Writing Out of Bounds

In the early morning hours of November 5, 1994, a 27-year old woman named Andrea O'Donnell was brutally murdered. Her badly decomposed body was discovered by another roommate in the apartment that she had shared with her boyfriend. A few days later police arrested Andrés English-Howard, Andrea’s boyfriend, and booked him on suspicion of murder. In the late summer weeks of August 1995, after only a two-week trial in San Diego Superior Court, Andrés English-Howard was convicted of murder in the first degree in the death of Andrea O’Donnell. The night before he was scheduled to appear in court for sentencing, Andrés ripped apart his bed sheets, and, in a series of gestures that eerily mocked the way he had killed his girlfriend, stuffed a gag in his own mouth, covered his head in a shroud and hanged himself in his prison cell.
An awful story, yes, but on the surface, nothing unusual. Andrea’s story is just one of the millions of stories about women who are victims of violent abuse every year….I knew Andrea. But what makes this story seem so different from all the other stories about women victims of violence is not that I knew her, but who I knew her to be….Standing right in the middle of my own life, I saw Andrea as a very personal, conflicted symbol of my own womanhood. It’s not that she was just like me; I was just like her. The twenty-seven years of her life spanned the length of the contemporary women’s movement in the United States, the time of my own political growth. I couldn’t help but see her through that history, through the history of combinations of where we both had been in those years. I saw her as the daughter I might have been….Living Between Danger and Love, (Rutgers University Press, 2000), pp. 1,4.

I wrote this book as a very personal story about the 1994 murder of Andrea O’Donnell, an SDSU women's studies student, by her boyfriend Andrés English-Howard. But it’s about more than their stories.

Writing makes you feel vulnerable. You put yourself out there, say you stand for something. Even though writing and publishing require some significant degree of ego strength—the truth is, the closer the moment comes when your "work" is about to be made public, the more frightened you become. Perhaps that's why many writers say they write first for themselves, to work out problems for themselves. Only later, and with trepidation, does the audience come into the picture.

I have always felt vulnerable about writing. But, until I wrote Living Between Danger and Love, I had been able to hide my vulnerability behind scholarly jargon. I couldn't hide in this book. Not that I didn't try.

When I first started to think about writing about Andrea’s murder, I approached it like every other academic topic I had taken on—as a philosophical problem to solve. The problem, as I saw it then, was domestic violence and I approached it as a feminist writer—as someone who wanted to engage the issue of violence in intimate relationships in order to empower women and men to work against violence and to write in a way that was "respectful" of the lives of the subjects about whom she was writing. I wasn’t self-reflective enough. I let an analytical approach take over; that approach took me out of the world instead of more deeply into it.

Then, two things happened. The first was in 1996, after a lecture I gave about interdisciplinary perspectives on violence against women. I used Andrea’s story to illustrate the points. When I'd finished, a close friend approached me. How much of the story was I willing to tell, he wanted to know. How much of the truth in the story was I going to share? I knew exactly what he meant. Was I willing to reveal myself. That's what he was asking. The second thing happened after another lecture I gave the next year on the same subject. A graduate student in the audience commented that the lecture was interesting. And then he posed a controversial question: "But where are you in all this?"

Those two things, along with conversations with friends and family and other women writers, the spirit of activism in students and colleagues who were propelled "to do something" in the face of Andrea’s death, and the four months as a visiting professor in Sweden--all these experiences compelled me to write a different kind of book.

When I think about the writing process now, I know that something very special began to happen for me when I got away from my home, when I went to Sweden, a place familiar, yet distant to me.

The shadows are different in Sweden. [In winter] Night with shadows is the longest part of the day. "You’ll have a hard time adjusting to the dark," friends warn me before I leave San Diego in August. "I have never lived alone," I say. I say this out loud. I hear myself confess it like a sin. I have never lived alone. Still, I don’t think the dark will matter.

But, the dark mattered a lot.

By late October, in the south of Sweden, night descends a little past three in the afternoon. I bike home in the dusk through the park. The gravelly path is a trail of frozen curves cutting close to the edge of a black river caked with ice. The cold is so sharp it has silenced my bike’s warning bell and made my fingers numb. The light attached to the front wheel dimly flickers on and off. I peddle faster to make the beam stronger. Birches lining the river bank sway gracefully. Their limbs creak; they are sore from the wintry weight of snow. I want to get home quickly so I can stand on the balcony of my apartment, overlooking the train depot, and greet the last inches of night descending across the broad sky. Below me, slowly stilled railway cars gasp a little, almost unnoticeably, at the dying of the light.

I watch night come. I think about others further north of me who have been enveloped already, nearly an hour earlier. I am jealous. Already I have learned to covet the shadows. I watch myself disappear willingly into the dark’s embrace. The sun hides things you can only see at night. I burrow deeper into the seductive, enveloping gray. (Living Between Danger and Love, pp. 128-9)

I started to write about my family, my childhood and at first those things seemed to have no connection to the book. I thought they were interesting dreams, memories; but the book was about something else, I kept thinking. I thought the book would become a scholarly treatise about freedom and choice, a discourse on the problem of domestic violence. But when I sent a portion of what I had been writing to an editor with whom I had been working, she told me something that both scared and exhilarated me. She told me to get rid of all the footnotes!

That moment when I discarded the footnotes was the moment when I discovered my own voice, hidden in thicket of references and arguments was my own strong voice, saying again and again that it would not be silenced; that it wanted to speak, that it had to speak. Only then did I understand what the book was about and why I was writing it.

To me, the book that I wanted to write, that I wrote, is about mourning; it's about loss and coming to terms with the unsettling of self that loss evokes. The unsettling comes from thinking about all that remained undone and unsaid in a relationship, all that was unfinished about the relationship and whether and how that can be lived with. This unfinished business echoed in the question that kept getting posed to me after Andrea was killed—"How could it happen to her?"

When you mourn, you're stuck in a place of thinking that goes round and round the idea that perhaps things might have been different. Yet ultimately what you confront is something much more disturbing than the possibility that the past might have been different. You confront the frightening fact that no matter what happened, it is past, irrevocably over and that the memory of the way things were and the role you played in them is what the living must continue to live with.

I wanted to write through mourning and into what it felt like to experience living with difficult memories. I decided to write about the role we all play in events like violence because I wanted to evoke complicated, uncomfortable feelings about memory and loss. Many people might say that the issues I wrote about in this book—violence in intimate relationships--are far away from their lives. But I tried to write about them to bring them closer; I wanted to find a way to provide different avenues into them, instead of away from them. And I did that for political and for personal reasons. I wanted people to recognize someone in this book and, through that recognition, become unable to say that the issue of violence is an issue about "them" but not about "us." To me, the process of seeing "them" in "us" is a political process.

So, writing the book became, for me, a political process of soul restoration. And it took me in directions I hadn’t anticipated at the outset and helped me find a voice that I hadn’t known I had. Or, maybe it’s more accurate to say that I anticipated some of the directions I would have to go in, but I wasn’t prepared to risk taking them at the beginning.

I've done a whole range of writing over many decades. Although I'd written and published several academic books, only writing Living Between Danger and Love gave me permission to call myself a "writer." I accept the risk of being a writer now.

Writing this book has pushed me even further in the direction of what others have called the position of the public intellectual. It’s pushed me to examine critically how teaching and writing might better engage public debate and action about what the Romans called res publica—the things we have in common as humans. And, oddly enough, it’s pushed me in the direction of writing fiction.

I see writing as a kind of public act; it's a political thing. Even if you're not dealing with political subjects. Because it opens you into the world.

The necessary eclipse of responsibility. This is what I felt in all the reactions to Andrea’s death, in the questions from the press, in letters to the editor, in responses to the presentations and speeches that I made to all different sorts of groups, in discussions with friends. And I even felt it on some days in meetings of the San Diego Domestic Violence Council. A slight shifting in the seat, a clearing of the throat, a need to turn away from the bright day and rest on our laurels, tired from the wearisome vigilance of living.

I won’t exempt myself from wanting to mock this penumbra of guilt brought on by haunted shoes, by the ghosts in a stranger’s warm bed. Of course, I’d rather say, it has nothing to do with me. How could it? I won’t deny wanting to avoid the threatening, enveloping despair that surely follows from something so simple, so stunningly stark as the thought that we share the burden for what happens in others’ lives by merely not thinking about our own. I, too, would rather be bereft of memory. I, too, want the comfort of limning, once and for all, the boundaries between good and evil.

But in the insistence and repetition of all the reasons why it couldn’t happen to you or to me, and in the surety of all the pronouncements about how well we are doing to prevent this theft of trust, this bereavement of freedom from bodily harm from happening at home to ordinary, decent people, people just like me or you, I have heard something else. Call it reasonable doubt. And I have heard in this reasonable doubt something hopeful and public: the possibility that we might yet together do more to strengthen women’s sense of power and men’s sense of care. (Living Between Danger and Love, pp. 163-4)

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