Black Eye: Escaping a Marriage, Writing a Life

by Judith Strasser

Book Overview

From disaster movies to cult movements, apocalyptic images surround us as we mark the end of the current millennium. Fearful Hope: Approaching the New Millennium provides a wide range of essays probing the meaning and significance of millennial expectations and apocalyptic visions.

• Format: Hardcover
• Language: English
• ISBN: 0299199304
• ISBN13: 9780299199302
• Release Date: March 2004
• Publisher: University of Wisconsin Press
• Length: 350 Pages
• Weight: 1.00 lbs.
• Dimensions: 1.1" x 6.3" x 9.3"

Customer Reviews

Difficult, painful, beautiful memoir

In 1986, Judith Strasser ended an abusive seventeen-year-marriage. The end came, she tells us in the first sentence of her memoir, when her husband slugged her in the eye. His punch was the exclamation point that concluded the sentence of Strasser's marriage, a time measured by arguments, emotional abuse, depression, alcoholism, cold silences, and abandonments. It also opened a new period in her life, for her husband's blow freed Strasser to become the confident, creative woman who is able to write this difficult, often painful memoir. Black Eye is told through two interwoven narratives. One story encompasses time spent during 1996 and 1997 at two writing retreats, Norcroft (on the shore of Lake Superior) and Ucross Foundation, in Wyoming, where Strasser crafted her memoir. The other story is narrated through the journal she kept ten years before, in 1986, the year her marriage broke apart. In that year, Strasser and her husband, Stu, were living with their two young sons in Madison, where Strasser worked as a public radio producer and Stu, unemployed, contributed funds from an inheritance. Strasser, bewildered, confused, diffident, uncertain, was in therapy; Stu, an alcoholic, refused to participate in any meaningful way in marriage counseling. Black Eye's two narratives have essentially two narrators: the younger Strasser, learning through pain how to become her own person; and the older Strasser, who sometimes looks at her younger self in impatient dismay. What are you waiting for? the older Strasser wonders. "I want to say to this woman, go already. Leave. It's tedious, coming back to the computer again and again to find that you are still stuck in a relationship that is obviously abusive, obviously past time to end." As a reader, I find myself agreeing. Get on with it, I want to say, get out, get out. What's taking so long? In some ways, this book is too close for comfort, for Strasser tears away the protective screen of narrative distance that keeps the author/narrator and her experiences safely apart from the reader. The journal sections are desperately painful, as the marital situation deteriorates, the children suffer, and the shillyshallying younger Strasser can't get up the courage to turn the key on her prison door and walk out. As a reader, I was there, inside the story, urging, prompting, pushing, judging, hoping, hurting. When the blow finally came, I almost had to duck. For some readers, there will be too much pain, too long a lingering, too much rationalizing and denying. But that, I think, is exactly Strasser's point. Many women--including smart, well-educated, self-supporting women who consider themselves "feminists"--are trapped in abusive relationships, wanting to leave, afraid to go. In 1998, the year Strasser was writing her book, over one-third of American women reported being physically or sexually abused by a partner at some point in their lives. Strasser's journal entries capture that experience with a brutal, unyi

Brave and Powerful

Black Eye is a brave and wonderfully-written book, genuine and evocative. Its structure, weaving two journal lines, brings the present and the past together. The effect is more powerful than a simple chronological retelling would have been. I think many people believe domestic violence happens only to women who live in poverty, or who have not had educational advantages. This book allows us to see how it can happen to anyone, no matter how privileged. Though it is hard to come face to face with the reality of abuse, when it is presented as openly and thoughtfully as it is in Judith Strasser's book, the reader is able to learn and to grow from the experience. I am grateful to her for having the courage and perseverence to bring this book to life.

COURAGEOUS, TRUTHFUL, INSPIRING

I just finished reading Black Eye and had to record how wonderful I thought it was. It grabbed my attention immediately and I had to keep reading it until done. I think the author's courage is amazing. She's so truth-ful--including being very candid with the very personal choices that may not always reflect well on herself. I enjoyed and learned from the recorded dreams that clearly showed how they guided the writer in her "hero's journey" to her soul... And all this comes across in such a down to earth, wonderful way. A good read. (I want my friend who is in an abusive marriage-in-trouble to read it--if she could ever find the time with her child, work and life.)

A nice little trip through some stages of a life

This is a very good book. I like the jumping from journal to dreams to past to present. It gives a realistic impression of the thinking process Judy went through.I think the sense of uncertainty that seeps from the pages is at just the right level. The book doesn't focus on "agonizing decisions" as would have been easy to fall into, but the sense of struggle is evident on every page. It also "wallows" much less than I might have expected. It is written more by a person in control of her destiny than someone who is just carried along by events. If I were a woman trying to find my way in a similar situation I'd like to think that the book would demonstrate that one can take control of one's life.