The Secret Lives Of Women Who Snap
A conversation with Chelsea Bieker on her new book, MADWOMAN
In her new novel, Madwoman (which someone needs to adapt into a Netflix series stat), Chelsea Bieker provides her reader with nearly everything a bookish soul could want. Bitingly smart satirical analysis about wellness culture and the allure of the status grocery store? Check. Raw excavations into the inner workings of an abusive relationship? Check. Experimentations with identity and our ability to refashion our personhoods through a series of evasions and altered realities? Check. The eternal weight of a mother/daughter inheritance? YES CHECK.
Madwoman is so much all at once that I find it hard to describe. It’s a page-turner, and in a way, it’s a whodunnit. Except we’re never entirely sure who might have done what. And it’s bursting with relatable truths about early motherhood that are startling in their specificity. I loved it. And I loved talking to
, who writes the newsletter, about hair vitamins, the maddening magic of Moon Juice prods, what we want from our mothers (even if we know we’ll never get it), and so much more.
Sara
I don't know why I want to start here, but I love, love, love the role that grocery plays in the book. I like to think of it as the erotics of Erewhon. I know you’re a fellow Poog hag, and the way you tread the line between critiques of wellness culture and genuine enthusiasm is so great. It’s a delicious blend of healthy skepticism, satire, and hope, which your protagonist, Clove, really needs.
Chelsea
The character of Clove is so close to me. In many ways, we are one - ha. Especially at that time of life when my kids were around Clove’s kids’ ages. I was trying to figure out what makes a good mother. Like what makes a sturdy, caretaking person. And as a sober person too, I started delving into the wellness world because you’ve got to get your jollies where you can. And wellness was in some ways (not financially!) an accessible way to try whatever it is that’s promising whatever it’s promising. Maybe the aesthetic packaging is feeding me in a way too.
My love affair with grocery began even before parenthood, as I was coming into adulthood and really trying to figure out, like, how do I live a life that's different from my parents. And it really did feel like this wellness world, or the idea of a “pure” diet and the knowledge around herbal remedies seemed to be the antithesis of what I’d been exposed to during my childhood. It felt really safe to me.
And that being said, Clove’s obsession leads her into a terrible amount of debt. She would never tell the prices of these things to her husband, right? Because at the end of the day, she can't totally justify it, right? It's like, I'm spending all this money on this sort of promise that I know has been marketed just for me, and there’s some shame in that. And also, Clove has this weird shred of hope that if she can engage with those products, she can elevate herself. I think it’s also a commentary on how hard motherhood is, especially in our country. Even if you have your basic needs met. It’s so, so hard. So where do you get help from? How do you get your needs met?
Clove doesn't really have a lot of community, and she can't really trust others. That's her big thing. But she’s committed to pursuing this ideal of radiant health. And I mean, there’s always the allure of what if this one thing actually works? Right now, for example, I'm taking a very expensive hair growth supplement to try to regrow my post covid postpartum hair loss. And, you know what? It's fucking working. It’s at least working a little - ha - and maybe no one can tell but me, but it gives me just a little tiny bit of satisfaction.
Growing up with my mom, because we lived in such poverty, we just couldn’t have nice things. And Clove feels that too. She watched her mother deny herself anything nice over and over again. It connects to self-worth in a way. Even if it’s just a green juice, if the green juice is just for her, it’s her way of saying she’s worth an overpriced juice. It’s an easy way to check the box of worthiness. And it really contrasts to the deprivation of her youth. Definitely in early motherhood, that immediate fix, those instant dopamine hits that come from little purchases, they can really keep you afloat. And it’s like, I’ll deal with the ramification later because right now I just need to get through the day.
Sara
I love that you mention mothers’ longing for hope that something (anything!) can make life just a little softer or easier. And it really strikes me that mothers in particular are led to seek hope in consumerism, in a very specific way rather than, for example, community outreach, coalition building, political work, etc.
Chelsea
Absolutely, and I think that even though there is that impulse to eye roll some of this stuff, the moms with their bone broth are being fed a good mother narrative from social media and elsewhere. And most of us have pure intentions - we WANT to be good moms and if bone broth might get us there (or get us to a place where we can believe in our maternal goodness), so be it. As a new mother, I found a real sense of safety in doing things a certain way. I was so hungry for understanding, so eager to read about attachment parenting. I earnestly wanted to set my daughter up to have a different experience in the world than I did. I wasn’t asking what the cost of my obsession with goodness was for me, and no one else around me was asking that either. But of course, in thinking I could never put the baby down, or never let her cry, or whatever it was, I hit a point of total burnout. But it was just what I thought I had to do. And I can look back and have a lot of compassion for that version of me, but I certainly felt like I was doing the right thing at the time by really committing to the bit of the mom that I was determined to be.
Sara
I think that's super, super relatable. The Dr. Sears books did a real number on me.
Chelsea
Oh I had all of them. And then when I had my son four years later, I was kind of like, I've been through this. I know he'll be okay if I take a break. It was not possible for me to fathom that mindset with my daughter. In the book, Clove is going through post weaning anxiety. I totally had that with my daughter, but I didn't know for a long time that that's what was happening, right? And that was a real come to Jesus time where I had to reroute some of the rigidity and some of my ideas about motherhood.
Sara
This reminds me of the bit with Jane and Clove, where Clove is looking at Jane's belly button piercing and feeling the urge to tell her about what will happen to the piercing once she has a kid (among other things!) We want to believe that the passing of maternal wisdom will make a difference. And I found that so so so deeply relatable. As a new mom you really do feel like you've gone through this crucible, and you're just desperate to scream out your knowledge to anyone who listens.
Chelsea
Yeah, and also, if someone had screamed out their knowledge to me when I was 26 and pregnant, I would have been like, Uh-huh. I’ll do this better than you. We all have to go through our own initiation. But I did have so many moments where I wondered why no one had prepared me. I remember when I was having post weaning anxiety. There was nothing online about it. There were like one or two mom blogs where women expressed having it, but there was no sense of a solution. Because there's literally no research about it. My midwives didn't even know what to tell me. No one follows up with moms that far out of the postpartum period. There are just no studies done about the hormonal shifts when you stop breastfeeding. And that was really painful. And then I read Sarah Menkedick’s Ordinary Insanity and I was just so angry. She really lays out how little medical research is done on women's bodies in general, but especially surrounding pregnancy and postpartum. We’re really all figuring this out together. This is also where the desire for supplements comes in right? It's like, well, what can I take? What can I try? Because nobody knows what to do, so I guess I'll figure it out myself. So yes, I want to scream to moms. Like, hey, when you stop breastfeeding, if you feel absolutely like you've lost your goddamn mind, it's okay. Come talk to me! It happens to so many women.
Sara
Much of the book grapples with the cycle of domestic abuse, and so often people simply don't understand that cycle. And you know, there's this tendency to look at an abusive relationship and say, Well, why didn't she just leave? Why didn't she ask for help? Why didn't she move out? And I think your book really beautifully and vividly shows why and how that cycle continues. And why people stay. You make it make sense, I think, for people who aren't familiar with how the cycle works.
Chelsea
It is hard to understand, and even when you're in the trifecta, as I was growing up with my parents, I felt so much anger toward my mom, and it's taken years of my adulthood to really unpack that, because it's not really the right response. The anger exists nonetheless, because as a kid, it just felt like, why can't we leave? Why are we still here? And I was probably just conditioned by patriarchal society to blame my mom. I was looking at her for safety and looking at him as the villain, right? Why aren’t you getting us out?
So it was really my intention to show just how insidious that cycle of abuse works and how much complex PTSD changes the brain. And often it’s frankly more dangerous to leave, or that acute period of leaving is often when women are killed or the abuse gets heightened. And so that threat is really real and often there just aren't the resources for a safe exit. It takes a lot of hands on deck to make a safe exit, and often women are really under-resourced. Part of the cycle is a slow chipping away of community, of resources, of self confidence. And I wanted to show both the reality of the cycle alongside a lot of compassion towards the mother character AND Clove’s complicated frustration she feels for her mother. Even though she knows that it's not her mom's fault, there are still a lot of complicated feelings around it.
Sara
There are so many delicious twists in this book - and without giving anything away, many of the women in the book are skillful at disappearing themselves. And often this is a result of trauma, but their tactics also demonstrate real ingenuity and brilliance. They’re survival tactics. I just wonder what you think about women's need or desire to self narrativize our own lives and make sense of our identities through storytelling.
Chelsea
I think Clove in particular feels that life would be made much easier if she could let go of the narrative of her childhood. The burden of it is immense, and she wonders, you know, what would it be like if I just didn't have to carry it anymore? Can we ever really do that? It’s such a fantasy of mine, and I obviously did not create a new identity and lie to my husband for years and years, but there are times in my life when I’d love to just put my baggage down. And not have to grapple with it. I think the book shows that you can’t really do that. I mean, the shadow self is always going to find you in the end. Whether or not the people around you know, you’ll see it when you look in the mirror. We all work to integrate our pasts in an honest way. One of the reasons the book is written as a direct address to Clove’s mother is because she has a deep longing for her mother to know her, really know her.
Because of the abuse, because of all the interference of domestic terrorism, that intimacy was broken between these two women. Male violence comes in between women's intimacy, right? And she feels like, How can I rectify that? I need you to know me, and I need you to know me on my terms, outside of him, outside of what we experienced. I want you to know what life is like for me now. Like, this is what we did today. We went to the grocery store. We went to the post office. I want you to see my life and see me.
When my parents were alive, I felt so much desire for them to understand the way I've had to compensate because of what they did. But at the same time, there was always such risk in those conversations, because they were very quick to shut down or really want to commit to a different story. But the desire persisted for me, and I will never really get that sense of understanding from them. So I can accept that, or I can work to accept that, and writing this book felt like my way of attempting to put it all down. Midway through writing the book, I remembered when I was like 20, I had a blogspot or something, and they were little fragments of “Dear M.” These little letters between M (mom) and C (Chelsea). I was always interested in that really candid communication that I just couldn't actually access.
Sara
I mean, even as an adult child, you never stop hoping that your story will be fully seen by your mother, or fully prioritized in a way that a child expects her story to be prioritized.
Chelsea
Right. And my mom would always say, I Just hope you remember the good times. There were good times in there too, right? Unfortunately, it's really weird, but I actually don't remember the good times. There were so few that weren’t shadowed by fear, or the tense threat of violence that just was always in the air. And neurologically we’re programmed to remember the bad stuff as a way of staying safe, but it’s hard. She always had vivid memories of me being really young, and tender memories of moments between us. Unfortunately I can't remember, because I was so young.
Sara
Ok, the reality show in the book - Snapped? I can’t remember if it’s real or fake.
Chelsea
Oh it’s real.
Sara
Well that’s unfortunate. I was really hoping it was satire! But of course it’s real. I think there's this real stubbornness in culture to view women as capable of withstanding everything and anything and and to carry their pain and not let it impact their decisions or their actions. I’m willing to bet that in almost every one of these Snapped stories, if you see the whole story, it's not going to be like, Wow, this woman went crazy out of nowhere. It's going to be like, No, she reacted completely logically to a set of circumstances that was untenable. Why do we have a cultural fixation with like, a woman's breaking point, like, what is that fetish?
Chelsea
Well, you're right to imagine that in all of those shows, once you get the full picture, you're like, yeah, she's been victimized for decades. Or it's obvious self defense. Almost always. But still the fixation remains on that moment when, like in Nightbitch, she turns into a dog. How do women hit that breaking point in a way that's accommodated by our world? We allow men to hold all sorts of reactions and moods and snaps and whatever. But we expect women to accommodate and make things ok and smooth themselves down. And when a mother snaps, it’s very shocking to everyone, so much so that there's a television show called Snapped. I don't have a full answer. There's an interesting book called Terrifying Love by Lenore Walker that was published in the 70s. It’s a really foundational text on domestic violence that at the time was really revolutionary, because it just had not been studied or closely examined. Prior to very recently, domestic violence was just a marital issue, a private home issue. It wasn’t even criminalized until 1994.
So Walker interviewed all of these women who had acted in self defense and murdered their abusers. Many of them were imprisoned, and Walker tries to locate the nuance within their situations and show how the legal system really was not looking at the full picture in so many cases. It still doesn’t.
Sara
I think so much of it is constructions of gender. Like, if a man has a temper, that's a “normal” masculine trait. And it's like, what is a masculine trait? What is a feminine trait? What do we accept? Speaking of shadow selves though, I want to talk about Jane and Clove. I love any story where a woman is falling platonically in love with another woman. And I feel like this definitely is one of those.
Chelsea
I wanted a character to come into the book that would be able to get past Clove’s veneer. And I think it probably stemmed from this experience of being at parks so much when my kids were little and feeling like I had this fire burning inside of me. I wanted to talk about so many things and so many new feelings and revelations about the demands of motherhood. I wanted to just GO THERE with other women. And I found that to be tricky sometimes because I was just so tired. I wanted to dive right in and couldn’t deal with the small talk about diapers or whatever. It felt really painful to endure.
Sara
YES
Chelsea
And I don’t know if this is what the kids are saying lol, but I needed someone to match my freak. I would, like, scan the playground for someone that looked unhinged in the way that I felt unhinged. And that’s how I found some of my very closest, early mom friends. These were women that weren't afraid to show anger. They weren't afraid to show me their cracked nipples. Because there was no time to wait. I felt an urgency. We didn't have time for small talk. I need to see your nipple right now. Just all of it, all of it. And some people are down for that, and some aren't. And I was just someone who really wanted that, because then I knew I was just going to go home after the park and be alone some more. I wanted other women who could match my intensity.
Sara
I so, so, so get that, I remember there was a very specific kind of depression that would settle over me, like when I went on a new mom date, full of hopes, and we'd get stuck in like, Pleasantry Land, and I would feel deeply depressed, like it was such an isolating, terrible feeling. I just felt like I was in this bubble alone. And yeah, you want to dive right into the gory. The good stuff.
Chelsea
There’s a moment in Madwoman, where Jane is like, Have you suffered? And Clove is like, Yeah, have you? And she's like, Yeah. They see each other, and they see that they’ve each gone through something. And I wanted to depict that sort of instant recognition.
There’s a scene I cut where Clove meets a mom who is best friends with her sister, and Clove is just like, I will never be able to get to the level I need to get with you. She just recognizes they’re on different planets. And like, of course, hell yes to women who are best friends with their sisters or moms! I’m so jealous! I want that too. I want to be my daughter's best friend, and go on trips, and all the things. But when you feel so raw in those moments you just want to know you’re taken care of. I need someone who can meet me here in this much more like, desperate place.
Sara
At one point, Clove has a really shitty mom day (pun intended), and this mean lady yells at her:
I carried a screaming Lark away that day, tears in my eyes imagining what it would have been like if the woman had said, Hi, my name is Brenda. I've seen you walking with your kid before. Always alone. Are you okay? You're doing your best, and your best is good enough. Would they like a graham cracker? Would you like five minutes of adult conversation? But that rarely, if ever, happened in real life. I felt the familiar dislocation. I was welcome almost nowhere with my children. Almost no one saw me and saw someone who was at work, for I was at work every day with them, wasn't I?
Many of society's ills would be smoothed away if mothering was seen as valid labor. If the world was made friendlier towards parents.
Chelsea
I was just having this conversation with a friend, and she was like, What would happen if they just paid moms? What if you just paid moms? What would happen? And I was like, Well, everything would be fixed.
Sara
Legit!
Chelsea
I always felt so much shame directed at me when my kids would act in a way that wasn't, you know, pleasant. And I think that was a piece of motherhood that did surprise me. It made me more prone to just stay home, because it felt easier. Like, I might as well not bother anymore. It just felt so difficult to move through the world on those bad mom days.
I remember this drug store that’s since closed down. And there was no, like, child seats in the carts. And I went up to the counter, and was like, Do you have a cart with a seat for him? I had my little baby boy, and they were like, we just don't have those. And I was like, So am I supposed to just hold him? I just left! It was just a very clear way of communicating that I wasn’t supposed to be in that space.
Sara
Do you have anything you want to talk about that I didn't bring up?
Chelsea
It’s funny - you’re the first person who has talked about the grocery stuff.
Sara
Oh my gosh, really?
Chelsea
Yeah. I think more of the focus has been on the domestic violence stuff, which is fine, but I really hope readers get a full sense of Clove’s entire story. She’s not just defined by domestic violence. She's not just defined by the past. We get to see her falling in love. We get to see her in her marriage. In life, it’s not just the trauma. It’s the mundane too. It’s always everything. It’s always both.
Sara
I should also say the wellness stuff is FUNNY. Funny as hell.
Chelsea
I mean, Moon Juice has me in a chokehold. Even if I have no idea if it does anything. The packaging!
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This sounds amazing. Can’t wait to read! I’ve truly never processed the mind fuck of early parenting but instead blurred it all in my head. Everything in this interview resonates with that time! I
I felt so seen in this interview (and likely in this book). The loneliness, the desperation for connection, the buying for comfort or identity or healing (my purchases were art supplies). It’s been a long time (ever?) that I’ve seen it all laid out in one place.