It’s someone in the supermarket checkout line. It’s a friend from high school or a suitemate from the dorm. It’s a coworker, a neighbor, a member of your book group. Maybe it’s your cousin, your aunt, your sister. Maybe it’s you.
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That describes Weldon herself: successful journalist, longtime essayist for the Chicago Tribune, newswriting teacher at Northwestern University. But for years Weldon’s seemingly picture-perfect life had a secret side: a pattern of physical intimidation and increasingly violent assaults by her husband, a high-powered lawyer as smart and successful as herself.
And the assaults, Weldon is careful to point out, were sporadic, sometimes just one in a year. The issue, she says, was power, not injury; if her husband, a college boxer and lifelong athlete, had intended to seriously hurt her, he would have. Each time there was a single blow–resulting in a bruise, a fat lip, a black eye–followed by profuse apologies and flowers. The last time, at his parents’ summer home, he knocked her to the floor. She screamed, his family came running, and the lie ended, as suddenly as it had begun.
“Look, I still get tired of standing up and saying this,” she says. “I’m not crazy about having this on my name tag for the rest of my life. I just wish no one else would ever go through it again.”
