It happened when I was young, five or six. Once, maybe several times. I don’t quite recall it but remember the edges. The corner of the woods, the pressure of a thing in my mouth. Years later, during an EMDR session, I broke down crying, breath knifing through my chest. But the specifics of it, I don’t remember. Sometimes, because of this, I tell myself it didn’t happen. Sometimes I believe it when I say it.
He was my age, which complicates things. He also had a habitual cruelty, which doesn’t. He would kick me, ride me, and force himself on me in other ways; these, I also remember in fragments. I do not know, precisely, why I permitted it, especially as we were the same age; he was hardly even bigger. But what I have thought about increasingly, in the 25 years since it occurred, is what had been happening outside of our dynamic to cause him to act the way he did. Violent, hurt, and hurting me. Who taught him the behaviors he learned, and how? Was it someone the same age? Older? Older still? Regardless of what language you use to describe what happened, it changed me. What I have been wondering since then — through all the late nights — is what to do with that change, and what led to it in the first place.
Whidbey, out this month from Mariner, is not precisely concerned with the why of what happened, although it is concerned with what comes next. The abuser, as a voice, is almost completely absent. T Kira Madden’s novel, following Long Live the Tribe of Fatherless Girls, instead looks at the aftermath of abuse, from the point of view, mainly, of those it was done to. In this way it advances a theory of what writer Johanna Hedva calls the “blast radius” of trauma in their 2024 book How to Tell When We Will Die. Hedva describes the shattering of a previous life that follows the development of disability. “There is before the blast. There is after. And now there is you in that devouring cloud that won’t stop eating everything,” Hedva writes. However, the term is just as applicable for the psychological disabilities that arise from PTSD-inducing events, which is where Whidbey comes in — events specifically, in Madden’s novel, that center around the grooming and sexual assault of children.
“It was my first therapist’s idea to use BC and AC for Before Calvin and After Calvin, a way to identify the two distinct Birdies in order to marry the whole girl back together,” Birdie Chang, one of the novel’s central characters, explains. She is theorizing, to herself, the effects of her rape, at age nine, by sixteen-year-old Calvin Boyer. “At some point I wondered if I settled entirely into After Calvin Birdie,” she adds, “someone different and opaque, with no chance of finding who was there before.” And, a moment later, describing Calvin to her dinner hosts, “[He] made me crazy.” Blast radius. The aftermath and everything that comes with it. Change.
In form, the book follows a similar radius, expanding further out in perspective as it goes on: two central characters at first; then three; then, in the vertiginous, masterful third section, many. Whidbey is structured nominally as a murder mystery; Calvin has been run over by someone by the book’s second chapter. But this direction is quickly subverted: Despite a pulpy opening where Birdie talks about wanting to shoot Calvin “in the dick” to a condescending stranger who then offers to kill him, the blast radius takes over the plot. In turn, the mechanical callousness common to some thriller novels is replaced with a deep, abiding empathy for every woman involved.
So, absent the pursuit of thrills, we are left with the book’s most central characters instead. Birdie, on a ferry to the small island town of Whidbey, Washington, towards a sort of self-imposed exile from her life and especially her partner Trace (“I saw her and I thought, There. There it is. The beginning or the end of my life,” narrates Birdie about seeing Trace for the first time). Linzie King, an isolated former dating show contestant who had also been groomed by Calvin and is similarly manipulated by the ghostwriter of her memoir about it. And, astonishingly, Calvin’s mother Mary-Beth, who has her own life disrupted by the blast radius of Calvin’s conviction, incarceration, monitoring, and then his murder — feeling a deep anger at the world, queasily, on behalf of her pedophilic son. All these women are living in the wreckage of Calvin’s actions, fucking up, trying to heal, and compromising their own morals over the course of the novel. (“Good and nice aren’t the same thing,” Birdie’s conversational partner muses on the ferry, an idea that reverberates throughout.) All these women are shaped by the continued harm of one person and then the system that punished him in turn.
This particular blast radius is especially notable, and difficult to read, in the Mary-Beth sections, where she rhetorically attacks those impacted by his actions and defends her son. Despite veering into some cliches of the white rural poor — she is often motivated by her hardheaded pride, her unwillingness to accept charity — the complexity of her own relationship to Calvin, as well as the halfway community he was a part of, is chilling and moving in equal measure. (“Cal, like all of you, I know, was a victim of the system” she notes in one breathtaking visit to Gateway to Grace, the “reentry compound” where other convicted pedophiles live.)
Through Mary-Beth, Madden advances an abolitionist politic, one where incarceration isn’t a panacea for harm done: Calvin getting sepsis from his ankle monitor (as he does when forced to live with other registered offenders in an encampment under the Tuttle Causeway, a staggering act of legislative cruelty based on a real Florida policy) doesn’t help any of the survivors. It just hurts him and another woman, his mother. Narrating wide swaths of the book from Mary-Beth’s perspective is one of the boldest decisions in the novel: As unlikeable as she is, her own querulousness is as much a mark of her trauma. Even her job, at a year-round North Pole-themed gas station in Florida, is implied to be a result of losing her previous position following her son’s conviction. Here, Madden’s commitment to exploring questions “so big they held the pressure of the ocean,” as she writes at the end of the book — the horror of someone hurting others in that particular way, and the absolute inadequacy of responses to that violence — is at its most thorny and complex.
Writing the angles of the book’s approach out suggests Whidbey is punishing, miserabilist, and nihilistic, a cycle of bad things endlessly reiterating. And true, there is a starkness to the work that can be deeply chilling. (An early sequence where Birdie fantasizes that her abuse was all “some wild and complicated misunderstanding” is especially intense.) But here’s the thing: In life, and in the book, that’s not all there is. Surely you know that, too — if you have been through something similar or have loved someone intimately who has been through something similar. Despite what Birdie theorizes earlier, trauma does not shape the parameters of a life. Let me repeat that: Trauma does not shape the parameters of a life.
Rather, there’s a deeply humane spirit that runs through Whidbey — one that follows the legacy of other writers expanding the boundaries of what a narrative about abuse can do. An early sex scene between Birdie and Trace on Whidbey hums with complex eros:
I wanted to feel her skin and fingers and the warmth of her. I wanted her to keep her rings on. For it to feel sharp and sudden, for her to reach in and let me sit on her whole fist; I wanted her to grab my throat with her other hand and squeeze…. I felt, for that moment, what it was like to be powerful.
As I read this passage I found myself thinking of Dorothy Allison, a titan of working-class queer Southern writing and ceaseless advocate for CSA survivors in her life. In her book Two or Three Things I Know for Sure, she writes of the need to tell all the parts of life:
in order to not tell the one the world wants, the story of us broken, the story of us never laughing out loud, never learning to enjoy sex, never being able to love or trust love again, the story in which all that survives is the flesh.
Allison’s work, when I read it, felt like a cosmic benediction, a way to view my life and lives of those I loved that didn’t capitulate to dread or despair. That corpus — which I read, ironically, on Whidbey myself, at a women’s writing residency — speaks to rage and hope and blast radii, too. It saved me, in a way that I suspect Whidbey will save people too.
It may sound strange to say that a work about the blast radius of trauma, coming out at a time of increased discussion of the pedophilic abuse of children — and, just as relevantly to the book, the abettors of that abuse — is hopeful. But Whidbey allows a grace to survivors, and a generosity towards the full, imperfect humanity of their lives, that I found profoundly moving. “It’s never too late, to be a new person,” Birdie reflects to herself near the end of the book. Certainly, in my own life, realizing that I had the capacity to heal, that I wasn’t the sum product of others’ bruises on me, was revelatory. The fact that Whidbey, too, allows reinvention even on a formal level — shifting from a murder mystery to something far more compassionate and ambitious — only serves to underline the importance, and necessity, of that change too.
“Don’t forget about the girls,” Madden writes, in the third section of the work. “Everyone forgets about the girls—that’s always been the problem.” In all the work’s multivariate speakers, modes, and tones, it ensures that they — or, if it speaks to you, you, or, even we — will be remembered as well.
