IN THE RHODODENDRONS

Making sense of trauma.

Award-winning poet and YA novelist Christle examines her life, her relationship with her mother, and her affinity with Virginia Woolf in a lyrical memoir that circles around an event that occurred when Christle was 14. In the U.K. for her grandfather’s funeral, one of many trips she made with her English mother to visit relatives, she was excited to be staying with a cousin. One night, she went out with him and his girlfriend, first to a pub, where she got drunk, then to a club, where a man led her out to an alleyway and assaulted her. She was so drunk that she wasn’t sure she had been raped, but her cousin’s girlfriend got her a morning-after pill just in case. Shaken by the assault, she felt wounded as well by her mother’s apparent lack of empathy. “Where had she been, I thought, when I was alone in my cousin’s flat?” Already a rebellious teenager, she became even more volatile: “Anger filled the space where connection could have been.” Christle reprises her distress as she recounts several subsequent journeys to the U.K.: with her mother and sister in 2018, and three on her own in 2019, 2021, and 2023. Each time, she searched for a new understanding of what happened to her. Woolf accompanies her on each trip, as Christle thinks about the young Virginia’s sexual abuse by her half-brother. Even on trips alone, Christle is accompanied by her mother, whose own disclosure of being “molested” when she was 8 years old complicates Christle’s perspective. Covid-19, a friend’s suicide, motherhood, and a life-threatening medical emergency all factor into her efforts to find meaning and coherence in the “unknowable parts” of the past.

A sensitive chronicle of pain.