tells the story of an older woman in a physically abusive marriage. I virtually read these books back to back, thus getting a double dose of terrible love relationships. But they were compelling. Very compelling. I didn’t want to put either book down.
Since a writer is told to write what she knows, these books caused me to be very worried about the author. A quick visit to Hanna Halperin’s website assuaged that feeling a bit – she has worked as a domestic violence counselor. Thanks to this background, both books seemed realistic, which pretty much guarantees a less than happy ending in each case.
That said, click here to read my review of I Could Live Here Forever
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Continue reading below to learn about Something Wild…
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The book opens with adult sisters Nessa and Tanya Bloom coming home to Arlington, Massachusetts to help their mother, Lorraine, pack up their childhood home. She is moving to New Hampshire to a property that her husband, Jesse, recently inherited. Jesse is the girls’ stepfather. Nessa gets along with him. Tanya does not.
Tanya lives in New York where she is well-established as the ADA in the Manhattan District Attorney’s Office. She is married to Eitan, a doctor, and she is newly pregnant, but only Eitan knows.
Older sister, Nessa, is not as well-established. She lives a couple hours away from her mother in Northampton and works as an office manager/receptionist for a psychiatrist. The man she is dating, Henry, is a patient at the doctor’s office who suffers from anxiety, has an arrest under his belt for stealing a taxi, and still lives at home with his parents. He’s not particularly good to Nessa. She admits that she’s “probably a little mentally ill. She doesn’t hear voices or anything like that. She’s just sad a lot of the time – most of the time.”
Then there’s Lorraine. The first time we meet her we learn she and Jesse have financial difficulties, which is the real reason for their upcoming move. We also learn they fight frequently. In fact, they are “just coming down from the latest one.” She doesn’t tell us much about the fight itself, just about his tears, the flowers, and the sex that is part of his apology, part of their cycle.
But before we even meet these characters, there is a preface that starts the book. In it, we learn about the “Wild Thing.” Nessa and Tanya would get it – or feel it? – when one sister chased the other and were just about to grab, pinch, or smack the other. The author says, “It was fun at first, the thrill of running away, the thrill of chasing. They’d laugh, giddy with the fight or flightiness of it, until the one being chased would scream out, ‘Stop, I’m getting the Wild Thing!’”
As it turns out, the Wild Thing was also the feeling they got in dreams when they were not able to run fast enough and someone was on the verge of catching them. This little opening section of the book also tells us about the worst Wild Thing ever. It was the “night at Dan’s house.” It is something that happened fourteen years ago and is something Tanya and Nessa have never talked about, even right after it happened, whatever it was.
As might be expected, it takes until halfway through the book for the reader to learn the details. As I read and read and read trying to figure out those Dan, Tanya, and Nessa details, I was lax in trying to figure out what all was going on with Lorraine and Jesse. And as significant as the night with Dan was to the lives – and psyches – of the two sisters, it is really Lorraine’s story that is the heart of the book.
But I think that was the author’s plan, to distract me from what was going on right before my very eyes with the mom. Isn’t that the way it is with abused women? They walk among us and yet no one sees what is happening
Ultimately, Tanya and Nessa realize that Lorraine is living her own Wild Thing – with Jesse doing his version of grabbing, pinching, and smacking her – and they try mightily to help. But since this book is so realistically written, you can be sure this is NOT the concluding line of the book: “And they all lived happily ever after.”
And yet, it was such a compelling book to read. I could not put it down.
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Click here to learn more about Something Wild.
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