Madwoman

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Clove has gone to extremes to keep her past a secret. Thanks to her lies, she's landed the life of her dreams, complete with a safe husband and two adoring children who will never know the terror that was routine in her own childhood. If her buried anxiety threatens to breach the surface, Clove (if that is really her name) focuses on finding the right supplement, the right gratitude meditation.

But when she receives a letter from a women's prison in California, her past comes screeching into the present, entangling her in a dangerous game with memory and the people she thought she had outrun. As we race between her precarious present-day life in Portland, Oregon and her childhood in a Waikiki high-rise with her mother and father, Clove is forced to finally unravel the defining day of her life. How did she survive that day, and what will it take to end the cycle of violence? Will the truth undo her, or could it ultimately save her?

“MADWOMAN is brilliant. The rare kind of book that lives in your bones, as riveting as it is intimate. This is emotional suspense at its best, but it's also a chronicle of modern womanhood, an exploration of what mothers and daughters do to and for each other, and an ode to hope in the aftermath of trauma. Somehow, Bieker delivers all of this in a voice that is fresh, urgent, and darkly comic. A novel hasn't consumed me like this in a very long time. MADWOMAN is on my list of all-time favorites.”— Ashley Audrain, author of The Push and The Whispers

"A gripping, gritty, gorgeous book about motherhood, the traumas of domestic violence, and the mad, raw, funny, wrenching, astonishing things we do to survive… This book made me laugh and cry. It reads like a thriller and a love song. It’s about being crushed and rising strong."— Cheryl Strayed, author of Wild 

"Chelsea Bieker breathes thrilling, risky energy into the familiar trope of the madwoman . . . [Bieker’s] prose crackles with tiny shocks and arresting images . . . [her] writing is raw, breathlessly confessional, brilliant in its depiction of the long shadows cast by domestic violence, the constant tension carried by survivors. However, her true secret weapon is humor.”— Catherine Chidgey, The New York Times Book Review

Chelsea Bieker is the author of the debut novel Godshot, which was longlisted for The Center for Fiction's First Novel Prize and named a Barnes & Noble Pick of the Month. Her story collection, Heartbroke won the California Book Award and was a New York Times "Best California Book of 2022." She is the recipient of a Rona Jaffe Writers' Award, as well as residencies at MacDowell and Tin House. Raised in Hawaii and California, she now lives in Portland, Oregon with her husband and two children.