Madwoman, Chelsea Bieker
“This book is for my mother, who lives in every line,” Chelsea Bieker writes in the dedication to her second novel, Madwoman, alongside a candid photo of her own mother. It’s a disarmingly intimate opening that sets the tone for a blistering journey through the complexities of motherhood, the art of survival, and the painful legacies we inherit. While Bieker insists that this novel isn't autobiographical, it’s impossible to ignore her lived experiences echoed throughout, lending the story a remarkably human authenticity.
We follow our protagonist, Clove, a seemingly privileged young woman living a picture-perfect life in Portland with her loving husband and two children. But behind the façade of artisanal groceries, adaptogen powders, and meditation apps lies a fragile psyche stitched together by obsessive wellness rituals and carefully constructed lies (“His love language was touch. Mine was secrets.”) in a desperate attempt to suppress her crippling anxiety rooted in her harrowing past.
Clove’s precarious equilibrium is shattered when a letter arrives from a women’s prison in California, forcing her to confront the buried memories of her chaotic childhood and the relationships she has long avoided. As her skeletons threaten to surface (“I vowed to keep my secrets and keep myself hidden”), Clove meets Jane — a mysterious new friend — which further unravels her carefully controlled existence, gifting us with a delicious narrative that forces complex, imperfect characters to accept ownership of their demons.
Bieker structures Madwoman through dual timelines, juxtaposing Clove’s polished, present-day life with flashbacks of her tumultuous upbringing in a sweltering Waikiki high-rise, providing a visceral contrast between the woman who has painstakingly constructed an ‘Instagramable’, enviable adult life with the child shaped by a violent and unstable environment. In these flashbacks, Bieker examines the cycles of violence and confused parental love that defined Clove’s childhood. Her mother emerges as a figure of sharp contradictions - nurturing and dangerous - their weighty relationship is slowly unveiled in Clove’s narrative, which is modelled as if conversing directly with her mother, while her father dominates as an unpredictable and volatile force. In doing so, Bieker poses searing questions: How do we break free from inherited cycles of violence? Is reinvention possible without reckoning with the past? Can we protect those we love without compromising our own identities? And can we truly thrive, not just survive, after enduring the unimaginable?
The equivocations of motherhood are central to Clove’s internal conflict, and she is fiercely determined to shield her children from the generational cycle of violence that marked her youth. Still, her dissociation questions whether denying the truth is more harmful than good. One of the novel's most compelling aspects is its consideration of the invisible labour of motherhood. Clove’s narrative is interspersed with the constant, exhausting calculations required to keep her children safe, happy, and innocent. But it’s clear her unspoken fear that she might fail them as her parents failed her shadows every interaction. With it, Bieker’s portrayal of motherhood wonderfully balances tenderness with the unvarnished truth of what it means to care for others while carrying the weight of one’s own trauma - and this makes the examination of her own relationship with her mother all the more interesting to unpack.
Bieker excels at crafting a sense of place. She meticulously grounds Clove's formative years in the sensory chaos of high-rise life in Waikiki, making it almost impossible not to imagine the peeling walls and feel the sticky, oppressive heat. Bieker astutely frames a visceral tautness to the prose that contrasts sharply with the sterile perfection of her adult life in Portland. This stark duality mirrors Clove’s psychological state, oscillating between the curated ideals of her present and the disorder she grew up with.
Bieker also sharply critiques wellness culture. Clove’s obsession with luxury supplements, organic foods, and curated self-care rituals offers a darkly comedic yet heartbreaking portrait of her attempts to ‘re-mother’ herself in a world that failed to nurture her (“I wanted everything I was giving my children now.). While her rituals may seem absurd, they are emblematic of her struggles. This commodification of wellness intelligently showcases Clove’s dependence on these external solutions as a source of stability and comfort, poignantly asking, “I wondered if you and father had discovered such vitamins, had restored your health from the inside out, would that have kept us safe?”. The ‘neatness’ of the wellness industry, with its promises of becoming whole (“I had discovered the epicenter of all solution”), becomes a poignant metaphor for the futility of attending to internal wounds with surface-level fixes. After all, no amount of bone broth or meditation apps can erase her past.
Yet Madwoman is not just a narrative of pain but a testament to resilience. Both Clove and her mother endure unimaginable hardships, but neither is defined solely by their suffering. The love they have for one another, although complicated (“I don’t know what I can really offer you, Mother. I don’t know if we will ever be okay.”), is unmistakable. Although one’s past cannot be erased, understanding it can be redemptive, and it is with this parting nod Bieker ultimately gifts us with a story about hope: “I saw his death could mean something beautiful. A long-standing cycle had ended with his fall. The cycle ended with me.”
With Madwoman, Bieker further cements her place as a significant voice in contemporary fiction. Her debut novel, Godshot, and her short story collection, Heartbroke, already established her as both a remarkable storyteller and a writer with an authentic understanding of motherhood and the grief of losing parental figures. Madwoman continues this trend as Bieker sensitively explores how trauma reverberates through families, stretching across generations, timelines and places, and the strength needed to break the destructive cycle of domestic violence once it has begun. It’s unflinching and genuinely gets under your skin.
Madwoman is as gripping as it is devastating, yet it is also full of heart and humour. Fans of Ashley Audrain's The Push and Lisa Taddeo's Animal will find much to admire in this devastating and hopeful exploration of motherhood, identity, and personal survival. It urges us to confront the systems that shape us and question the stories we tell about who we are and who we can become.
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