Review
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“Goodbye, Sweet Girl is heartbreaking, breathtaking in its
, and urgently truthful in its harrowing and tender
examination of when empathy fails—and when it wins.” (Los Angeles
Review )
“Kelly Sundberg’s lyrical, devastating 2014 essay about domestic
violence, “It Will Look Like a Sunset,” made readers hold their
collective breath. It’s now expanded into a full-length memoir
about Sundberg’s husband, a man who was wonderful and violent at
turns.” (Elle, The 30 Best Books to Read This Summer)
“Goodbye Sweet Girl is a beautiful, devastating, and nuanced
story of domestic abuse and escape that does true justice to the
experiences of the victims without judgment or criticism of their
choices.” (Bustle)
“Goodbye, Sweet Girl, bursting with such heartfelt, beautifully
crafted scenes, is a gift for those who’ve experienced the pain
of growing up and out of abusive relationships and a guide for
those who seek in and understanding.” (New York Journal of
Books)
“Mesmerizing and poetic, Goodbye Sweet Girl is a harrowing,
cautionary and ultimately redemptive tale that brilliantly
illuminates one woman’s transformation.” (BookReporter)
“Kelly Sundberg gives one of the most brave and beautifully
written accounts of a marriage gone wrong in her memoir, Goodbye,
Sweet Girl. Sundberg looks at both the tenderness and the
violence of her abusive marriage, while also analyzing why women
remain too long in dangerous relationships.” (Brooklyn Digest)
“[Goodbye, Sweet Girl helps us] to better understand each of our
nuances and complexities, how any of us rationalizes our
decisions, and how we find the courage to take care of ourselves
and to speak our truths…. [Sundberg writes] her truth with a deep
sense of compassion.” (The Millions)
“Goodbye, Sweet Girl is a story of domestic violence and
survival, written by Kelly Sundberg, who experienced abuse at the
hands of her husband. A strong and empowering memoir, the layers
of Sundberg’s life are utterly inspiring.” (Women.com, 15 Awesome
Books With Strong Female Protagonists)
“A fierce, frightening, soulful reckoning-- Goodbye, Sweet Girl
is an expertly rendered memoir that investigates why we stay in
relationships that hurt us, and how we survive when we leave
them. Kelly Sundberg is a force. She has written the rare book
that has the power to change lives.” (Christa Parravani, author
of Her: A Memoir)
“Reading Kelly Sundberg’s writing—fresh, luminous, spirited—is a
pleasure second only to witnessing her decision to survive.
Goodbye Sweet Girl is a meditation on what it takes to save your
own life.” (Ariel Levy)
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From the Back Cover
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Kelly Sundberg’s husband, Caleb, was a funny, warm, supportive
man and a wonderful her to their little boy, Reed. He was also
vengeful and violent. But Sundberg did not know this when she
fell in love. After Caleb’s true nature was revealed, she tried
to convince herself he would get better. It took a decade for her
to ultimately accept that the partnership she desired could not
work with such a broken man. In her remarkable book, she offers
an record of the joys and terrors that accompanied her
difficult awakening, and presents a haunting, heartbreaking
glimpse into why women remain too long in dangerous
relationships.
To understand herself and her violent marriage, Sundberg looks to
her childhood in Salmon, Idaho, a small, isolated ain
community known as the most redneck town in the state. Like her
marriage, Salmon is a place of deep contradictions, where Mormon
ranchers and hippie back-to-landers live side by side; a place of
magical beauty riven by secret brutality; a place that takes
pride in its individualism and rugged self-sufficiency, yet is
beholden to church and communal standards at all costs.
Mesmerizing and poetic, Goodbye, Sweet Girl brilliantly
illuminates one woman’s transformation as she gradually rejects
the painful reality of her violent life, begins to accept
responsibility for herself, and learns to believe that she
deserves better.
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About the Author
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Kelly Sundberg’s essays have appeared in Guernica, Gulf Coast,
The Rumpus, Denver Quarterly, Slice, and others. Her essay “It
Will Look Like a Sunset” was selected for inclusion in The Best
American Essays 2015, and other essays have been listed as
notables in the same series. She has a PhD in creative nonfiction
from Ohio University and has been the recipient of fellowships or
grants from Vermont Studio Center, A Room of Her Own Foundation,
Dickinson House, and the National Endowment for the Arts.
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