The chain: love, betrayal, and the sisterhood that heals us
Description
A devastating personal testimony and a searing indictment of persistent misogyny.
In January 2017, Chimene Suleyman was on her way to an abortion clinic in Queens, New York with her boyfriend, the father of her nascent child. It was the last day they would spend together. In an extraordinary sequence of events, Chimene was to discover the truth of her boyfriend's life: that the man she’d loved had gaslit, lied to, stolen from, and painfully betrayed her and many others.
In this spellbinding memoir, Suleyman exposes one man's control over many women and the trauma he left behind and celebrates the sisterhood that formed in his wake despite—and in spite of—him. With radiant prose and incisive observation, Suleyman questions society’s complicity in allowing those who would do women harm to flourish and contemplates why others remain silent witnesses by accepting and normalizing shameless behavior towards women. She demonstrates how women themselves are acculturated to perform prescribed roles of giver and nurturer, to be self-sacrificing and subordinate, and to bolster the egos of others by remaining silent and ignoring their own protective instincts.
A soul-baring story, brilliant cultural critique, and celebration of the healing power of sisterhood, The Chain is a book for any woman who has questioned her relationship and buried her doubts, for any woman who can't quite identify the source of her unease and for any woman who has been sheltered by the fierce protection of her female friends.
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006339295
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Published Reviews
Kirkus Book Review
A personal story of misogyny and a study of the world that enabled it. In 2017, Suleyman's boyfriend left her, for good, at an abortion clinic in Queens. Emerging from her devastation to seek an explanation of that day and its preceding events, she discovered an Instagram post that led her to dozens of women victimized by the same man. These women and their stories spanned the globe, showing a perpetrator who preyed on their proclivities for caretaking and self-doubt. The author shows how he deviously exploited harmful assumptions ingrained in both women and men about what women can and should be asked to withstand at the hands of men. Suleyman passionately calls out and critiques each of these assumptions and the harm they enact. In this consistently acute analysis, the author addresses attitudes about mental health, vulnerability related to immigration status and racial identity, the belittling of women in comedy bits, and nuances ignored in debates about abortion. With the heat of anger and a steady, stunning tempo, Suleyman stacks her experiences with those of the man's other victims to demonstrate the insidious nature of gaslighting and abuse. The text is a cautious corrective to the optimism of movements like #MeToo, holding the healing and community of a group of survivors that might only have formed in our modern age against stubborn attitudes about women shaped decades ago. "It is tiresome living in a world where experience becomes truth only in volume, truth validated only in numbers," she writes. "But I understood that this is how it goes. And so did he." Suleyman deftly interrogates the heart of these truths, and her book is impressive as much for the author's skill and elegance as for the terror of the story that fuels it. A maddening tale told with insistence, insight, and beauty. Copyright (c) Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.