Review by Carly Rae Zent
Dzanc Books / March, 2020 / 264 pp
Laura Bogart’s new novel, Don’t You Know I Love You, is a unique contribution to literature’s ongoing conversation about interpersonal trauma. It attempts to explore what it means for a victim of domestic violence to grapple with recognizing in themselves a legacy of destructive tendencies inherited from the person who harms them.
The novel does so with a fresh specificity: it takes place in a suburb of Delaware, near D.C., and gazes at a working-class family with a familiarity that is personal rather than exoticizing. Bogart depicts the abuser with complexity and unexpected depth. In some ways, he displays more loving moments than violent ones. His cycle of ego and violence is not generic, but his own.
Bogart’s early-twenties protagonist, Angelina, has been avoiding her physically violent father and her enabler mother, Marie, by living alone. After a bad car accident that leaves her unable to work, she moves back in with her parents, only to be quickly reminded of why she left in the first place. She scrambles to escape while at the same time attempting to stake a claim to her identity as an artist in the depersonalizing haze of post-grad life.
We get hints of Angelina’s heated nature from the beginning. She argues with her friend’s neighbors and recalls dealing with childhood conflict via “lunchboxes swung into the sides of heads.” She starts a new relationship with another artist, Janet, whose steady calm is an effective foil against which the reader can measure Angelina’s escalating anger.
Bogart frequently pins down the emotions of her characters with powerful, precise language. In a paragraph on the distance between Marie and her daughter: “When Angelina was born, Marie’s bones went hollow. As if her marrow, her core, bled out of her in that final push. Marie could still feel this essence in the new body pressed against hers, but it was like a goldfish skittering through a clear pond, glimpsed in flashes, too quick to catch.” Or Angelina, falling in love: “She’d only ever known surprise as a prelude to a scar, a moment when fear calcified into memory. Now surprise was the soft taste of skin salt and a floral lotion.”
At its best, her detail-oriented prose captures a certain chilling, unglamorous mundanity in the way habits drive the characters’ choices while living with domestic violence. Angelina returns to living with her abuser because, well, what other option does she have? She inevitably reenters a familiar dynamic in which her father becomes possessive over choices that are hers to make, not because she enjoys this dynamic, but because it is easier and physically safer to not challenge it.
In a diner with her husband shortly after he assaults their daughter, Angelina’s mother also demonstrates this: “Marie gave him some of her fries, as she always did, only this time, instead of shoveling them over with her fork, she tossed them to his plate, one by one, just to magnify each little thunk.” Even when she feels resistant to her husband’s harmful behavior, Marie enables this abuser because she always has, just as she will always share her fries. She doesn’t know what else to do. She can make it clear that she is unhappy with him, but she inevitably will repeat her choices.
While Bogart’s prose can stumble into the territory of overwritten, the novel has a touching vulnerability, and yet does not make excuses for any character’s bad behavior – even Angelina’s. The result is an clear-eyed but empathetic examination of the violence of which we could all, perhaps, be capable of given the right history and circumstances.
There exists a cycle of abuse. While most victims of abuse don’t go on to abuse others, many perpetrators learned their mechanisms of dealing with conflict and intimacy from those who hurt them in similar ways. It’s a legacy of trauma. Don’t You Know I Love You does strong work in acknowledging the ways that legacy is created, and even imagines how we could maybe, if we try, start to upend it.
Carly Rae Zent is a fiction MFA candidate at Purdue and CNF editor at Sycamore Review. You can follow her on Twitter @_seeray.